When I came back from vacation five weeks ago, I started a six week series that I entitled, ONE. Knowing we were going to be doing away with the “traditional/contemporary” split in worship in favor of a blended format (you can read about it here and here–please do!), I thought it would be wise to spend six weeks preaching on the various dynamics of unity–providing a Biblical, theological rationale for what oneness is and why it’s so important to God.

The final sermon in this series is entitled ONE: One Mission. My goal will be to unpack the one mission of God and then highlight our privileged role in God’s mission. As I was thinking about the mission of God, I went back to Matthew 24:37-41.

Matthew 24:37‑41 is a key passage some Christians use to justify an escapist theology, approaching this world with a “Why shine the brass on a sinking ship?” attitude. In this passage Jesus likens “the coming of the Son of Man” to the time of Noah, when people “were unaware until the flood came and swept them all away.” Then Jesus gives two brief pictures of the effect of his coming: “Two men will be in the field; one will be taken and one left. Two women will be grinding at the mill; one will be taken and one left.”

These verses have been employed to support the idea that God will one day evacuate, or “rapture,” all the righteous people, leaving behind an evil world destined for annihilation. Therefore, the thinking goes, Christians should focus exclusively on seeking to rescue lost souls rather than waste time trying to fix things that are broken in this doomed world. This perspective is evidenced in a comment I read not long ago from a well-known Bible teacher: “Evangelism is the only reason God’s people are still on earth.”

But a closer look at the context reveals that in those pictures Jesus gave of men in the field and women at the mill, those “left behind” are the righteous rather than the unrighteous. Like the people in Noah’s day who were “swept away,” leaving behind Noah and his family to rebuild the world, so the unrighteous are “taken,” while the righteous are left behind. Why? Because this world belongs to God, and he’s in the process of gaining it all back, not giving it all up.

When it comes to this world’s future, God will follow the same pattern he engineered in Noah’s day, when he washed away everything that was perverse and wicked but did not obliterate everything. God will not annihilate the cosmos; he’ll renew, redeem, and resurrect it. As Randy Alcorn writes, “We will be the same people made new and we will live on the same Earth made new.”

Moreover, the comparison between the floodwaters in Noah’s day and the fire that Peter wrote about is significant. The wicked things that are “swept away” by water can grow back (as happened in Noah’s time). But the wicked things burned up by fire can never come back. The burning-away effect of fire is permanent; the sweeping-away effect of water isn’t. Fire, in this case, is better than flood.

One thing all of this means is that God intends to bring redemption into every arena where sin has brought corruption—and that’s everywhere! As the beloved Christmas hymn “Joy to the World” puts it:

He comes to make his blessings flow, Far as the curse is found.

In these remarkable lines we broadcast in song a gospel as large as the universe itself. The blessings of redemption “flow as far as the curse is found.” This hymn reminds us that the gospel is good news to a world that has, in every imaginable way, been twisted away from the intention of the Creator’s design by the powers of sin and death, but that God, in Christ, is putting it back into shape.

Because God created peoples, places, and things, and because sin has corrupted peoples, places, and things, God intends to redeem peoples, places, and things. In Christ, God intends to redeem not only individuals but also neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces. He intends to redeem not only environmentalists but also the environment; not just lawyers but also law; not simply government officials but also government itself (Isaiah 9:6‑7). His goal is to transform every cultural sphere, from art and education to commerce and communication—everything! His mission is to redeem, renew, and regenerate all that is twisted and corrupt, broken and crusted over with sin.

Furthermore, this is a mission God will never abort. He refuses to quit until he has renewed every last inch of his good creation that has been contaminated by evil. “Behold, I am making all things new” (Revelation 21:5). The apostle Paul says that God is using the power of Christ’s cross to “reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven” (Colossians 1:20). He speaks of God’s “plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him [Christ], things in heaven and things on earth” (Ephesians 1:10).

Theologian Cornelius Plantinga notes the comprehensiveness of it all: “In a thousand ways, God will gather what’s scattered, rebuild what’s broken, restore what has been emptied out by centuries of waste and fraud. In a thousand ways, God will put right what’s wrong with his glorious creation.”

God promises nothing short of total cosmic renewal. Our confident anticipation of that renewal—our living hope of it—triggers and sustains our excitement and motivation for making a difference by living unfashionable lives.

