When we truly love our spouse, or our child, or our friend, such love isn't simply a declaration of loyalty (although it is that). Real love fleshes itself out in embodied activity: showering them with praise, telling and showing them we care, treating them well, honoring them in conversation with others.
The church calendar gets quite full this time of year, filled with opportunities not only for us to practically express love for our neighbor but, more fundamentally, love for our God. But this same opportunity can feel confusing or intimidating. So, the first question I want to reflect on together as we begin this Advent season is, "What does God enable us to do by his Spirit to faithfully show forth, to him and to the world, our great love for him?" We'll focus on how the Ten Commandments show us love for God fleshed out as worship. After that, we'll explore not just how but why we worship.
How Do We Worship?
Jesus teaches us that all the law of God is summarized in love for God and love for neighbor (Matt. 22:40). This twofold love corresponds perfectly to the two "tables" of the Ten Commandments. In the fifth through tenth of the commandments, we're taught to honor our parents and other authorities, defend human life, uphold marriage, tell the truth, protect others' rights, and to be content with what God has provided for us. In other words, loving your neighbor will never look like murdering him, or betraying her trust, or stealing from him, or lying to her, or envying his success.
These are practical commands, laws of true love. The first table of the Ten Commandments works the same way, but focuses on our primary love: the worship of God alone. Martin Luther famously said, "God doesn't need your good works, but your neighbor does."[See Wingren, Luther on Vocation, 10.] What does loving God look like when he doesn't need anything from us? The first four commandments teach us that love for God looks like devoted worship.
Thou shalt have no other Gods before me.
While we all admit to believing in only one true God, we know that in our day to day lives, our god can be anyone or anything we look to for our ultimate good or meaning, anything we flee to for assurance in times of distress. The Lord and the Lord alone is the fountain of life (Psalm 36:9, Proverbs 10:11, Jeremiah 2:13, John 4:14, 7:38, Revelation 21:6). It is upon him that we're meant to place our hopes and affections, to find our joys and comforts. And it is the Lord of hosts that we are meant to run to to be our mighty fortress, our rock, our stronghold (Psalm 18:2, 46:11, 62:2, 89:26, 95:1). We worship as a declaration that he is our God and we are the people of his pasture (Ps. 95:7).
Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image.
It is the default position of mankind to want to worship with our eyes. Our affections and delights follow our eyes. Eve heard the Serpent questioning God’s word, but it wasn’t until she “saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom,” (Gen. 3:6) that she took it and ate and sinned. Throughout history, people have beheld the wonders of nature all around us, attributing to them all kinds of meaning, symbolism, and even divine status. But God is invisible. “No one has ever seen God… (John 1:18).” God is not part of creation and cannot be symbolized or analogized directly by anything within creation. And yet, God relates to us. How? By his word. All creation testifies to the character of its Creator. The Christian is one who listens to the voice of the Lord while longing to see his face (Psalm 27:4). In heaven, we will attain the “beatific vision” of seeing the Lord, of beholding his glory and beauty (1 Cor. 13:12, Rev. 22:4). But in our pilgrimage on earth, we're like the Bride in the Song of Songs. While she waits for her Bridegroom to come to her in person again, she clings to his words: “My Beloved spoke and said to me…” (Songs 2:10).
Christian worship focuses mainly on the ears. We hear, read, proclaim, sing, and pray the word of God. We do so not to simply find new tidbits or things to apply to our lives, but to find God himself dwelling within his word, the place where he has promised to be found. Christian worship isn't meant to be an eye-popping spectacle. (This is why more and more the ornamentation at my church, Holy Cross, is relatively simple and restrained.) Worship is a sacred time and place where the main point is to dwell on the words being spoken to us because they are the very word of God. Even the sacraments are, as Calvin said, a visible and tangible word. We express our love for God by listening to his voice, putting our faith in him and him alone, and responding to him in prayer and song.
Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.
What does it mean to take God’s name in vain? And what does that have to do with our worship? If you’re like me you might have grown up thinking that this basically was an admonition against profanity. Remember the scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade when Indiana mumbles to himself, “Jesus Christ.” Sean Connery, his aging father, immediately slaps him and says, “That’s for blasphemy.” (Click here if you need to relive it, but don’t leave the newsletter and go watch the whole movie just yet!)
And there is certainly an aspect of the third commandment that is focused on not using the Lord’s name as a common phrase we say when we are angry, annoyed, hurt, or disgusted. But this leads us towards a deeper understanding of this commandment. Whenever God prohibits something in the Ten Commandments he is also commanding its opposite. For instance, when God prohibits murder, he is also positively commanding that we must strive for the good and flourishing of the lives of our neighbors. When God prohibits adultery he commends marriage and requires us to honor the institution of marriage and treat it with dignity and respect.
The same is true for the third commandment: to keep this commandment means to not use the Lord’s name in a vain way, an empty way, and it means that we ought to hallow and honor the name of the Lord. We are both prohibited from dishonoring the name of the Lord and commanded to honor it and hallow it. And now we can see the fairly obvious connection to our worship.
Christian worship is an act of love between God and man, it is not primarily visual or experiential but steeped in Scripture, God’s written revelation to humanity. Why? Because it is within Scripture where God has revealed to us his name that we might hallow it. God must reveal himself to us if we're to know him rightly. God is transcendent, holy, ineffable, incomprehensible, and therefore we cannot presume to worship him however we think we should.
