This summer, I climbed up the tallest "M" in the world built by the School of Mines at the University of Wisconsin, Platteville. The School of mines is gone, morphed into the Engineering School which still comes out to tidy up the "M" every fall. I sat on the crown of the hill above it and saw no sign of the "M" from my lawn chair. I came here to worship God because the "M" is on the Platteville Mound, the tallest hill rising from the midst of the surrounding gently rolling farmland. If it were clear, I could see across the Mississippi River to Iowa. I came because my daughter Sarah, who died a year ago, would have loved it. She would have looked out across the kind valley to the soft hills lost in the haze, listened to the wind in the few trees and bushes on the mound and the sound of blackbirds, felt the cool, humid air, and she would have called God great.
How she loved to worship God! She danced for joy in the Lord, and told stories to children, and played the flute at lunch for the residents in the nursing home she worked at and strove to serve and honor her husband as the church is supposed to honor Christ, and she delighted--delighted--in nature as showing His glory. We know from her journals that she wanted to please God in all she did because He is worthy.
These days, when we talk about worship, we equate it with the music portion of a Christian service, as if prayer and teaching and testimonies are not worship. I don't know when or why that happened in American history. However, singing is one area of a worship service where emotions are acceptable and it now carries the spiritual burden for the whole hour.
There is a reason for that. As a music education major in college, I learned the value of music in the lives of human beings. It combines the intellectual, physical, and emotional aspects of every performer, no matter how inept. Since the spirit is defined as the mind, will, and emotions, we can legitimately claim that music touches the soul and that is a primary reason that worship is still found in the music of churches, not matter how otherwise spiritually dead they may be.
What is worship? Most people are surprised to find that in not one single verse of the Bible are worship and singing put together--except when Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego would NOT bow down before the giant statue of Nebuchadnezzar when "all kinds of music" played! All possible forms of the word "worship" in the King James Bible number one hundred ninety-six, and yet no one is singing; so what does "worship" mean?
Noah Webster's 1828 dictionary says our word "worship" comes from the Saxon "wyrth-scype"--worth-ship. "Chiefly and eminently, the act of paying divine honors to the Supreme Being; or reverence and homage paid to him in religious exercises, consisting in adoration, confession, prayer, thanksgiving and the like."
Adoration, confession, prayer, and thanksgiving can all be done with music, but there is no requirement that they be. Praise is another matter.
Of the three hundred two references to praise in the Bible one hundred seventy-nine of them are found in Psalms alone. Psalms is, of course, a hymnbook. This doesn't mean these are the only places where praise is associated with singing, but you get the point. While we as modern Christians read the Psalms as Scripture or as personal prayer, they were originally meant to be sung.
When we talk about Psalms, there are two sides to our approach to them: one is as prayer and the other is as song. In "Life Together", Dietrich Bonhoeffer said that as prayer, the Psalms are really only completely absorbable if we understand Christ to be the person praying. Not all of the Psalms are pertinent to us. However, we are part of the body of Christ when we believe and on that account we can pray or sing the Psalms with Christ or for a brother in need. Musically, singing together centers all the singers' minds on one thing, uniting our prayers so that each one's entire spirit (mind, will, and emotions) are aligned with his neighbor's. Jesus said "If two of you agree on earth concerning anything that they ask, it will be done for them by My Father in heaven" (Matt. 18:19); so singing together intensifies our prayers--we are agreeing in prayer with all our souls.
Is there an order to worship? Any specific requirements? In both Old and New Testaments, we are commanded to sing and the Old Testament goes so far as to say the the earth will sing, too. Paul does say in I Corinthians 14:40 that services should be carried on decently and in order, everyone taking turns and that "God is not the author of confusion, but of peace" (I Cor. 4:33). Aside from that, the last thing that Jesus did with his disciples at the Last Supper, His last time sitting down with them for organized teaching, was to sing a hymn (Matt. 26:30).
Let's get back to the idea of worship. How does the Biblical or Saxon idea of "worth-ship" connect us to praise and singing?
I began singing in children's choir, much to my surprise when the pastor's wife dragged me there, when I was ten years old. By eleven, I had played the flute with the adult choir, one of the top five in the city of Chicago broadcast over the radio every Sunday. That led to singing in youth choir, playing in bell choir, leading Sunday school music, leading singles group worship with five chords I remembered from ten weeks of guitar class in college. I have participated in crusade festival choirs with two hundred people, led children's music with a guitar, led Sunday worship with a piano and organ, brass or a worship band, or no instruments at all.
All of these musical arrangements were in the service of bringing praise to God, but what else did they have in common? Only one thing: a willingness to serve because God is worthy. Participants might be as young as three or as old as eighty-five or more. Sometimes, it was electrified, sometimes not; but above all, people were willing to serve because God was worthy of our praise. We didn't have to have degrees in music or even ever had a lesson. We just had to be willing to serve and willing to be used, to be God's instruments.
In I Chronicles 25, David was organizing his musicians. He chose three men and their children, both male and female, to serve in two week stints over the course of a year to play music in the temple. The three men, all of whom wrote Psalms, were Asaph, Jeduthun, and Heman; but listen to how they are described.
Asaph "prophesied according to the order of the king" v. 2.
Jeduthun "prophesied with a harp to give thanks and to praise the Lord" v. 3
Heman was "the king's seer in the words of God, to exalt his horn" v. 5.
Their service with instruments and music was called prophesying (v.1). Prophets brought a message from the Lord. They weren't simply workmen skilled in the use of musical instruments and poetry, but prophets bringing God closer to man and man closer to God. These were no court musicians; they were ministers of God.
They also taught their children all the songs of the Lord (v. 7), which I'm guessing were the Psalms they were writing, and to play on cymbals, stringed instruments and harps. When they divided responsibilities, they were put in groups of twelve and the Bible says they all served, "the small as well as the great, the teacher with the student" (v. 8). No auditions for David!
We lead singing at church because of the ministry we are called to, not because we are professionals or passionate for it, but because God is worthy. He is worthy of our humiliation when we don't do well and our glory when we do. We are not playing or singing for a congregation, but for an audience of One. We lead the congregation to meet with God, to bless them so that God will be blessed and it doesn't matter if the congregation or even one person in the congregation thinks we did well or poorly; our service was as a guide for people to the presence of God, prophesying with voice and instruments, worshiping God in spirit and in truth.
So again, what is worship? In the Bible, when people worshiped, they bowed down before the object of their worship. In America, we don't do that in public and rarely in private; but we can bow down in our hearts and minds before the Lord to acknowledge His worthiness; and when someone asks you to sing or play, or run the media, or if you are moved to share a song that has touched you and shown you a great truth about God don't hesitate to volunteer. It is a tremendous honor and a means of great humility and a gift to the God of the universe.