(This material was taken from my book Unfashionable pg. 52-55)

Given the amount of attention and feedback we’ve received this week with regard to removing the “traditional/contemporary” split in worship at Coral Ridge in favor of a blended format (you can read about it here), I thought it would be a good idea to do a follow-up post going into even more detail regarding why we made the decision we made. Later this week I’ll do a post answering some of the questions we’ve been asked.

First of all, this was not first and foremost a music decision. It was a gospel decision. In other words, while I certainly don’t claim to know each and every situation in each and every local church, I don’t think a local church can experience the degree of deep, rich unity that Jesus prayed for the night before he went to the cross by having a “traditional/contemporary” split in worship. I think by segregating ourselves this way we miss out on some choice blessings that Jesus intends for his one body to enjoy.

Let me tell you a story.

A couple years ago my wife and I went to my daughter’s end of the school year kindergarten musical. As I sat there watching her sing and dance and laugh on stage with friends she adores—I was surprised by a rush of sadness that overcame me.

Some of Genna’s friends are white, some Hispanic, some black. Some come from families having very little, some from wealthy families. Some come from single-parent homes, others from homes where Mom and Dad are happily married. Some are physically uncoordinated, while others are already remarkably athletic. But to my then six-year-old daughter and her friends, none of these differences made a difference. They didn’t even seem to notice those things that, in time, will tend to separate them.

By the time Genna and her friends are in high school, our culture will have tried to convince them to join “their own kind.” Over time they’ll be informally segregated into cliques: cheerleaders with cheerleaders, nerds with nerds, jocks with jocks, artists with artists. The rich will be influenced to stick with the rich, the poor with the poor, blue collar with blue collar, white collar with white collar. Movies, magazine covers, and TV shows will influence them to believe that “beautiful people” should enjoy life with other beautiful people, leaving the unattractive to their own groupings.

By the time they reach adulthood, many of these young friends will be torn apart by the very differences God intends for us to celebrate and enjoy—differences that make each one of us unique.

During the musical, my daughter’s eyes met mine, and she waved and smiled. I did my best to hold back my tears and smile back. Unexpectedly for me, a time intended for sweet memory-making had brought a moment of sorrow. I sat there groaning inwardly for my daughter, who would soon be pressured to view human life and community very differently than she does now—very differently, in fact, than God intended.

What I experienced that afternoon was the sad reality that this world is irrefutably tribal. In spite of how open and freethinking we believe our society has become, segregation is still fashionable—now more than ever, in some ways.

We segregate by age and socio-economic classes as well as by race, physical appearance, and cultural background. We’re grouped according to likes and dislikes, preferences and personality traits. We form clans of people who all look, talk, think, and act the same. Some of this separation is both understandable and unavoidable. From elementary school through high school, academic institutions separate students according to age, recognizing the benefit of age-appropriate teaching. But for the most part, when people separate from those who are different, they miss out on so many things intended to enhance human life and relationships.

In The Four Loves, C. S. Lewis mentions two friends, Ronald and Charles. After one of them died, Lewis realized there was no consolation to be found in the possibility that he and the surviving friend might now actually “get” more of each other as a result. “Far from having more of Ronald, having him ‘to myself’ now that Charles is away, I have less of Ronald.” He would never again, for example, observe Ronald’s unique reaction to one of Charles’s jokes. Lewis notes, “In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out. By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets.”

The same dynamic of relational loss is at work when we segregate according to kind. We see and experience much less, not more, when we gravitate toward, and surround ourselves with, those who are just like us. When young are separated from old, rich from poor, black from white, “traditional” from “contemporary”, our world becomes a much smaller and less remarkable place. Our preferences and perspectives remain plain and narrow. We lose sight of the beauty and the brilliance that accompany gospel wrought diversity.

You see, when the gospel really grabs you, something happens.

Some of my closest friends today are people I would never have hung out with in high school. That’s as it should be—the work of God the Son reconciling us to God the Father must also result in our reconciliation with one another. When we come to God through repentance and faith in Christ, we come into a new relationship with God’s people, many of whom are quite different from us. The church ought to exemplify a radically unusual social order because it integrates people who are very unlike one another.

