After attending church with his father one Sunday morning, before getting into bed that evening a little boy kneeled at his bedside and prayed: “Dear God, we had a good time at church today, but I wish you had been there.”  Have you ever felt like that?  Ever been to a service and thought that God wasn’t there?  For some of you, maybe this has never happened, but I would imagine that for most of you it has.  It has happened to me before—I have had the feeling that God was absent from services that I was leading and preaching at!  I knew I was there, but I wasn’t so sure God was present.  Maybe we feel this way because we are not really there ourselves—not present as we should be, not in the right frame of mind or spirit.  Or maybe we feel God is not in the worship service because of the style of the worship or the sermon was boring.  Whatever the case may be, most of us, if we are honest, would admit that there has been a time or two when we went to a church service and we weren’t so sure God was there with us.  Let me be clear here lest you accuse me of heresy.  The fact is that God is present everywhere and so technically when we say God wasn’t present, we can’t be right.  But the feeling was that God was not there—we may know intellectually that God was present since He is omnipresent, but we just didn’t “feel” the Spirit if you will, the service didn’t “move” us in any way.  I think you get the point. 

          For quite a while now many churches have struggled at one time or another over their worship services.  How do we best reach out to people and provide a worship experience that will meet the needs and wishes of as many people as possible?  How do we best praise God in church?  Different people have different answers to these questions.  The issue of what worship should look like and sound like can be very controversial in many churches.  Get on the internet and do a “Google” search of the term “worship wars” and you will see what I mean.  For many churches the issue of worship style is a huge problem and it can and has led to churches splitting and arguing and fighting and all that great stuff that Jesus just despises.  Worship is extremely important for us and so we get personal about it at times—but I am convinced that often times we don’t have the correct attitude when it comes to worship.  More than that, we don’t really have a firm grasp or knowledge as to what in the world worship really is.  And therefore, it turns out that we are passionate about something and willing to argue about something and even leave a church over something which we really don’t even understand.  We don’t even know what we are talking about—we just know how we feel—and we can’t even describe why we feel that way let alone back it up from the Bible. 

          What is worship?  I submit we argue so much about worship style and preference because we don’t know what true worship is.  We don’t have a theology of worship that gives us a foundation upon which to build our beliefs and live our lives and praise our God.  You know how it is.  Some people want to sing only hymns and have only organ music in church.  Others want guitar and drums and “contemporary” music—whatever they mean by that term.  Some want classical music or “traditional” worship—whatever they mean by that term.  Some churches use more of a rock band.  I once had a church member tell me that he thought the only instrument that belongs in a church is an organ.  Just a word of advice—if you feel that way, please don’t express that to me after the service because there are more problems with that statement than there are words in the sentence.  Some people think hymnals are outdated and we should have the words to songs projected onto a screen or wall.  Others think that is an idea straight from the pit of hell.  What is worship then?  Why do we get so fired up about it, so passionate about it, how come we have such strong feelings and emotions on this issue?  I submit to you that sometimes we get more fired up about this issue than we do about Jesus Himself.  If we were really on fire for the Lord and knew what worship is, we wouldn’t get so fired up about our personal feelings and preferences when it comes to worship. 

          One simple definition of worship is that it is “our glad response to the immense grace of the Triune God.  All of life is worship if we live in gratitude and reverence, with mindfulness of God and eagerness to serve Him.”[i]  Worship is something we take an active role in.  Many churches describe themselves as “liturgical” churches.  Typically older, traditional churches are liturgical, or would be described this way.  The word “liturgy” comes from the Greek and means “the work of the people.”  Worship is to be the work of the people, not a performance that people come to watch.  As Robert Webber says, “Worship is a verb.  It is not something done to us or for us, but by us.”[ii]  So worship is indeed a way of life.  Robert Webber goes on to say that “the liturgy (worship) is the summit toward which the activity of the church is directed; at the same time it is a fount from which all the church’s power flows…I visualize an hourglass set on its side.  At the very center, the waist of the hourglass is worship.  On the left, everything that one does in life, work and leisure, moves toward the center, worship.  On the right everything that one does in life, work and leisure is empowered by worship.  In this vision of life our worship stands at the center and gives shape to all that we do.”[iii]  