A name is a big deal, it is one of the first acts of self-disclosure you can commit to with another person. “Hi, my name is Jared.” This sentence begins an entire relationship. I have invited you to know me in a way you couldn’t have before. Even if you already knew my name, me revealing my name to you invites you to address me by my name, to be in relationship with me.
God’s name is similar. He has revealed his name to us that we might call upon him, not as a distant and unknown God but as a close and intimate God, our God. In Scripture, the name of the Lord is directly linked to salvation. Proverbs 18:10 says, “the name of the Lord is a strong tower, the righteous run to it and are safe.” St. Paul, in Romans 10:13, states “whoever calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.” The name of the Lord is also meant to be praised and worshipped. We are called to sing of the name of the Lord (Ps. 9:1-2), the Lord’s name shall be praised from the rising of the sun to its setting (Ps. 113:2-3). The Lord’s name is also evidence of God’s blessing and presence with his people. When the Lord first tells Aaron to bless the people, using the famous “Aaronic Blessing” (The LORD bless you and keep you, the LORD make his face to shine upon you…) he says that “So they will put my name on the Israelites, and I will bless them.” (Num. 6:27). God’s name is also his presence with his people (2 Chron. 20:9).
Christian worship is God's revelation of his name to his people and our trusting, hallowing, worshipping, and praying to his name—and all it represents—in response.
This means that, while God is incomprehensible and mysterious, Christian worship is actually not us leaning into an experience of the unknown and mysterious. Rather it’s just the opposite: the unknown and mysterious has been made known by revealing himself. So while his ways are still above our ways, and we don’t fully comprehend him, we can truly know him and trust that our knowledge of him is trustworthy.
Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.
Finally in our exploration of how we worship, the fourth commandment teaches us that God calls us to set aside a day each week to worship him, to rest from our labors, and to renew our trust in him.
Of all the Ten Commandments, there might not be a commandment that is more neglected than this one these days. For all the sexual promiscuity, lying, anger, and coveting that we see in society today, I doubt many are feeling particularly guilty about NOT going to church on Sunday. However, there it remains: the sabbath-keeping commandment that comes before first-degree murder, adultery, perjury, grand larceny, and greed.
This is actually the complete reverse in the Bible. It was the Sabbath that the Israelite was commanded to honor and revere, to keep it sacred and set apart from other days. This was in the midst of an agrarian society where there was no “weekend,” the work that was needed to be done was never ending. And yet God commanded his people to stop working one day a week and worship him. Which meant that they had to leave work where it was and go and find their true identity in their relationship with the Lord.
The sabbath commandment, while it looks different for Christians (for instance, we worship on the Lord’s Day, Sunday, the day that Christ rose from the grave; the transition from Saturday sabbath to Sunday worship happened fairly quickly in the beginning of Christianity, but I can’t go into that now, it would require much more writing than I’m willing to do here…) is still in effect for Christians. It looks different, we don’t have the same Sabbath laws that the Israelites had, but nevertheless we are still called to worship the Lord on a given day (not a given day of our choice but of the Lord’s).
As Christians, we ought to hallow the Lord’s Day and keep it sacred. We ought to have it set apart for our rest and pursuing the things of the Lord: worship, reading the Scriptures, prayer, service to our neighbor. These are the things that help us to remember that our salvation is not in the activities we engage in Monday through Saturday, although we are tempted to believe they will save us. Rather, our salvation is in the Lord and his name alone.
Secondly, the Lord’s Day being honored is a day in which the Body of Christ gathers together. We need one another and we need to hear that there are others who still believe in Christ despite the chaos we experience in the world. Our mutual fellowship is helpful to our faith, you cannot do Christianity on your own! As we’ll read in the Epistle reading this week, the Letter to the Hebrews specifically commands us: “And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds, not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another” (Heb. 10:24-25). God commands us to gather together for our mutual encouragement and to spur one another towards love and good works.
Lastly, the Lord’s Day is a foretaste of the heavenly rest that we will experience in eternity with God. It is God’s people, gathered together to worship him and proclaim his name, hearing his word, and enjoying communion and fellowship with God and each other. It’s a picture of what God’s throne room looks like right now, and also what it will be like “when we all get to heaven” as the old hymn says.
Why Do We Worship?
When I first came to my church, Holy Cross, one of the mottos I heard a lot was, “We Worship and Serve.” What a great image of a church! A church, fundamentally, is a place in which the law that we proclaim every week in our liturgy—to love God and love our neighbor as ourselves—is being worked out in the lives of the believers who call the church home.
This obedience is beautiful, but it isn't something that comes from the law itself. The good news of the gospel proclaims God’s great love for sinners who have broken his law, yet by his mercy are brought into perfect relationship with him through the saving work of his Son and empowered and indwelled with his Spirit as he “works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure” (Phil. 2:13). How we worship must flow from why we worship, because the law of love is only motivated by the gospel of grace.
Love is a gift we can't earn for ourselves. It comes from God alone. But it is something we, by his grace, can give in return.
We love the Lord by worshiping him, and we love him because he first loved us in Jesus. We worship him by receiving his word (both audible and tangible), praising his name, mutually encouraging one another, and serving our fellow Christians. Our worship is a practical act of true love, but always in response to the ultimate act of love wherein God sent his Son into the world to redeem us, to die for our sins, and to restore us to relationship with our Father. That is what love looks like truly fleshed out—or rather, Love truly enfleshed in the Son born of the Virgin, the Savior alone who is worthy of our worship this Advent season and always.
