Objectives:

  • Demonstrate the need and necessity of preaching in our understanding of congregational worship.
  • Examine the difference between worship in all of life and corporate worship
  • Explain that everyone worships something. 

I. How Do We Glorify God?  — Honoring Him

  1.  We glorify God by ascribing to him the honor and adoration due to him because of his excellence.
  2. Psalm 29: “give to the Lord the glory due his name”
  3. All true religion begins with reverence. Reverence is due to God because he is great and because he is gracious.  — Dr. Robert Rayburn

II. How Do We Glorify God?  — Reflecting His Glory

  1. In worship, we are trying to reflect the glory of God to others
  2. Declaring with our lips and our lives that God is more important than anything else in the world to us
      1. Martyrs declare with their last breath that God is more important than their own lives. This is an act of worship.
      2. Giglio: “The simplest definition I can give is this: worship is our response to what we value most. Worship is something we all do.”

III. How Do We Glorify God?  — By Valuing Him the Most

  1. Everyone worships; most people are just worshiping the wrong thing in the wrong way.
  2. Worship is, in essence, declaring what we value most; we can do this with our lives and with our lips.
  3. Worship fuels our actions. It becomes a driving force in all that we do.

IV. How Do We Glorify God?  — By Desiring Him Most

  1. Everybody has an altar and every altar has a throne.
  2. Follow the trail of your time, your affection, your energy, your allegiance, and at the end you will find the throne of what you worship.

V. How Do We Glorify God?  — By The Preaching/Sitting Under the Preaching of His Word

  1. The pinnacle of the worship service is preaching.
      1. The one thing we want in life is communion with God
      2. God discloses himself to us through his Word
      3. The preaching of the Word is God’s message being delivered to us.
  2. If we don’t think that preaching is part of worship, we miss the whole point.
  3. “In preaching the Word of God delivers through the preacher to the congregation an applicatory word about God and godliness.”  — J.I. Packer
  4. How did God create the world? He spoke, and it was so.

VI. How Do We Worship?  — By Not Confusing the Experience with Worship

  1. Our experience of music is not the only or most important part of worship.
    1. The confusion between worship and experience is one of the biggest confusions in the evangelical Protestant world today.
  2. The Holy Spirit is the only one who can generate a holy experience during worship
    1. The only way to engender this experience is through the Word by which the Spirit works
  3. True worship can come with lots of ranges of experiential responses
  4. Your worship services need to accommodate the whole range of Christian experience

VII. How Do We Worship?  — Understand the Why Behind Our Practices

  1. One of the first things you should do when planting a church is a series on why we worship the way we worship
  2. Congregants need to be taught the why behind their worship practices
  3. The purpose of music is to serve in worship, not to drive worship

 

Dr. J. Ligon Duncan III

Ligon Duncan (MDiv, Covenant Theological Seminary; PhD, University of Edinburgh) is the Chancellor & CEO of Reformed Theological Seminary, the John E. Richards Professor of Systematic and Historical Theology, and the President of RTS Jackson. He has authored, co-authored, edited, or contributed to numerous books. You can follow him on Twitter.