O come, let us worship and bow down; let us kneel before the Lord our Maker.
Congregational worship
I. Its principle. God made each, and God rules all; and while of each is demanded individual acknowledgment and homage--“Stand in awe and sin not, commune with your own heart upon your bed and be still,” “enter into thy closet, and shut thy door, and pray to thy Father which is in secret,”--yet of all is required, that they should acknowledge a common origin, recognize a common supremacy, confess a common necessity, deprecate a common peril, avail themselves of a common salvation.
II. The form. We are enjoined in the text to “worship and bow down, and kneel before the Lord our Maker.”
III. The benefits. We thus realize by faith the presence of an unseen Deity. We thus recognize the moral supremacy of the God who wilt be our Judge. We feel the precariousness of life, and are thus made to improve its remaining opportunities. The act of coming hither is the confession that we have a soul; and the act of uniting in what is here transacted is a cultivation of the soul for immortality. (T. Dale, M. A.)
Worship
Our modern word “worship” is the old Saxon “worth-ship”--that is, in its application, the adequate recognition of God’s “worth “ or due, and the creature’s loyal payment of his debt. In the Bible the word signifies generally an act of respect or of homage. Sometimes it is used of the deference which one man pays to another--as, for example, the case of Nebuchadnezzar, who “worshipped “ Daniel. Sometimes it is used to express the spurious devotion which men of old paid to idols. But most frequently it is used to indicate the highest homage that man can pay to his Maker, i.e. adoration. It is only moral intelligence that can appreciate the worth and due of God, and that is capable of offering to Him the sublimest adoration. Now, man is involved in a threefold relationship--a personal one, a family one, and a public one. From none of these will God consent to be excluded, nor is it right that He should be. We cannot dismiss Him from our personal lives, for He so encompasses us that to be rid of God means that we cease to exist. We may not close the door of the family against Him, for the family is peculiarly His institution, over which He has the right of perpetual superintendence. And if public life advances without God as its Captain, it must, as all history demonstrates, finally land in the bog of despair and ruin. But it is not sufficient that God be not excluded from the threefold life of man. He must be actively welcomed into each sphere, and His “worthship” be recognized therein. Undoubtedly, the most important thing of all is the worship of God in the persona! life of each man. As individuals we must recognize and love God. We cannot in this matter lose ourselves in the crowd. Next in importance to personal life is the life of the family and the worship of God there. With every fibre of my being I say to you, guard your families. Do not let your children grow up little better than heathens--teach them the Fatherhood of God and His right to their love and service. But now let us give all our attention to the matter of the public acknowledgment of the worship of God. The New Testament throughout assumes the necessity of public worship, while in several places it commands it (Hebrews 10:25; Matthew 18:20; 1 Corinthians 14:40). And there is the example of Christ (Luke 4:16). But these commands and assumptions are not arbitrary; they simply voice the Divine instinct within us, that gregarious instinct which results in public gatherings. It is this instinct that makes public worship a necessity, for in it we express our common belief, our common prayers, and our common thanksgivings. Each of us is bound to a common Creator by a common bond, and each creature is bound to every other creature by virtue of the bond which binds all to God, and this common bond must receive common recognition. How shall this recognition be best set forth so as to employ the whole of our faculties in the exercise? Our public worship should be a service common to all. It is impossible for any minister to pray so as to comprehend all the needs of his people; at best he can only touch the surface, and it is inconvenient and might be indecorous for each person to state his own case in public. But there are certain thanksgivings and prayers which touch every nature, and in public worship these should be stated. Christ taught His disciples a form of prayer in which they were to say, “Our Father,” “Give us,” “Our trespasses”--a prayer common to all. But for thanksgiving and prayer to be common they must be responsive--this is demanded by the necessity of the case. The Bible patterns of worship are responsive. Read the accounts of worship in Revelation 5:12. And that great Temple book--the Psalter--was composed for responsive worship. This, you perceive, brings us at once to the question of a liturgy. Might we not have a series of liturgies, compiled, if you will, from the Bible only, so arranged as to promote unity of thought? (F. C. Spurt.)
