Most American Christians today do not understand how listening to an hour of preaching can be an act of worship. This is because we tend to regard worship as something inherently emotional. Worship, we believe, is something that we feel. We like to be "lifted up to the Lord" in worship, which seems to require a heavy emphasis on songs. "Good worship" is worship that moves us, touches our heart, and causes us to sway a little. Because we equate praise and worship with emotions, we tend to think of our standard Lord's Day morning worship services as containing two distinct parts: the "praise and worship" part (which consists primarily of singing and perhaps public testimonies), and the teaching or lesson part (which consists of the pastor's morning sermon). We see the sermon as a wholly intellectual and didactic event (read: it doesn't move us emotionally), so we think that the worship stops when the preaching begins. I get blank looks from otherwise energetic Christians when I speak of "worshiping while one listens to the Word being proclaimed" or "preaching as an act of worship for preacher and listener" or "meeting God in the preached Word."
What is the problem? In addition to placing too much importance upon emotions, we American Christians suffer from a sub-biblical view of preaching. But this may be because-in spite of all our affirmations and orthodox statements of faith-we have a sub-biblical view of the Word of God itself.
We can (and should) say many good things about the Word of God: it is infallible, it is inerrant, it is God-breathed, it is useful, it is relevant, it is the final authority in matters of faith and practice. But we should add one other thing, something our Protestant forefathers emphasized but we have forgotten: the Word of God mediates the presence of God to us. In other words, God does not normally speak to his people today through dreams or Isaiah-like prophets. He speaks through his Word. This means that if I wish to hear God's voice and enjoy his presence, I need to sit before his Word. To put it another way, we meet God in his Word. The Holy Scriptures not only teach us, exhort us, and correct us (although they do all these things), God's Word is also the normal medium through which we encounter God himself and receive from him.
This is one of the many ways in which the Bible differs from other books. One example will suffice. A good history book will communicate the facts about Abraham Lincoln to me. An extremely skillful history book may do such a good job of explaining Abraham Lincoln that I can have some understanding of the former president's motives, personality, and demeanor. But in the end, I can only encounter facts about Abraham Lincoln; I cannot encounter Abraham Lincoln himself. This means that my history book is only (or at best) didactic: it teaches me. The Bible is quite different, however. To be sure, the Scriptures teach us many facts about God, his truth, and his ways among men. A careful reading of the sacred Word enables us to understand in part God's character, his attributes, and his motives. In this sense, the Bible (like many other books) is didactic: it teaches me. But the Bible is much more. A prayerful and reverential reading of its pages allows one to encounter the living God himself! We do not only meet with facts about God; we meet with God himself.
This is what we mean when we say that the Word of God mediates the presence of God to us. Where am I most likely to commune with God intimately? When can I most expect God to supply his grace and usher me into his presence? When the Word of God is set before me richly, carefully, clearly, and redemptively. We reveal a sub-biblical understanding of the Word of God when we deny (whether in theory or practice) that the Word mediates God's presence to us.
Few American Christians today believe that the Word of God mediates the presence of God. Ask the average American Christian when (or where) she is most likely to commune with God intimately, and she will respond, "When I'm singing." This is why we use the phrase "praise and worship services" to describe a meeting where we do nothing but sing. In other words, we use songs to mediate the presence of God. Although we would never admit it, we secretly believe that hymns, contemporary Christian songs, and praise choruses are more powerful than the Holy Scriptures.
And this is precisely why we do not regard listening to a sermon as the high point of our worship. We no longer know how to meet God in his Word. Truth be known, we do not come to the preaching hour expecting to meet God; we only expect to hear a lesson. In other words, we are rationalists who see the proclamation of the Word of God as an exclusively didactic and intellectual process. It is during the singing and testimony time that our emotions are aroused and "real praise and worship" occurs.
Our Protestant forefathers would be shocked by our emotionalism, quasi-mysticism, and Roman Catholic mentality. The medieval Roman Catholic Church provided the ultimate in sensory religious experience that was not based upon the Word of God. Catholic masses were nothing if not regal, mysterious, moving, and sacral (as in "creating a sense of the sacred"). They also ordinarily gave no place to the vernacular preaching of the Word of God. In the medieval Roman Catholic Church, atmosphere and ritual were used to excite the emotions and give the people a religious experience. From the beginning, Protestants rejected this approach to "praise and worship." In contrast, Protestants affirmed that the Scriptures-not the medieval mass, which even Rome's critics conceded was a moving religious experience-mediated the presence of God. Protestants made the proclamation of the Word of God (and, specifically, the sermon) the primary focus of the Christian meeting. They went so far as to call the Word of God "a means of grace," or one of the two objective channels (the other being the Sacraments) instituted by God wherein he ordinarily binds himself in the communication of his grace. For our Protestant ancestors, preaching was not a "teaching time" that followed the worship portion of the service. Nor was it a mere "lesson" that engaged the mind while singing engaged the heart. Preaching was the time when Christians were most likely to commune with God.
