Worship has three, or maybe five, dynamic directions. There is a gift and receipt dynamic to it. It looks a little bit like this:
Worship goes up, it goes out, or sideways, and it goes in.
What I mean by this that the primary direction of our worship is towards God, or ‘upwards.’ We worship the sovereign Lord of heaven and earth because he is worthy of our worship. He is goodness and beauty and truth, leading us to direct wonder at his person and his acts. We worship Jesus.
We find that as we worship the Lord, he comes to meet with us; in fact, we discover that he stepped towards us before we stepped towards him, so as we choose to worship we also receive from God. Our up also becomes a down, the heavens are not like brass—even though they sometimes feel like it (Deuteronomy 28)—and God encounters us as we honour him. That’s the gift and receipt dynamic, even a dialectic, that happens as we worship Jesus.
The Bible is also clear that we sing and pray and read the Bible for each other’s benefit too (Ephesians 5). Our worship is directed vertically but for those alongside us to hear. There is, therefore, a horizontal element. Perhaps the diagram falls down here because the arrows aren’t doing the same thing as each other, we aren’t worshipping our neighbour, but we do want to encourage them and build them up by allowing them to hear our worship.
That’s why we make sure we sing and pray loudly enough to hear the person next to you. That’s why our media teams work hard to make sure nothing is so loud that you can’t hear the person next to you. I should be encouraged by their off-key expressions of joy much as they should be by mine. On difficult days I need to hear them sing with gusto the words that I am struggling to believe, that is one of the ways we encourage each other.
Try to encourage your church to be noisy. There is a place for contemplation and silence but that’s very rarely a Sunday morning. Instead, pray loud enough that the person next to you can hear you.
The dynamic here is that as I also hear your singing, your ‘amen’ and your prayers I am built up. We edify one another (1 Corinthians 14) as we both worship the Lord. Our joy becomes mutual joy. This is one of the reasons that worship with the church is a dynamically different ‘event’ to worshipping Jesus on your own. We spur one another on in joy, in delight, and in apprehension of the goodness of God.
Finally, I am edifying not just the person next to me, but also my self. Praise the Lord, O my soul (Psalm 103)! I am encouraging my Spirit with truth and helping myself believe whatever is hard to believe today by praying and singing and reading it. Funnily enough it also helps me to hear myself out loud. Me praying in my head is not as effective at stirring my spirit towards prayer as me praying audibly is. I don’t think I have a theological explanation for that yet, but it is a demonstrable phenomenon. My first suggestion would be that we should remember that we aren’t minds on sticks or brains in jars, we are people, we are bodies, and utilising our whole selves is most effective in stirring ourselves. That’s, by the by, why waving your arms around is good for you.
My Sunday morning worship is aimed at God, who graciously meets and encounters me as I do so. I’d also like my near neighbours in church to hear me for their benefit, and I would like to hear them for my benefit. My soul needs to hear me too, for my own benefit. These effects are cumulative. What I mean is that my worship for God increases—if it’s reasonable to use quantitative language, it’s not a quantifiable thing—as I hear others and myself worshipping. The church acts together as a self-amplifying effect over time. It’s, in essence, a feedback loop, but the kind that your PA guys would like to facilitate.
This is a slow effect and can have many blockers, but it is a true effect. It’s why we can’t really worship as effectively on our own. It’s part of the beauty of Jesus’ genius idea: the church. This kind of progress is tracked over years, if not decades, but it’s real. Remind yourself of it on Sunday, because God has designed us to need each other, even as we worship him.
Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash
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