Worship

The Situation Today There exists much confusion about worship today. This remains true even in churches that claim the title "reformed" and those claiming the phrase reformata, semper reformanda (“reformed and always reforming”). Typically, the approach of most churches has been, “Whatever God has...
Tomorrow the remains of Hughes Oliphant Old (April 13, 1933 - May 24, 2016) will be interred at the Christian Street Cemetery in White River Junction, Vermont. A prince in Israel has died, leaving behind mourners who will miss both his genteel Christian piety and the vast body of knowledge that he...
One of the most important things we will do at Second Presbyterian Church is disciple our children to a living, personal faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. We live in a society that assumes that when children grow up they will jettison the family's beliefs and values. But the Bible sees things...
Herein lies that which all the beauty of the world fades before, and becomes as a thing of nought,—which brings all the outward pomp of ceremonious worship into contempt;—I mean the glory and excellence that lies in the spiritual communion of the soul with God, by the grace of the Holy Ghost, in...
In the late 1890’s B. B. Warfield, along with several other men, wrote against “the impatience . . . with the effort to define truth and to state with precision the doctrinal presuppositions and contents of Christianity.” [1] Such impatience was possessed by many who confessed to be Christians,...
Introduction Hebrews 12.28 prescribes that Christian worship be grateful, awe-filled, and reverent. Hebrews 12.29 describes why Christian worship should be so: "our God is a consuming fire." In the preceding post, we paused to consider the significance of this imagery and concluded that it presents...
Advocates of "family-integrated worship" -- a fancy term for keeping kids of every age in church services rather than shuffling them off to the nursery/crèche, Sunday School (UK), or Children's Church (US) -- generally claim their practice as the historical one up until rather recent times. "What...
Introduction According to Nicholas Wolterstorff, worship is the "Godward acknowledgement of God's unsurpassable greatness . . . whose attitudinal stance toward God is awed, reverential, and grateful adoration." As we saw in our last post , this definition aptly summarizes the vision of worship set...
In his book, The God We Worship , Nicholas Wolterstorff defines worship as the "Godward acknowledgement of God's unsurpassable greatness . . . whose attitudinal stance toward God is awed, reverential, and grateful adoration." According to Wolterstorff, worship is "Godward" in its orientation. In...
I love to see families walking through the doors of the auditorium on Lord's Day morning. I see each of them as a living stone coming together to form a living temple in order to worship the living God. They were once like the dry bones of Ezekiel's vision scattered about in the valley of the...