Adoration
The psalm contains two strophes or stanzas: the first consisting of five verses and the second of six. Each of these stanzas opens with an invitation. The first is an invitation to praise offered loudly with the voice. “O come, let us shout joyfully to the Lord: let us make a joyful noise to the Rock of our salvation; let us go forth to meet Him with thanksgiving; let us make a joyful noise to Him with hymns.” And the second stanza begins with an invitation to something altogether different,--to worship, or as we had better render it, to adoration. “O come, let us prostrate ourselves, let us bow down, let us kneel before the Lord our Maker.” The word which is rendered “worship” means prostration, literally nothing less than prostration. The two Words which follow mean something less emphatic--the first, the bending of the body while the worshipper still stands, the second kneeling. Nothing changes in the East so far as habit is concerned, and you cannot to-day enter a mosque without seeing each of these three words literally acted on. Sometimes the worshipper bends his head and shoulders, then he kneels, then he prostrates himself entirely, touching the ground with his forehead. This, so far as the outward posture goes, is undoubtedly what the psalmist meant to invite the congregation of Israel to do, as being the outward expression of adoration. But adoration is an inward act of the soul which corresponds with those postures of the body which have just been described. It is the soul recognizing its nothingness before the magnificence of God, its sin before His purity, its ignorance before His omniscience, its feebleness before His power. It is the creature lying in the dust and understanding, as by a flash of light from heaven, what it is to have a Creator and to be alive in His presence. It is sinful man emptying himself of self-assertion before the Being who made him, knowing himself, or almost knowing, himself as he is known, crying: “Out of the deep have I called unto Thee, O Lord,” etc. When we assemble and meet together in church, it is to “render thanks for the great benefits that we have received at God’s bands, to set forth His most worthy praise, to hear His most holy Word, and to ask those things which are requisite and necessary as well for the body as the soul.” Of these four objects of assembling together in church, that of hearing God’s Word, whether read or preached, is not now in question. But what is the relation of the other three, thanksgiving, praise, and prayer for blessings, to adoration? They all three differ from adoration in this, that in each of them the soul is less prostrate, more able to bear the thought of self, than in pure and simple adoration. Certainly, in praise we seem to forget self more easily than in thanksgiving or prayer, since thanksgiving carries the mind back to something which we have received, and by which presumably we have profited, and prayer, in the narrower sense of the word, asks for new blessings, whether for the body or soul. Pure adoration has no heart for self; it lies there silent at the foot of the throne, conscious only of two things, the insignificance of self and the greatness of God. And yet adoration must be the basis, so to put it, of true thanksgiving, and praise, and prayer; it is the fitting acknowledgment of our real relations with God, which should precede them. It sometimes does, indeed, imply so paralyzing a sense of this our nothingness before God that left to itself it would make praise, thanksgiving, and prayer impossible. But here, as we lie in the dust, the one Mediator between God and man bids us take heart as He utters that most consoling sentence: “No man cometh unto the Father but by Me.” He-bids us, as it were, take His hand, and thus, with Him and by Him, not merely adore God, but praise Him, thank Him, pray to Him. Let us, then, briefly remind ourselves of some leading benefits of worship, which explain the importance which is assigned to it by the Church of Christ. First of all, it places us, both as individuals and as a body of men, in our true place before God our Creator. Unless, or until, we believe that one Being exists to whom we stand in a relation utterly different from that in which we stand to any other--namely, that of owing our very existence to Him--worship is impossible. Worship only begins when faith acknowledges the Almighty Creator: it dies away as faith in Him decays; it dies away as He gives place in thought to some purely human imagination respecting how the universe came to be what it actually is. But even where there is no difficulty in believing in God the Creator, and no disposition to question His existence or His power, we sometimes observe that this great belief has no practical effect whatever upon life and thought. Many men practically live as though it were not true that it is God who has made us and not we ourselves. Now, the corrective to this--which is a practical failure, after all, rather than an intellectual mistake--the corrective to this is worship. Worship places us face to face with the greatness of the Creator. The very first effort of worship implies that God is resuming, has resumed, His true place in our thoughts, that He is no longer jostled out of our