          Psalm 96 is all about worshiping God—it is a call to worship and praise Him in all that we do.  We are told to sing to the Lord a new song, proclaim good tidings of His salvation, tell of His glory, to ascribe to the Lord glory and strength, to bring an offering, to worship in holy attire and to tremble before Him.  Instead we battle over “traditional” versus “contemporary” meanwhile not defining or explaining what we mean by those terms.  God is never contained by the music that we already know.  Psalm 96 tells us to “sing to the Lord a new song.”  There will always be a need for new melodies, new harmonies, new texts, new arrangements, new instrumentations, new expressions of, and to, the infinitely incomprehensible God—even as we will always build on the faith expressions of our forebearers and need some of the old, old songs to tell “the old, old story.”[iv] 

          Remember the Gospel lesson we read this evening?  Some of you know the story very well—no pun intended.  The story of the woman at the well is filled with all sorts of nuggets of truth.  There are many topics one could preach on from this text, but I want to focus on what it says about worship.  Jesus starts up a conversation with the woman and they get to talking about “living water” which is Jesus’ way of referring to the Holy Spirit.  He tells the woman to bring her husband and she replies that she has no husband.  Jesus says, (I believe with a touch of humor) “You’re right about that.  Fact is you don’t have one, you’ve had five and the guy you are shacking up with now isn’t your husband.”  Now this conversation has gone in a direction the woman would rather not go—all she came here to do was draw water and she came at a time when she assumed no one else would be there.  So she changes the subject—and what does she change the subject to?  How does she try to get Jesus’ thoughts off of her and her issues?  She has the brilliant and clever idea to talk about the current worship war that was going on at the time.  “Sir, the woman said, “I can see that you are a prophet.  Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem.”  Hear part of Jesus’ reply: “A time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks.  God is spirit, and His worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth” (Jn. 4:23-24).

          Jesus says we must worship in spirit and in truth.  When He speaks of “spirit” here He is probably not referring to the Holy Spirit—it is the human spirit He has in mind.  Not that the Holy Spirit has nothing to do with our worship—hopefully the Holy Spirit is already dwelling within us.  Jesus’ point is that one must worship not simply outwardly by being in the right place and taking up the right attitude, but in one’s spirit.  “Spirit and truth” points to the need for complete sincerity and complete reality in our approach to God.  These are the sort of people God not only wants, but we are told He actively seeks for them and we are told that we “must” worship this way.  It’s not optional to worship in spirit and in truth because God Himself is spirit and truth. 

          Now I bring this all up because I think it applies directly to one of our biggest problems with worship today, and that is the objective versus the subjective.  By objective I mean expressions of truth about God and by subjective I mean feelings about God or in response to God.  The dominant fight between “traditional” and “contemporary” sometimes circles around this opposition, for the older traditional hymns are typically more doctrinally focused, whereas a greater proportion of contemporary music stresses feelings primarily.  It seems to be an opposition of truth and spirit and lo and behold, Jesus says we need both; in fact we must worship in both spirit and truth.  We need the theological content, the great doctrinal truth in our hymns, but we also need the emotion and spirit which can often be found in praise songs and which should be a part of any song we are singing or any instrument we are playing.  And the truth is there are hymns with great emotion and some with weak theology and there are some praise songs with great theology and doctrine and some with little emotion. 

          It should come as no surprise that conflicts over worship styles are now called worship wars.  People are bound to take changes personally if they affect their worship experience.  This is not just a function of personal preference, this is sacred ground being tread upon: a person’s corporate experience with God.  God is after a life of worship for each one of us.  It’s what Paul calls our "service of worship"—presenting ourselves to Him continually as living sacrifices, transformed in our thinking and awake to His will in the world.  Romans 12:1 says: “Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—this is your spiritual act of worship.    Unfortunately we tend to turn this service of worship (which takes up our whole life) into a worship service (which takes up about an hour a week).  It puts a lot of weight to bear on 20 minutes of music if that will be a person’s sole worship experience for the week.  No wonder people are fighting so hard for their music.  True worship incorporates our minds in understanding, our strength in service, our souls in wonder, and our spirits in praise.  It does not take a song to do this.  It takes my mind on God and my whole being focused in His direction.  I also believe it is possible to do all this while doing everything else we normally do—in fact, this is what gives everything else meaning.  This is what Paul meant when he said to do everything we do to the glory of God (1 Cor. 10:31).  All of life is to be worship.  It’s our life, not a worship service, that will make us worshipers.  We don’t go to church to worship; we go to church because we are already worshipers.  And if someone is a true worshiper, which means their whole life is an act of worship, then what happens for 20 minutes of music once a week is a small thing indeed.  I often hear people say they need to give God more of their time: longer quiet time, more prayer, more Bible reading.  That’s good, but I’m not sure God wants more of my time as much as He wants more of my attention.  It’s not this time for God, this time for work, this time for play, and this time for me.  It’s the whole thing for God.