In Paul’s day the world was rigidly divided between Jew and Gentile, slave and free, male and female. Those walls of separation were thick, and the groups on each side were hostile. But that didn’t stop Paul from boldly proclaiming God’s intention to establish a new community—the church—that not only included all these but also allowed them to enjoy deeply interdependent relationships. As Paul argued for the Gentiles’ place in God’s redemptive plan, he said, “There is no distinction between Jew and Greek; for the same Lord is Lord of all, abounding in riches for all who call upon him” (Romans 10:12). As Paul decried certain Jewish leaders for teaching that the sign of circumcision was a condition for justification, he wrote, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). And when he addressed class distinctions threatening to divide the church, he asserted our newness in Christ, in which “there is no distinction between Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and freeman, but Christ is all, and in all” (Colossians 3:11). If he were writing to the 21st Century church you could almost hear him say, “There is neither ‘traditional’ nor ‘contemporary’ worship; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

Paul kept affirming a foundational reality that always accompanies true gospel belief: when God makes us one with Christ, he also makes us one with each other, removing the barriers of separation erected by our society. In contrast to the tribal-mindedness of the world around us, the church is to bring together people who would remain separated in any other sector of society. The divisive and fundamentally worldly notions of class, race, economics, and age prove to be painful sources of loneliness, fragmentation, and alienation in the modern world—things the church should strive against in establishing a new community.

The primary reason, though, that stylistic segregation in worship shrinks our souls is because it prevents us from knowing God deeply. The only way to know him deeply is to have many different types of Christian people in your life, since each person will help to reveal a part of God that you can’t see by yourself. This means the great tragedy of segregation isn’t so much that we see less of each other but that in separating from each other we see less of God. All of us need other lights than our own to see more of his myriad facets.

So, we miss out on some great things God intends for us to enjoy when we separate in worship according to musical tastes. The idea to do this comes, not from the Bible, but from American consumerism and we adopt this practice to our own peril.

As my friend Steven Phillips rightly says, we ought to use the best music, prayers, and traditions of our Christian past, so that our worship is guided and enriched by our fathers in the faith. In doing this we demonstrate that our Christian faith reaches back thousands of years. And we ought also to use the best new songs and styles – to “sing a new song to the Lord” as the Psalms say – so that we can demonstrate that the grace of God is ever new. God’s saving power is available now, in the present day, to all who call on Him in faith.

By musically blending things in this way we  exercise love toward those who resonate with different musical tastes than us. We recognize that our worship service is a shared time and a shared space, so that if a particular song or style doesn’t inspire us, we can still look across the sanctuary and give thanks from our hearts for the diversity of people who are here. The gospel of Jesus Christ invites us to look across the aisle and say, “Though this song or style may not appeal to me, I see that God is using it to move you. I love you in Christ and I’m glad you’re here.”

Brothers and sisters, this is the way it should be–especially when we gather for worship! And thank God, this is the way it now is at Coral Ridge!

Today was a monumental, historic day at Coral Ridge.

For many years Coral Ridge had two very distinct worship services–one contemporary and one traditional. The result was the unintentional development of two different churches under one roof. It wasn’t healthy. So back at the end of Spring we started talking about what we could do to unify our one large church.

Given our desire to re-plant Coral Ridge around a holistic and comprehensive understanding of the gospel we concluded that we needed to make a change. After all, since the gospel is the good news that God reconciles us not only to himself but also to one another, the church should be breaking down walls, not erecting them. God intends the church to be demonstrating what community looks like when God’s reconciling power is at work.

Most churches would agree that any segregation arising from racial or economic bigotry runs contrary to the nature of the gospel and should not be tolerated. But there’s another kind of segregation, perhaps more subtle, that many churches today have unapologetically embraced.

Following the lead of the advertising world, many churches and worship services target specific age groups to the exclusion of others. They forget that, according to the Bible, the church is an all-age community, and instead they organize themselves around distinctives dividing the generations: Busters, Boomers, Millennials, Generations X, Y, and Z. Many churches offer a traditional service for the tribe who prefer older music and a contemporary service for the tribe who prefer newer music. The truth is, however, that if the only type of music you employ in a worship service is old, you inadvertently communicate that God was more active in the past than he is in the present. On the other hand, if the only type of music you employ in a worship service is new, you inadvertently communicate that God is more active in the present than he was in the past.

The only way to musically communicate God’s timeless activity in the life of the church is to blend the best of the past with the best of the present. In other words, we must remember in our worship that while “contemporary only” people operate with their heads fixed frontwards, never looking over their shoulder at the stock from which they have come, and “traditional only” people operate with their heads on backwards, romanticizing about the past and always wanting to go back, the Church, in contrast from both extremes, is called upon to be a people with swiveling heads: learning from the past, living in the present, and looking to the future. That’s the only way to avoid in worship what C.S. Lewis called “chronological snobbery.”