I understand that the appeal for Word-based worship, or worship that is centered upon the preaching and hearing of the Word of God, may sound strange just as we are beginning to abandon it in favor of more "exciting" methods. But Word-based worship was commonplace among our Protestant forefathers. Protestants of all stripes understood that the guidelines for a biblical and profitable worship service could be reduced to one phrase: Word and Sacrament. For centuries, Christians have met with their God in the written Word (as set forth in the sermon) and in the living Word (as set forth in the Lord's Supper service). We may be the first generation of Christians to think that we can have a praise and worship service without the presence of either the preached Word or the communion table.
Why do most American Christians assume that preaching is not the primary means for praising and worshiping God? Two reasons.
First, many preachers do a bad job of preaching. In particular, so many of our sermons have emphasized morals, ethics, and lifestyle choices without situating those issues within a redemptive context that we have made it almost impossible for Christians to worship while listening to the Word. We emphasize Christian behavior to the exclusion of the person of Christ. When we do not hear the Triune God set forth in the sermon in a meaningful way, it is extraordinarily difficult to worship. (One brother tells me he now understands why his church practices exclusive psalmody: due to the steady diet of moralistic and exemplaristic preaching, psalm singing is sometimes the only time when the flock hears redemptive themes.) How do we raise our eyes to heaven to worship our salvation-giving God when the sermon outline goes like this:
I. Ahab's Major Flaw
II. Are You Like Ahab?
III. Don't Be Like Ahab
In other words, moralistic and exemplaristic sermons-which cause us to look exclusively at ourselves and ask, "How am I doing?"-are not conducive to worship. After hearing years and years of nonredemptive sermons, our churchgoers are trained to regard sermons as morality lessons only. They think the function of the sermon is to exhort in moral behavior and provide encouragement. Most churchgoers have never been asked to see Christ in a sermon, so they do not expect to do so and do not know how to do so.
On the other hand, theocentric, Christocentric, and redemptive sermons are conducive to worship. These sermons cause us to look heavenward and see the God who redeemed us. By setting forth these themes, these sermons do mediate the presence of God to us. We see Christ by faith as he is preached ("faith comes by hearing…"). We consider and exult in our God as he is set forth in a sermon.
There is a second reason American Christians today are strangers to Word-based worship. Listeners often do a bad job of listening. We Americans have been so dumbed-down by an often shoddy public education system, sound-bite political campaigns, half-hour sitcoms, video games, and our addiction to entertainment that we find it difficult to listen to a sixty-minute-long sermon. To make matters worse, we are so historically ignorant that we do not realize how spiritually immature we are! Most American Christians today regard a sixty-minute sermon as criminally long, which means that Charles Haddon Spurgeon, George Whitefield, John Calvin, Jonathan Edwards, and most Puritan pastors would have been pulpit failures by contemporary American standards. The point, however, is that we are unable to listen skillfully and profitably. I suspect that many of us simply do not like to listen. Good listening requires good thinking, which is a chore.
But a major part of the problem with our listening, I suspect, is that we do not come to sermons expecting to see God. We do not listen expecting to hear redemptive truth. And we do not approach the preaching hour expecting the Word of God to mediate God's presence. Indeed, experiencing God's presence is often the farthest thing from our minds when we settle in to listen to a sermon; instead, we expect to experience a morality lesson or a duty pressed upon us. This is why we groan impatiently (but inaudibly, of course) when the preacher has spoken for fifty minutes and then says, "And now let us consider my last point." Our groan is proof that we do not expect that last point to be something that shows us the Savior, or something that opens up the glory of God for us. Who would groan impatiently if he expected to see God more clearly?
Lest I be misunderstood, I should conclude by affirming that I favor Christian meetings where praise and worship abounds. It is biblical to include singing in such a service, and I would certainly want to include singing in my Lord's Day gatherings. But hymns and songs are effective only insofar as they proclaim the Word of God, and a hymn or song (at best) only scratches the surface of biblical exposition. We deny the extraordinary power of the Word of God when we assume that hymns and praise choruses are the best facilitators of genuine worship. I also favor Christian meetings where worshipers' emotions are involved. Of course sitting in the presence of the Holy One of Israel is "emotional"! Of course seeing Christ and exalting him reaches down to the worshipers' emotions! But we do not pursue emotions for their own sake or because it is enjoyable to get "pumped up," as if we were in a high school pep rally. We pursue God in spirit and in truth; we pursue God as he speaks in his Word.
Do you want a real praise and worship service? Do you wish to commune with God intimately? Do you wish to handle spiritual realities and taste heavenly food? Then find a good Christ-centered preacher, tell him to preach meaty sermons that present redemptive truth, prepare to listen, and expect to feast. Good Bible exposition is not merely talk about God; it is God's talk. Good preaching is not merely correct proclamation of the truth; it is God himself proclaiming his Truth in his own words. If hearing God speak in his Word does not elicit true praise and worship from us, then we have a problem that requires a solution much greater than a Sunday night singing service