When it comes down to it the war is not between those who want traditional worship and those who want contemporary worship.  The real war is with the enemy who would do us in by dividing us and rendering us ineffective by our bickering and fighting.  Paul has one goal for the church, "that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.  Then we will no longer be infants …" (Eph. 4:12-14).  Does fighting over 20 minutes of music sound like "the whole measure of the fullness of Christ"?  People in the world are dying all around us without Christ, and we are worried about what to do with music in a worship service that is not the beginning and the end of worship, anyway.  I wonder if Jesus even cares at all what kind of music we worship with as long as we worship.

We argue about worship because we make the mistake of thinking it’s about us—our preferences and what we like.  Worship is not about us or for us—it’s for and about God!  Psalm 96 instructs us to “Sing to the LORD a new song; sing to the LORD, all the earth.  Sing to the LORD, praise His name; proclaim His salvation day after day.  Declare His glory among the nations, His marvelous deeds among all peoples.  For great is the LORD and most worthy of praise; He is to be feared above all gods.”  Worship is for God, not for us.  We are so self-centered we forget that not everything should be or is, about us.  Worship should be personal, but it’s not just private and it’s not all about you—it’s all about God.  Marva Dawn puts it like this: “Unless we are perpetually vigilant, we find ourselves asking about everything, ‘What’s in it for me?’  When that point of view invades our worship attitudes, we complain, ‘I didn’t get much out of that worship service.’  So what?  It wasn’t you we were worshiping, was it?”[v]  We spend our lives choosing what pleases us, so it is decidedly countercultural to search instead for what pleases God. 

Worship though, is our offering of ourselves to God.  Psalm 96 tells us to “Ascribe to the Lord the glory due His name; bring an offering and come into His courts.”  If we really think about the truth that worship is for God, then actually all the worship service is offering—indeed all of our life is an offering to God.  It would help us all to worship more faithfully if we would remember that every element of our participation is our offering, instead of reducing the offering merely to the giving of money at one point in the service.  If preachers would give their sermons and musicians their music as offerings, then the tendency to perform would be avoided.  How different our daily lives would be if we perceived them not as an endless round of chores to accomplish, but as a continuing variety of opportunities to bring an offering to the Lord.    

So what is worship?  Worship is offering your whole life to God—all that you say and do—your body, mind and spirit all offered to God.  Worship is not a matter of taste or preference and worship is not about you—worship is about God.  Worship is work.   Worship is giving God the worth He deserves.  The point of worship is to glorify and please God.  The main point of worship should be not to attract people but to adore God.  Worship services should not be places where the congregation sits down to watch a performance put on by a pastor, worship leader, worship band or a choir.  The congregation is not the audience—God is the audience.  Style is not the issue.  What matters is whatever songs or forms we use keep us aware that God has invited us into worship, that God is present, that God is worthy to receive our praise, that there is so much to learn about God that we will never get done.  The question is whether our worship services immerse us in God’s splendor. 

So go forth from this place knowing that God is the one whom we need to please in our worship.  No one style of music or one order of worship is able to contain the greatness, the diversity and the majesty of our God.  Learn to worship in ways that you aren’t used to or aren’t comfortable with because for others, it is just what they need.  Sing songs you don’t necessarily like because others will sing the songs you like but they don’t.  Be willing to compromise, be humble—be part of a real community where people can get along without being carbon copies of each other.  Our worship should be new and old, simple and complex, contain ritual and spontaneity, enthusiasm and silence, joy and delight along with sorrow and lament, order and freedom, freshness and continuity and familiarity, fact and feeling, truth and spirit.  Our worship should be as immense and varied as the God we serve.  And that might not please everybody, but it will surely please God—and that is our goal.  Amen.