You see, when we separate people according to something as trivial as musical preferences, we evidence a fundamental failure to comprehend the heart of the gospel. We’re not only feeding toxic tribalism; we’re also saying the gospel can’t successfully bring these two different groups together. It’s a declaration of doubt about the unifying power of God’s gospel. Generational appeal in worship is an admission that the gospel is powerless to join together what man has separated.

Building the church on stylistic preferences or age appeal (whether old or young) is just as contrary to the reconciling effect of the gospel as building it on class, race, or gender distinctions. In a recent interview J. I. Packer said, “If worship services are so fixed that what’s being offered fits the expectations, the hopes, even the prejudices, of any one of these groups as opposed to the others, I don’t believe the worship style glorifies God.” One of the leading ways the church can testify to God’s unifying power before our segregated world is to establish and maintain congregations and worship services that transcend cultural barriers, including age and musical styles.

So, I am thrilled that as of this morning Coral Ridge broke down a thick wall that had been separating this church family for years. Because of our firm commitment to and love for the gospel, we worshiped together as one body around one table united to one Christ by one Spirit–and we felt God’s infinite approval!

The gospel revolution at Coral Ridge continues!

My much admired friend Tim Keller greatly honored me when he agreed to write the foreword to my book Unfashionable: Making a Difference in the World by Being Different. The book is my attempt to unpack the complex relationship between the church and contemporary culture in an accessible way. Tim’s astute and balanced perspective on these issues is clearly and concisely laid out in the foreword. Here it is:

Tullian Tchividjian bravely steps into the one of the hottest debates in contemporary evangelicalism—the divisive issue of how Christians should relate to our broader culture. He does so with grace, providing us with one of the most accessible guides to this issue that we have.

Let me give a brief outline of the current conflict as I see it.

Traditionally, evangelicals’ attitude toward culture has been one of relative indifference. It was thought, after all, that this world is only going to burn up in the end. Only human souls last forever. What matters, then, is to convert as many people as possible, and if we do so during the time we have left here on earth, society will be bettered and changed “one heart at a time.” Many churches and Christians still understand things this way. But during the last generation, as American social values changed drastically, and as the distinction between Christianity and the rest of the culture has sharpened, many Christians have felt pressured to respond. Three very different approaches have emerged.

First, some perceive the main problem to be the loss of moral absolutes. They insist that Christians have been too passive and must “take the culture back” through politics and grass-roots social activism around issues such as abortion, same-sex marriage, fatherhood, traditional gender roles, and abstinence education. They complain that Christians have become too much like the culture, since we have as many divorces and abortions and since many no longer really believe in absolute truth. Young people are therefore encouraged to recover a Christian worldview and then to penetrate the culture and accomplish a conservative version of the “long march through the elite institutions” that the young 1960s radicals achieved over the last thirty years.

In reaction to this approach, other Christians have insisted that the main problem today is the church’s irrelevance to the concerns of people and problems of society. While the first group thinks Christians are too assimilated to the world around them, this second group believes Christians are too withdrawn into their own subculture. Believers speak in language that is now undecipherable to the average person. In particular, they are indifferent to the inequality, injustice, and suffering in the world. In this model, the church is called to connect with felt needs of people and especially to work against the inequality and injustice in society. As different as they seem on the surface, older churches like Willow Creek and Saddleback and many emerging churches basically share this way of relating Christ to culture.

The last of the three approaches believes the main problem today is that both the conservative evangelical church and the liberal mainline church have been corrupted by the “Constantinian error” of seeking to reform the world to be like the church. Instead the church has become like the world. It is dominated by the political economy of capitalism and liberal democracy. Trying to change the world seduces Christians into conformity to the world in order to get into positions of influence. Trying to be relevant and meet felt needs only turns the church into another consumer mall. Instead the church needs to recapture its calling to be an alternative society, a counter-culture. It needs to follow Christ “outside the camp,” identifying with the poor and marginalized. It needs to have rich, liturgical worship that shapes Christians into a new society. It should stop trying to bring the kingdom of Christ into the world and simply live as signs of the future kingdom. Christians certainly live in the world and have secular vocations, but in them they should aim to act as good citizens and neighbors like anyone else. They shouldn’t try to transform the culture.

