Blog Posts - SONG OF ENDLESS YEARS

SONG OF ENDLESS YEARS

Trinitarian Worship

6/3/2015

Continuing from the last post, we look at four broad characteristics of biblical worship as identified by the curriculum published by BiFrost Arts. The curriculum asserts that Christian worship will be scriptural, triune, redemptive, and participatory.

2. Triune

"One distinctive of the Christian faith is that we believe in a triune God. We believe that the Scriptures describe God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, of one will, of one substance, unchanging, and glorious beyond all comprehension. This should be reflected in our worship.

"It is easy to emphasize one particular person of the Trinity. It is possible to emphasize the Holy Spirit, the baptism of the Holy Spirit, praying to the Holy Spirit, and being filled with the Holy Spirit, maybe even to the point of neglecting some of the other persons of the Trinity. Or we can boil down the whole of the Bible to having a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. All the prayers are directed to Jesus.

"Look at or listen to the prayers we pray during our worship service. What would it look like to say prayers and sing songs that acknowledge each person of the one triune God?"

As we strive for greater and great balance in our approaches to worship, it is tempting to load our prayers and songs with trinitarian references without considering the relational dynamics at play.

One of the most concise and helpful definitions of Trinitarian worship is found in James Torrance's book Worship, Community, and the Triune God of Grace:

“Trinitarian Worship is the gift of participating through the Spirit in the incarnate Son’s communion with the Father.”

The Triune God, complete in relationship from all eternity, has created us for his glory and redeemed us from the fall so that we may participate in the mystery of the Trinity's continuous outpouring.

Torrance unpacks this definition even more, showing how our union with Christ is the core of all we do, individually and corporately:

(Trinitarian worship) means participating in union with Christ, in what he has done for us once and for all, in his self-offering to the Father, in his life and death on the cross. It also means participating in what he is continuing to do for us in the presence of the Father and in his mission from the Father to the world. When we see that ..... (and) that the unique center of the Bible is Jesus Christ, ‘the apostle and high priest whom we confess [Heb 3:1], then the doctrines of the Trinity, the incarnation, the atonement, the ministry of the Spirit, Church and sacraments, our understanding of the kingdom....all unfold from that center.

Biblical Worship

6/1/2015

In the next few posts I will continue to recount some of the content from the Sunday School class I taught on Worship and Music at Trinity. Keep in mind that I used the curriculum published by BiFrost Arts to structure our discussions. Read more about the curriculum here.

The curriculum asserts that Christian worship will be scriptural, triune, redemptive, and participatory.

1. Scriptural

Worship should be governed by the language, themes, and story of the Bible. Commentaries, confessions, and Christian literature are all valuable. But for corporate worship, the Scriptures should shape and guide our choices of prayers and songs.

While we may all agree that Scripture is important, it is often the case that our worship services are shaped only by a limited number of passages of the Bible that resonate and feel familiar instead of all the Scriptures.

Without the guidance and governance of the Scriptures, we can easily choose the comfortable passages and shape for ourselves an image of a God who is like us and loves the things that we love. Instead, we need the Scriptures to show us who God is and what he loves, and to teach us to love those things as well.

Look at the songs we’ve sung recently at church. Can we find scripture references for the lyrics? Is this scripture a complete passage or thought, or just a series of emotive phrases?

God's word gives us a framework for our praise, but more importantly, it is where we see and learn the unending worth and praiseworthiness of our Triune God.

We do not praise in a vacuum.
The reason and content of our praise is a reaction to God’s revelation of Himself.

-Bob Kauflin

The Expression and Formation of Our Love

4/28/2015

"Worship is not only something coming out of us through expression,
it is also something being formed into us.
There is an expectation in the Bible that we need to be formed
into a people who can worship."

This quote comes from the worship curriculum which we used in my Sunday School class on music and worship. It was created by Issac Wardell , the Director of Worship Arts at Trinity Presbyterian in Charlottesville, VA and director of Bifrost Arts. The quote gets to the heart of some of our misconceptions about corporate worship. It is easy to think that everything before the sermon (often mis-labelled itself as "the worship") is only about our expression to God, our offering of praise and adoration. It is easy to reduce our categories to the singing time and the teaching time, but corporate worship should be so much more.

We teach our children to say thank you, often with great difficulty. Yet, our hope is that with each repetition their inclination toward gratitude and an awareness of others is growing. Through the work of the Holy Spirit they grow more appreciative and may say "thank you" without prompting. They may even eventually mean it!