mental life by a hundred puny worthless rivals belonging to the world of sense. Worship, too, obliges us to think that we are ourselves. It is one thing to hold the immortality of man as an abstract tenet; it is another to be looking forward with a steady, practical aim to a life to come. Worship, depend upon it, is the great preparation for another life--a waste of time, no doubt, if the soul dies with the perishing body, if decay be succeeded by no resurrection, but a use of time than which none can be more sensible, more legitimate, if there be a most certain hereafter, and if, while “the things that are seen are temporal, the things that are not seen are eternal.” And thus, lastly, worship is a stimulus to action when--and, of course, only when--it is sincere. If it be true that “to work is to pray,” it is also true that to pray is to work. Prayer is, in fact, work, since it makes a large demand upon the energies of the soul, and it creates and trains in us capacity for other kinds of work than itself. It not only illuminates the understanding and kindles the affection, it braces, it invigorates the will. In worship we are in contact with the most real of all beings; with Him off whose will all else that is strictly depends, and in comparison with whom the most solid matter in His universe is but as an unsubstantial shadow. This contact with the highest reality cannot but brace us, and accordingly we find in all ages that the noblest resolves to act or to suffer have again and again been formed as though in obedience to what seems a sudden overpowering flash of light during worship. So it was with Isaiah when he saw the vision in the temple. “Then said I, Here am I; send me.” So it has been with more than one enterprise of our own day; the original resolution to make the venture has dated from the half hour of sincere worship, in which the energies of a single character have been lifted altogether above their average level, so that it became natural and easy to remove the mountains of obstacles around that had before barred the way to action. In another world we shall probably look back upon the way in which we have spent much of our time here with deep, although unavailing, regret; but we may be sure that no such regret will ever be felt on account of any time that has been devoted to the worship of our Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier. (Canon Liddon.)
The duty of external worship
External adoration may be considered as--
I. A part of that natural homage which the whole man, soul and body, owes to God, upon the account of His creation and preservation of us, and His sovereign dominion over us. We all look for the glorification, not only of our souls, but bodies, in the life to come. Now, a reward supposeth a work; it is meet and right, therefore, that we should worship and glorify God in this life with the body as well as the soul, if so be we expect that God should glorify “both our bodies and souls in another.”
II. A help and assistance towards promoting the spiritual worship of our souls. There is so close a connection between the mind and its organs, that they act, as it were, by consent; and the motions of the one do commonly, and in some degree, pass into the other. And this natural sympathy shows itself nowhere more remarkably than in acts of devotion. We usually blame the body to a high degree, as the great clog and hindrance of the soul. And so it often is. But here it may be made to draw equally in the yoke of duty; nay, even to give wings to the mind, which it presseth down, and overwhelms on many other occasions. Nor is the body more beholden to the soul, for the beginning of its motions, than the soul afterwards is to the body, for the increase of hers.
III. A sign by which we express to others the religious esteem and veneration that dwells in us. Great are the advantages which the people of God, when they are met together, do mutually receive from it. The cold and remiss worshipper is, at the sight of an exemplary, kindled into some degrees of holy warmth; the fervent and devout in the presence of it becomes yet more inflamed. A religious emulation rises then in the breast of the faithful, a holy strife and desire of excelling. But believers are not the only persons that receive benefit by it; unbelievers, too, though unwillingly, have their share. The profane scoffer, who dares encounter a single Christian without shame or fear of reproof has here an answer to his bold scoffs, in that still and powerful argument, which arises from the behaviour of a devout multitude, worshipping God in the beauty of holiness: such an argument as will destroy all its unreasonable suspicions, and convince him of the sincerity of men’s hearts towards God, by the natural unaffected signs of it, which are shown in his service: such as will put him in mind of the numbers of devout and good men against which he engages; lead him on from the thought of the present congregation to those of the same kind that are spread over the face of the earth; and make him sit down and consider whether with such a small strength (his own, and that of a few more) he can encounter so many thousands, even the united wisdom and practice of mankind (1 Corinthians 14:24-25). (Bp. Atterbury.)