So, who is right? Is the main problem a lack of evangelism? Or is it the failure of Christians to live out their worldview in the cultural institutions? Or is it our inability to connect with nonbelievers in their own language, to work against injustice, hunger, and poverty? Or is it the thinness and lack of distinctiveness of our own Christian communities?

When one takes a view of these models from thirty thousand feet, it is not too hard to realize why they all have so many adherents. Each one is onto something extremely important. Their biggest weakness, however, is that they tend to define themselves over against each other instead of over against the world. This means that, for all their strengths and insights, none of them seems to be able to see the strengths in the other approaches. This leads to imbalances and overreaching.

What I love about Tullian’s book is that he implicitly critiques all of these approaches, not by directly trying to refute them, but by selecting the strengths of each approach, explaining and illustrating each one in ways easy to grasp, and then showing how, at a congregational level, they can be woven together into a coherent whole. Here you will learn how we must contextualize, how we Christians should be as active in Hollywood, Wall Street, Greenwich Village, and Harvard Square as in the halls of Washington, DC. And yet there are ringing calls to form a distinct, “thick” Christian counter-culture as perhaps the ultimate witness to the presence of the future, the coming of the kingdom.

Tullian gives us a great example of how the emphases I’ve described can be combined in a local church in our own cultural moment. Read it carefully and you will profit greatly.

—Timothy Keller, senior pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church, New York City, and author of The Reason for God

(This is the final part of a 6 part series I’ve done on corporate worship. Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5.)

When we gather together for worship, we ought to come reaching up, starved for God, ready to feast together on the good news that, in the person of Jesus Christ, God has descended to us because we could never ascend to him. Feasting on God’s gospel together through prayer and preaching, sacrament and singing, provides us with the faith, hope, and love we need to be good news people in a bad news world.

We should not, however, only look back to what Christ has done, we should also look ahead to what Christ will do. We remember the past, but also rehearse the future. For, when Christ comes again, the process of reversing the curse of sin and recreating all things will be complete (1 Cor. 15:51-58). The peace on earth that the angels announced the night Christ was born will become a universal actuality. God’s cosmic rescue mission will be complete. The fraying fabric of our fallen world will be fully and perfectly rewoven. Everything and everyone “in Christ” will live in perfect harmony. Shalom will rule.

Isaiah 11:6-9 pictures it this way:

The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the young goat, and the calf and the lion and the fattened calf together; and a little child shall lead them. The cow and the bear shall graze; their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. The nursing child shall play over the hole of the cobra, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the adder’s den. They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain; for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea.

For those who’ve found forgiveness of sins in Christ, there will one day be no more sickness, no more death, no more tears, no more division, no more tension. The pardoned children of God will work and worship in a perfectly renewed earth without the interference of sin. We who believe the gospel will enjoy sinless hearts and minds along with disease-free bodies. All that causes us pain and discomfort will be destroyed, and we will live forever.

Until that day comes, we gather for worship not to escape the world’s present reality, but to be reminded by God that this world isn’t all there is. The Bible makes it clear that even though we enjoy one day in seven to “rest” from our earthly activities, there is still a rest that remains to be fulfilled (Heb. 4:9). It is the final rest when every day will be a holy day and a heavenly day.

Until the glory of the Lord fills the earth as the waters fill the sea, until the Kingdom of this world becomes the Kingdom of our Lord and His Christ, every day is not holy. This is why we need Sunday’s—to give us a one-day taste of our future destiny so we can persevere through the rest of the week.

When we worship together we enjoy and experience an intrusion of “heaven in the real world”—the end time in time. It’s the future being brought into the present. In our worship together, we enter into the very suburbs of heaven and get a weekly taste of what will eventually be permanent and eternal.

I look forward to corporate worship more than any other time of the week because when I am worshipping together with other sinner-saints, my anticipation for the Great Gathering on the last day intensifies. What we do together in worship is nothing less than a glorious rehearsal of what we will experience when the “ultimate assembly” is fully and finally brought together by Christ. Our weekly worship is a foretaste of that day when our feasting will be permanent and our fasting will be over—when we will finally be able “to enjoy what is most enjoyable with unbounded energy and passion forever.”

