The Goal Of The Worship Gathering
It is such a joy to be with you this morning. Warm greetings to everyone who’s here this morning.
Ministers in the gospel, and those people who have gone before us in terms of leading churches, whether it’s leading music in churches — because I know there’s a sense of, we have pastors, but we also have those who lead music in churches. It’s a joy for me to be here, and it’s a privilege even to be speaking about this.
I’m not a worship leader, so I won’t be talking much about music. I’m not going to be talking much about what it looks like to lead worship, but we’re going to be talking about the whole service. What does it mean for us to gather together? What’s the goal of gathering together when we come to worship God?
I think it’s actually a very interesting topic. Is there something, or how do we think about a biblical or sound worship service, worship gathering? What is the worship gathering for, and how do we know if we are doing it right? I think that’s sort of where we’re going to be looking into this morning.
But before that, let me pray for us. And then, if you do have a Bible with you, I just want to read Psalm 95 as we open up. If you can open up to Psalm 95. But let me pray for us as we get there.
Heavenly Father, we thank you. We thank you for your kindness to us. We thank you for your grace. We pray that now, as you open up your word, we pray Holy Spirit, you may be our teacher this morning. And we pray that our hearts may be opened to hear from you.
Lord, we long to hear you even this morning. Speak to us, Lord, we pray. Lord, we pray that what we do not know, may you teach us. Lord, we humbly pray that what we have not, may you give us. That what we are not, may you make us.
We pray all of these things in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Amen.
I want to read quickly Psalm 95. Psalm 95 is a text that calls us to worship. It is one of the psalms that calls us to worship. We normally read this psalm at the beginning of our services at our church. It’s just a psalm that sort of gets us to be aware that God is the one who has gathered us together.
Let me just read it for us. It says:
“Oh come, let us sing to the Lord;
let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation.
Let us come into his presence with thanksgiving;
let us make a joyful noise to him with songs of praise.
For the Lord is a great God,
and a great King above all gods.
In his hand are the depths of the earth;
the heights of the mountains are his also.
The sea is his, for he made it,
and his hands formed the dry land.
Oh come, let us worship and bow down;
let us kneel before the Lord, our Maker.
For he is our God,
and we are the people of his pasture,
and the sheep of his hand.
Today, if you hear his voice,
do not harden your hearts, as at Meribah,
as on the day at Massah in the wilderness,
when your fathers put me to the test
and put me to the proof,
though they had seen my work.
For forty years I loathed that generation and said,
‘They are a people who go astray in their heart,
and they have not known my ways.’
Therefore I swore in my wrath,
‘They shall not enter my rest.’”
“Oh come, let us sing to the Lord. Let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation.” (Psalm 95)
So, we’re going to be talking about worship gathering. When I’m using the word “worship,” I’m not talking necessarily about singing. I’m talking about the whole gathering. What does it look like for us to gather for worship together?
Our Identity In Gathering
Now, I’m actually going to change the way I had thought about this, because how I want us to look at it, before we get into what we do when we gather together, or what we’re supposed to do — what does gathered worship look like? — we have to sort of go back and look at who it is that is gathering.
So there’s a sense that we need to come to the understanding of the church, the people that are gathering together. They are the church of Christ, the body of Christ. And why do we gather together?
So we almost have to go back to who we are, and then we can talk about what we do as we gather together.
It’s going to be more of a teaching, so I want to go more on teaching this to us this morning. I know I’m sort of used to preaching on a Sunday morning, but I want us to sort of go and teach this, because what I want us to get at is: before we do something, we need to understand who we are. Before we understand what we do, we need to understand where we are.
Being is always before doing.
You won’t be able to do something well without understanding who you are. Being is always before doing.
So even as we think about corporate worship, even as we think about gathered worship, we need to think about who we are as a people of God.
I don’t know if anybody here grew up in a family that eats dinner together — you know, when we sit around the table and eat dinner together. I didn’t grow up like that. I grew up where you sort of get your food, you can sit anywhere, and you can eat at any time. You can just grab your food, sit down, and eat.
But as I’ve started my own family, my wife has really changed my ways, and now we sort of sit together as a family, and we have to eat together, which is something I’m growing into. Amen, somebody. I’m growing into that — to say, as a family, we need to gather together.
One of the things, as I was learning about that, is that we are a family, and therefore dinner, when we gather together, is one of the ways that demonstrates our togetherness as a family. A family meal is something that’s important for us, and therefore when we gather together as a family, it’s something that demonstrates who we are as a family.
It’s a special meal. It’s a meal where we gather together, we pray with the kids, we catch up with one another. It’s a very special time together, but it shows who we are as a family.
Therefore, when you miss that — I mean, obviously that’s not going to happen in a perfect way. Sometimes someone is going to be sick, something is happening, so we won’t be able to gather together. But we are gathering together as a family to eat together because we’re a family.
Now, when it comes to corporate worship, or gathering together, we won’t be able to get what corporate gathering is all about if we don’t know who we are, if we don’t know the importance of this, if we don’t know what we need to do when we get there.
All of these things mean we need to go back and look at: what’s the meaning of being a church? What’s the meaning of being a people of God?
But I want to fast-forward to talk about how people think about gathered worship right now — different churches, different traditions. How do people think about corporate worship?\
Three Different Lens
And I want to think about it in three ways, and then we’ll go back to what we think the Scriptures are teaching on this.
Now, we could have people here from different traditions, and who do worship, gathered worship, in different ways. Even in urban spaces, there’s a sense that all of these things are coming together now in terms of how our worship spaces look. But there are sort of three ways that churches have thought about gathering, or worship, from what I have seen.
The first one is what I would call mission.
So, you would have traditions or churches that think about worship gathering as evangelistic worship. We’ve come together, but the most important thing about us coming together is that we are reaching the lost. So everything we are doing is geared towards reaching the lost.
Now, I don’t know if you’ve been in churches like that. Everything is shaped around: how do we reach the lost? It’s all about the harvest. Have you been in a place like that, where it’s all about, “We need to reach people”?
So everything we’re doing in a gathering has to make sense to the outsider, has to make sense to those that we are reaching. Everything is shaped by mission.
The songs we sing have to be as simple as possible because those who are coming in should be able to understand them. So we have to make things easier for those who are coming in. The content, whether it’s preaching or different things, we have to make sure, again, that we are reaching those who are coming in.
Don’t talk about things that are inside, inside language of the church. Think about those who are coming in. Everything is geared towards the lost.
The manner of preaching, the holistic experience of the gathering — make it look easy, make it look simple for those who are coming in. Even the way we put things together. Make sure that, you know, these days you’ve got good coffee, you’ve got everything looking good, so that those who are coming in are able to find a home here.
Everything is done with a lens of mission. How will this reach people? How will this reach people?
Now, that’s not a bad lens of looking at a gathering. It’s actually a very good lens. You are being evangelistic. You are thinking about the lost. You are thinking about those who are coming in. There’s a hospitality that’s there in the church. Everything is geared towards: how do we make sure that people who are coming in find a home here?
That’s a very good lens. But it’s not the only lens that we should look at corporate gathering through. It’s not the only lens, but it’s also a good lens.
I mean, myself, I’m a very evangelistic person, and therefore this lens speaks to me on what it looks like for us to reach people who are coming in. Therefore, we think about that more.
Then there’s a second lens. So that’s the first one: mission.
There’s a second lens, which is formation. Formation.
Now, this lens would be: how does a corporate gathering build us up to be more and more like Christ? So everything is geared towards how do we grow as people of God when we are inside here at the church. Everything is about forming us —…