Similarly, our sense of our gospel identity is informed by our corporate practices. God calls us to worship and we are reminded that we would not be seeking him apart from his initiating love. We confess our sins and are reassured of forgiveness through Jesus, reminding us that the life of the believer is one of perpetual gospel repentance. We are quick to forget and quick to turn away, but the Lord pursues us relentlessly.

The act of reading, singing, praying, and hearing together is a transforming practice. Will our prayers, confessions, readings, and singing always be heartfelt? Absolutely not. But we do know "that he who began a good work in [us] will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ (Philippians 1:6).

“Over time, cultivating the formative aspect of worship will cultivate in us patience and trust in the Holy Spirit’s work. It will free us from frustration and despair when we find that worship is not a rapturous emotional experience every single week. Instead, we can declare together, “God was present, I heard his word, and I know that he is at work in me.” This is not an affective experience on one given Sunday; it is a lifetime of Sundays.”

Seven Words from the Cross

3/25/2015

April 3 at 7:00 PM - Trinity Presbyterian Church, Asheville

Featuring:
Trinity’s Adult Choir
Soloists: Jennifer Aitken, soprano and Timothy Wilds, baritone
Violin: Mariya Potapova, Paul Stroebel Viola: Stephanie Quinn Cello: Franklin Keel
Piano: Vance Reese Reader: Danielle Teague
Pastor: Duane Davis Director: Anthony Moore

The Seven Last Words from the Cross are seven expressions of Jesus during his crucifixion, gathered from the four Gospels. These seven sayings have been widely used in Good Friday worship services since the 16th century and have set to music by many composers including, but not limited to: Lassus, Pergolesi, Haydn, Gounod, Franck, Dubois, Gubaidulina, and Macmillan.

As I was considering a new musical setting of our Lord’s dying words, I was drawn to another scriptural list of Jesus’ sayings from the beginning of his earthly ministry – the Beatitudes. The Beatitudes are proclamations from the Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew. Each is a declaration of blessing, without a narrative context, that forms a major biblical theme. These blessings have a gospel logic that is contrary to earthly wisdom: the poor in spirit and the meek, not the strong and powerful will have the kingdom of God and inherit the earth.

When I began to contemplate the seven words and the beatitudes together, I noticed many similar themes. Jesus said that those who hunger and thirst for righteousness will be blessed, but on the cross he thirsts in agony as the only true righteous man. He promised that those who are merciful shall receive mercy, but he receives his Father’s wrath against our sin even as he implores his Father to forgive those crucifying him. For our sake [God] made [Jesus] to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

I have used a chiastic structure for the music. A chiasm is a literary device in which a sequence of ideas is presented and then repeated in reverse order. The result is a “mirror” effect as the ideas are “reflected” back in a passage. The term chiasm comes from the Greek letter chi, which looks like our letter X. This structure is found often in the Bible, especially in the Psalms and Old Testament as well as the music of J. S. Bach.

There is even a mirroring of Jesus’s relationship with his Father in the structure of the seven words. In one and seven Jesus addresses God as his Father (“Father, forgive them” and “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit”) but in word four the relationship is broken and Jesus, forsaken on the cross, cries out to him as “my God.”

Jesus secures for us the very blessings and benefits he is denied on the cross.

Think on these things

3/6/2015

This is an excellent, yet brief discussion among D. A. Carson, Matt Boswell and Keith Getty on the nature of the songs we sing in worship and their impact upon us. I particularly appreciate Keith's point about songs not merely being a vehicle for orthodox theology, but a work of poetry, beauty, and excellence. Theological precision is merely the starting point. The offerings of songs and lyrics must be honorable, lovely, and commendable as works of art.

Principle vs. Preference

2/25/2015

One of the primary emphases in worship and music Sunday School class has been to distinguish between principles and preferences. Many battles over worship have been fought over critical aspects of our faith, but many in recent history have been waged over preferences, stylistic concerns, and music.

Scripture offers us very little about the specifics of our corporate gatherings. We know that early believers "devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers" (Acts 2:42). But how should we teach? What does the fellowship look like? Was the breaking of bread a full meal, a symbolic remembrance of Jesus' death or some conceptual combination of both? Principles are guiding concepts that come from the overall teaching of Scripture. These principles will have multiple expressions depending on the time in history and cultural location.

Saying that worship songs should be based on the language and themes of Scripture is a principle, but saying that worship songs should always utilize an organ, band, or synthesizer is a preference. Universal principles should be applicable in all points and locations in history - from the house church risking persecution to the cathedral or from the first century church to the twenty-first century church.

Continuous Outpouring

2/19/2015

There have been an astonishing number of good books on worship written in the last 15 years, but if I have to choose a favorite it would be Harold Best's Unceasing Worship: Biblical Perspectives on Worship and the Arts. His work is the most comprehensive and holistic approach to worship I have seen.

