Does Worship Have To Make Sense? Second Commandment

Does Worship Have to Make Sense?

The Second Commandment

Exodus, 20.4, 5; Deuteronomy 5.8, 9

“You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them…

Remember, God is a God of order, not chaos.

I used to worship in a church in which, the first thing the congregation did following the hymn of praise was pray the Lord’s prayer. Then we would be seated for the rest of the service. So the call to worship came first, then a hymn of praise, then the Lord’s prayer. To vulgarize that you might say, the worship leader would say, “Come in here and worship God.” We would oblige by singing a song, and, in the Lord’s prayer, acknowledging our Father and His hallowed Name. Then we begin enumerating everything we wanted Him to do for us. It never seemed quite right to me that our worship began with our parading our desires and requests of the Lord before Him first off. In other churches the offering is collected following the sermon. I know there’s nothing cut-and-dried about this in Scripture, but really, does that make sense? We give to God what we’ve brought for Him and His Kingdom only after we’ve heard whatever His Word to us might be? Shouldn’t we make our offerings first, right after we praise the Lord, then confess our sins and unworthiness? Wouldn’t it make more sense to show God what we, by faith, have brought to honor Him and advance His work on earth as it is in heaven? All this is to say there’s an order to worship, and we need to follow it, at least to follow an order of worship that makes sense in the light of Who God is and what we are doing in coming together before Him. To fail to observe good and decent – sensible – order is to limit God by less-than-complete worship.

Write me at nacurragh@aol.com and I’ll send you a brochure on decent and orderly worship. Do you think your church’s order of worship makes sense?

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“In the Gates” is a devotional series on the Law of God by Rev. T.M. Moore

T. M. Moore is editor of the Worldview Church. He serves as dean of the Centurions Program of the Wilberforce Forum and principal of The Fellowship of Ailbe, a spiritual fellowship in the Celtic Christian tradition. He is the author or editor of twenty books, and has contributed chapters to four others. His essays, reviews, articles, papers, and poetry have appeared in dozens of national and international journals, and on a wide range of websites. His most recent books are The Ailbe Psalter and The Ground for Christian Ethics (Waxed Tablet).

Scripture quotations in this article are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version, (c) copyright 2001,2007 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Editor’s note: The use of a translation other than the Authorised Version in an article does not constitute an endorsement in whole or in part by The Christian Observer.