Lesslie Newbigin (1909- 1998) played a vital role in helping the church understand the intersection of theology and mission–specifically the mission of Jesus Christ to the complexities of modern Western culture. A missionary himself to India, he was a contextual theologian par excellence. He understood long before most that Christians are to be good interpreters not only of Scripture but also of culture. He understood that God wants us to be like the men of Issachar, “who had understanding of the times, to know what Israel ought to do” (1 Chronicles 12:32). He understood that faithfulness to Christ and His mission means we can’t afford to leave our culture unexamined–and unchallenged. He understood that “the church was instituted by Jesus Christ to be a sign of God’s reign and the means of witnessing to that reign throughout the world [so that] the church that refuses to accept its missionary purpose is a deformed church.” So he thought long and hard, deep and wide about the cultural climate in the West (its challenges and opportunities) and all the issues surrounding the church’s mission—its proper relationship to this world and its proper place in it.

No one (including me!) agreed with everything Newbigin said or believed. But his counsel to the Western church regarding mission was winsome and wise. Below is one of my favorite Newbigin quotes. Enjoy:

If the gospel is to challenge the public life of our society, if Christians are to occupy the “high ground” which they vacated in the noon time of “modernity,” it will not be by forming a Christian political party, or by aggressive propaganda campaigns. Once again it has to be said that there can be no going back to the “Constantinian” era. It will only be by movements that begin with the local congregation in which the reality of the new creation is present, known, and experienced, and from which men and women will go into every sector of public life to claim it for Christ, to unmask the illusions which have remained hidden and to expose all areas of public life to the illumination of the gospel. But that will only happen as and when local congregations renounce an introverted concern for their own life, and recognize that they exist for the sake of those who are not members, as sign, instrument, and foretaste of God’s redeeming grace for the whole life of society.

(Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4)

A gospel-fueled worship service is a service where God serves the gospel to sinners in need of rescue—and that includes both Christians and non-Christians. Churches for years have struggled over whether their worship services ought to be geared toward Christians (to encourage and strengthen them) or non-Christians (to appeal to and win them). But that debate and the struggle over it are misguided. We’re asking the wrong questions and making the wrong assumptions.

Like many others, I once assumed the gospel was simply what non-Christians must believe in order to be saved, but after they believe it, they advance to deeper theological waters. But, as Tim Keller explains it, the gospel isn’t simply the ABCs of Christianity, but the A-through-Z. The gospel doesn’t just ignite the Christian life; it’s the fuel that keeps Christians going and growing every day. Once God rescues sinners, his plan isn’t to steer them beyond the gospel but to move them more deeply into it. After all, the only antidote to sin is the gospel—and since Christians remain sinners even after they’re converted, the gospel must be the medicine a Christian takes every day. Since we never leave off sinning, we can never leave the gospel.

To describe his condition as a Christian, Martin Luther employed the phrase simul justus et peccator—simultaneously justified and sinful. Luther understood that while he’d already been saved from sin’s penalty, he was in daily need of salvation from sin’s power.

Paul calls the gospel “the power of God for salvation” (Romans 1:16) and contrary to what some have concluded, he didn’t simply mean the “power of God for conversion.” The gospel remains the power of God unto salvation until we are glorified because we’re all “partly unbelievers until we die”, as Calvin put it. We need God’s rescue every day and in every way.

In his book The Gospel for Real Life, Jerry Bridges picks up on this theme—that Christians need the gospel just as much as non-Christians—by explaining how the spiritual poverty in so much of our Christian experience is the result of an inadequate understanding of the gospel’s depths. The answer isn’t to try harder in the Christian life but to comprehend more fully and clearly Christ’s incredible work on behalf of sinners and then to live in a more vital awareness of that grace day by day. Our main problem in the Christian life, in other words, is not that we don’t try hard enough to be good, but that we haven’t thought out the deep implications of the gospel and applied its powerful reality to all parts of our life. Real spiritual growth happens as we continually rediscover the gospel.

The same dynamic explains the primary purpose of corporate worship: to rediscover the mighty acts of God in Christ coming to do for us what we could never do for ourselves. We gather in worship to celebrate God’s grip on us, not our grip on God.

A gospel fueled worship service is a service where God’s rescue in Christ is unveiled and unpacked through song, sermon, and sacrament in such a way that it results in the exposure of both the idols of our culture and the idols of our hearts. The faithful exposition of our true Savior in every element of worship will painfully, but liberatingly, reveal the subtle ways in which we as individuals and as a culture depend on lesser things than Jesus to provide the security, acceptance, protection, affection, meaning, and satisfaction that only Christ can supply.