The core of the book is Best's concept of “continuous outpouring.” Best states that if from eternity the triune God “cannot but give of himself, reveal himself, pour himself out,” and if humans were created in God's image, then humans also bear his image as outpourers. We began to pour ourselves out towards God from the instant of our creation. We were not created to worship, implying God needed to be worshiped. We were not created for worship, with that being one element which can be separated. We were “created continuously outpouring”… and all that we “pour out” is intended as worship. Worship is “human outpouring” in response to the divine “outpouring of lordship” (p. 24).

While worship before the Fall consisted of mutual outpouring between God and imago Dei, Best stresses that the Fall did not end worship or continuous outpouring. When Adam and Eve fell, “Our outpouring was falsified. But it continued, with one telling difference: we exchanged gods” (p. 25). This is the heart of idolatry and why it is at the root of all sins. When we sin, we do not cease to worship, our worship changes direction - from the Creator to something created.

God and Sinners Reconciled

12/18/2014

Christmas Hymns have some of the richest theology you can find in congregational song. Perhaps it is because it is hard to sing about the incarnation without going on to explain Jesus' full ministry and reason for coming in the first place.

Think about "What Child is This." Verse one describes the angels, the shepherds, and new mother Mary. Verse two gets to the heart of Jesus' suffering work: Nails, Spear shall pierce him through; the cross be borne for me for you.

Charles Wesley, one of the most significant contributors to protestant hymnody and sung theology, has a number of his 6,000+ hymns in hymnals across denominational lines. His text Hark! The Herald Angels Sing, combined with Mendelssohn's majestic musical setting, is one of my all-time favorite Christmas hymns. It wasn't until a few years ago that I discovered two other verses which are not typically included in hymnals:

Come, Desire of nations, come,
Fix in us Thy humble home;
Rise, the woman’s conqu’ring Seed,
Bruise in us the serpent’s head.
Now display Thy saving power,
Ruined nature now restore;
Now in mystic union join
Thine to ours, and ours to Thine.
Hark! the herald angels sing,
“Glory to the newborn King.”

Adam’s likeness, Lord, efface,
Stamp Thine image in its place:
Second Adam from above,
Reinstate us in Thy love.
Let us Thee, though lost, regain,
Thee, the Life, the inner man:
O, to all Thyself impart,
Formed in each believing heart.
Hark! the herald angels sing,
“Glory to the newborn King.”

I have our church sing these extra verses at least one Sunday in Advent. The scriptural allusions show us that God's plan of redemption first promised to Eve in Genesis is fulfilled in the work of the second Adam (Jesus).

Glory to the newborn King!

What is worship?

12/13/2014

Worship of the living and true God is essentially an engagement with him on the terms that he proposes and in the way that he alone makes possible.
-David Peterson

To worship God ‘in spirit and in truth’ is first and foremost a way of saying that we must worship God by means of Christ. In him the reality has dawned and the shadows are being swept away (Hebrews 8:13). Christian worship is new covenant worship; it is gospel-inspired worship;
it is Christ-centered worship; it is cross-focused worship.
-D. A. Carson

Worship is what we were created for. This is the final end of all existence-the worship of God. God created the universe so that it would display the worth of His glory. And He created us so that we would see this glory and reflect it by knowing and loving it-with all our heart and soul and mind and strength.
-John Piper

Worship is the believer’s response of all that they are – mind, emotions, will, body – to what God is and says and does.
-Warren Wiersbe

…acknowledging that someone or something else is greater – worth more – and by consequence, to be obeyed, feared, and adored… Worship is the sign that in giving myself completely to someone or something, I want to be mastered by it.
-Harold Best

Worship is the submission of all our nature to God.
It is the quickening of conscience by His holiness; the nourishment of mind with His truth;
the purifying of imagination by His Beauty; the opening of the heart to His love;
the surrender of will to His purpose – and all of this gathered up in adoration,
the most selfless emotion of which our nature is capable and therefore the chief remedy for that self-centeredness which is our original sin and the source of all actual sin.
-William Temple

Worship is the continuous outpouring of all that I am,
all that I do and all that I can ever become
in light of a chosen or choosing god.
-Harold Best

Advent 2014

12/9/2014

Each year at Trinity we produce an Advent devotional to help focus our thoughts and worship during a very busy and often overwhelming season. It follows our Advent sermons series and explores many prophetic and narrative passages about the birth of Jesus.

I am especially thankful for Trinity folks who contribute their writing talents and perspectives to the project. May you be encouraged during this Advent season.

It's never too late to start!

Advent Devotional 2014