Three forms of worship

The Lord tells us to set your heart upon my pleasure. Haggai 1:8 is the core of the passage. It is a command. It is what the Lord wants Judah to actually do: go up to the hills and you shall bring timber and build the house, and let me take pleasure in it, and I will get glory, says Yahweh (Haggai 1:8).

Did you hear what God said through Haggai? Build the house and let me take pleasure in it. Set your heart upon my pleasure. Have you ever noticed that in contemporary circles in Christianity or in churches today that that is the missing element in our worship: giving God pleasure? Build the house, let me take pleasure in it! Do you think of worship that way, that you are giving God pleasure, that being the most essential matter? You see the situation we are in? I do not think that churches or congregations need to try to be boring and stick-in-the-mud places or anything like that, but we are in a society that puts a lot of emphasis on consumerism and you have to sell yourself. And that affects the way we pitch our worship sometimes. And there are false ways of worship. False ways of public worship that deviate from the one of seeking to give God pleasure. When we are in our new members classes, we try to give some indication of this. One false way is what we may call the entertainment model. In this way of looking at public worship, the people are basically spectators and the idea is to get them to enjoy it, give them a good time! There is no reason why we should not necessarily enjoy worship, but that is the whole pitch. And it is not merely television programs that follow an entertainment model, or religious programming on television that may follow an entertainment model, but sometimes in our sanctuaries in our churches you see this kind of thing going on. It misses the whole element of giving God pleasure.

And then there is also what I call the filling or service station model for public worship. What model is that? What does that say? Well, basically, someone that operates on the service station way of looking at worship is someone who says I have needs and I come because I want my needs met. There is nothing wrong with having needs and wanting them met, but sometimes that can so overarch and overshadow everything else. You see, the first thing that we do when we come to worship, should not be to say, I am needy, but above all to say, You are worthy! That is what worship is: a declaration of the worth-ship of God. It is where the English word comes from. And so, do my needs count to God? Yes, but that is not the main driving force in my worship. Whatever my needs are, the supreme desire ought to be to declare the worthiness and adoration of God. And in light of that the overflow and the byproduct will frequently be his touch upon my needs from the throne of grace. But I do not come because I want my needs met. I come rather to seek to give God pleasure.

Another example of a false way of looking at worship, that does not seek to give God pleasure above all else, and that is what we could call the lecture hall model. That is where you have a church that places so much importance on the preaching or the teaching that you basically have a hymn and a prayer, and of course an offering, and then of course you get the pencils and notebooks out and it all centers on teaching. That element of teaching then overshadows everything else, so that all the other elements of worship are sometimes called "preliminaries.” Now you need to realize that I think the Reformation is correct, and our tradition is correct, in placing a primacy on the preaching of the Word of God in worship. But it is a part of the worship; it does not eclipse that worship. And when you have hymns and when you have prayers, whether you are hearing them or whether you pray them directly, and when you have anthems and when you have confessions of faith, those are not preliminaries. We are taking words upon our lips in the Presence of God, of praise and of petition. That is worship. And we have to seek through that to give God pleasure. It is not merely the teaching or preaching of the Word, like in a lecture hall, it is worship. We can lose that, and that is the danger of some churches that sometimes get sucked into that kind of mentality if we are not careful. Set your heart, God says, in your worship, pon my pleasure. Let us get this place of public worship, yes but let me take pleasure in it. That is the missing element, tragically.¹

Dale Ralph Davis