Spiritual worship
Whatever other ends are secured by sanctuary service,--the education of thought, the quickening of sensibility, and the deepening of religious trust,--this is one main end, the worship of God. We bow before God because He is infinitely just, and true, and pure, and good,--worthy of all our reverence and love; and the song of redemption, as it is celebrated in heaven, fixes our attention upon the glory of the Saviour’s nature, as well as the merit of the Saviour’s work.
I. Everything in a Christian service should be regulated so as to advance spiritual life. The instincts of a fervent Christian man will resent all that is showy and formal, and will rejoice in all that lifts his heart and his thoughts into communion with the living God.
II. If that spiritual worship be present there will be no cry for forms of prayer. To enjoy prayer is one of the marks of true devoutness, and when there is delight in approaching God, the soul will choose its own simplest forms of speech. They will be touched with a broken spirit and a contrite heart. Meditation is prayer in preparation, and prayer is preparation spoken.
III. In the preservation of spiritual devoutness the worshippers have much to do. Remember this: that worship must be in harmony with our life, and not a brilliant exception to it. True prayer is connected with the continuous life of God in the soul. It is not the lifting up into a region we are strangers to, a kind of Alpine summit situation to which we have painfully climbed, but rather the enjoyment of an air which is the common breath of our souls. Then the worshipper can afford his earnest and hearty Amen! This he ought to do, this God wishes him to do: “Let all the people say, Amen.”
IV. In such spiritual worship, praise takes, its appropriate place. We desiderate united praise. It is not loudness we want; shouting, either in preaching, praise, or prayer, is not power; but we do want the united service of all voices and hearts, as they are touched with the Spirit of the living God. Nothing is so painful as a kind of languid indifference, or a listless mannerism, as though we had little at all to do with the service. Every man, woman, and child in the sanctuary ought to sing, ought to be in earnest about it, and ought to do their best at it.
V. In such spiritual service we are typing and tasting the worship of heaven. That worship we may well believe will be all that is deepest in reverence, all that is sweetest in melody, all that is purest in love. (W. M. Statham.)
Divine worship
I. The component elements of true worship. As it is the chief fact with regard to man, so it is of the highest consequence.
1. It has its inward principles. Its root is in the soul. “God is a Spirit,” etc. There must be--
(1) Profound reverence. This is the basis of religious excellence, and is inspired by the contemplation of God and of ourselves in His sight.
(2) Humility.
(3) Submissive trust and love.
(4) Humble hope.
2. It has its proper external acts. As the face is the index of the emotions, so outward acts are the index of the spiritual feelings within. There must be--
(1) Appropriate postures and demeanour.
(2) Appropriate times.
(3) Appropriate acts and places.
“Splendour of churches is only blameable when it interferes with charity; God, who requireth charity as necessary, accepteth the other also as being an honourable work.”
II. The reasons rendering Divine worship obligatory.
1. It is based upon our relations to God and the constitution and nature of the human mind.
2. It is a Divine institution. In the Old Testament it is abundantly commanded; taken for granted in the New Testament.
3. It is of supreme importance to the mental and spiritual welfare of the world.
(1) Its importance to ourselves is great. It maintains a sense of religion in the soul.
(2) To others the value is great.
Without our days, and acts, and places of worship, men would become entirely abandoned to a worldly and irreligious life. The maintenance of worship is the proclamation of the fundamental truths of religion, which bring blessedness to the individual soul, and peace and prosperity to society. Seek to attain the highest ends of worship in yourselves. Make your life one act of worship, “one great psalm.” (James Foster, B.A.)
Humility in approaching God
“Shall we presume,” says Thoreau, “to alter the angle at which God chooses to be worshipped--kneel before the Lord our Maker?”