The praising, praying, and preaching in such a service should constantly show just how relevant and necessary Jesus is. They must serve the gospel to sinners by telling and retelling the story that while we are all great sinners, Christ is a great Savior.

(To be continued…)

(Today I continue with my series of posts on corporate worship. Read Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3)

All too common today are polarizing tendencies in worship that fail to reach the whole person. For instance, in some churches, how a Christian thinks is far more important than how a Christian feels. Worship in these churches is primarily geared to informing the mind. But when it comes to feeling God, they remain stoic. These churches turn worship into a classroom for learning.

Other churches do well at “feeling” in worship but do “thinking” poorly. In these churches, worship is primarily geared to engaging the emotions—thinking is far less important than feeling. These churches turn worship into a therapist’s couch for emotional highs and healing.

Still other churches conclude that neither our thoughts nor our feelings toward God are as important as what we do for God. In these churches, worship is primarily geared to the will—the goal of worship is to get the worshippers to give more, serve more, or take some other action.

But notice Isaiah’s varied response to his encounter with the glory of God. He responds intellectually to God’s presence—there’s no question in Isaiah’s mind that God is who he is: “My eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts” (v.5). In the same verse, there’s also an emotional response—he feels the presence of God in his heart: “I’m undone.” Finally, there’s a volitional response—having encountered the living God, Isaiah is ready and willing to do God’s will with his entire being: “Here am I, send me” (v.8).

We, too, ought to experience God with the totality of our being in worship. Worship services ought to inform the mind intellectually, engage the heart emotionally, and bend the will volitionally. God wants thoughtful worshippers who believe, emotional worshippers who behold, and obedient worshippers who behave. God-centered worship produces people who think deeply about God, feel passionately for God, and live urgently in response to God. Therefore, when we meet God in worship, we should expect a combination of gravity and gladness, depth and delight, doctrine and devotion, precept and passion, truth and love.

Not only here in Isaiah, but throughout Scripture we see people in the presence of God weeping over their sin, celebrating their forgiveness, and exalting in God’s bigness. People feel their desperation, cry out for deliverance, celebrate their pardon—and in many other ways respond in fullness to the thick presence of God’s glory.

Isaiah’s many-sided response to God’s revealed glory is anchored ultimately in the multifaceted beauty of the gospel—the good news that in the person of Jesus Christ, God came down to recover and repair a world lost and broken by sin.

Contrary to what many Christians have concluded, the Bible does not tell two stories: one about Israel in the Old Testament, another about the church in the New Testament. The Bible tells one story and points to one figure. It narrates how God rescues his world that we wrecked, and exalts Christ as the one who accomplishes the rescue. In the Old Testament God revealed himself through types and shadows, promises and prophecies. In the New Testament God reveals himself in Christ who is the substance of every shadow and the fulfillment of every promise and prophecy. The Old Testament predicts God’s rescuer; the New Testament presents God’s rescuer. Therefore, the whole Bible—both the Old and New Testament—is all about God’s rescuer. A gospel-fueled worship service tells and retells this unified story—highlighting the story’s infallible Hero—through song, sermon, and sacrament.

If our worship is genuinely gospel-fueled, than we, like Isaiah, will go through a range of expressions when we’re together. The experience of the worshipper should be multifaceted because God’s story—the gospel—is multifaceted. Our worship should have many parts because the gospel has many parts, and is neither one-dimensional nor stagnant.

The cradle, the cross, and the crown of God’s Rescuer are to be rehearsed and in some way felt. For instance, the gospel takes us from a sense of gratitude when pondering the incarnation, to a sense of grief when pondering the crucifixion, and to a sense of glory when pondering the resurrection.

God’s story takes us low and brings us high and gospel-fueled worship services should in some way reflect those ups and downs in their style and substance, context and content. With our Hero, we should experience something of the darkness of the garden of Gethsemane and the daylight of the garden tomb. We cannot ponder the cross without feeling our sin. And we cannot ponder the empty tomb without feeling our salvation.

Our worship should include moments of praise, lament, and thanksgiving—or, in the words of Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann, “orientation, disorientation, and reorientation.” It should involve a sense of guilt and gratitude, desperation and deliverance, somber contemplation and joyous celebration. It should contain silence and singing, confession and cleansing, commendation of God and conviction from God.

(To be continued…)