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| All of Life is Worship - Again | | Date Created: Jan 03, 2006, 12:26 PM |
Just a little bit more on on this topic. It's important to remember that we often use the word "worship" in a way that it is not normally used in the Bible. As I tried to make clear in my posts and in my book the word "worship" in our English Bibles typically translates Hebrew or Greek words that denote a physical act of prostrating oneself, kneeling, or bowing down. Understood in this way, all of life is most definitely not "bowing down" or "kneeling." I tried to make this point in my discussion of John chapter 4 in The Lord's Service, pp. 290-294. Perhaps a little more clarification is needed.
Throughout the week we are walking, sitting, grasping, turning, pulling, typing, speaking, etc. Occasionally, maybe even regularly, we drop to our knees or bow our heads in prayer, or even lift our hands in praise. These ritual acts are done at specific times and places. If anything, they punctuate our daily work. By periodicaly performing these acts of worship, we define and consecrate the work of service we do in our individual callings.
Most importantly, these acts of worship are done with the assembly of God's people on the Lord's Day. When we are called togther as the church it is so that we can all receive and do things as the body of Christ. This "receiving" and "doing" is what we call liturgical worship. These acts - hearing, speaking, sitting, standing, kneeling, raising hands, singing, bowing heads, eating, drinking, etc. - are all acts of worship. Even common acts become special in the assembly. We may hear and speak, eat and drink, during the week, but they are not typically liturgical acts of worship. What we do on the Lord's day together as the body of Christ is different that what we do in "all of life."
We run the risk of gnosticizing "worship" with our overly mental/attitudinal view of what constitutes true worship. As I said in my recent posts: it is true that "all of life is worship" in a metaphorical sense. That doesn't make it any less real, but it does remind us that the worship we engage in on the Lord's Day in assembly with God's people - bowing, kneeling, singing praises, raising our hands, eating and drinking, etc. - is sui generis. We don't normally do these things as acts of worship during the week, at least not in the same way that we do on Sunday.
All of life is worship comes to fruition every Lord's Day when we physically offer our tribute, the token of the work of our hands during the week, to the Lord at the offertory. This ritual act makes what we have done during the week an act of worship. By doing this on the Lord's Day we offer everything we have done during the week to the Lord for his evaluation and pleasure. That act, then, affects our frame of mind, our mental attitude, as we go back into the world to work for God's glory during the week.
My problem is that people are using the phrase "all of life is worship" as a club to flatten out time so that the Lord's Day is no different than, no more important than any other day of the week. What people are saying to me is that all your talk about how the Sunday service should be ordered and how important what is done in the assembly is, well, this is all wrong because "all of life is worship." Or I say that the Lord's Day assembly is central and that what happens in "formal worship" orients one's entire life, and the naysayer then says, "No, all of life is worship." I say that the Sunday service is special and the critic responds, "That's wrong because all of life is worship!"
Now, if these objections sound rather illogical, I believe they are. I'm not even sure I can connect the dots when someone presents this objection to a liturgical service. Apparently, however, for some the fact that "all of life is worship" seems to imply that performing liturgical acts of worship on Sunday is either inappropriate or insignificant, mabye even both. Why all the fuss about Sunday worship if all of life is worship?
You don't know how many times I've heard this phrase used as a way to relativize, even neutralize the significance of the Sunday assembly. This highlights a dangerous tendency these days towards individualizing and mentalizing "worship." If a person can "worship" God in everything he does, then worship has been reduced to something that happens inside an individual's head rather than what they do - hearing, speaking, singing, kneeling, standing, eating, drinking, etc. - with the body of Christ in the assembly. |
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