Berean cogitations

Sunday, March 11, 2007

RC Sproul on worship

I came across the following quote today from RC Sproul, in which he addressed the topic of worship in church:

If people find worship boring and irrelevant, it can only mean they have no sense of the presence of God in it. When we study the action of worship in Scripture and the testimony of church history, we discover a variety of human responses to the sense of the presence of God. Some people tremble in terror, falling with their face to the ground; others weep in mourning; some are exuberant in joy; still others are reduced to a pensive silence. However the reactions may differ among human beings to the holiness of God, one thing I never ever find in scripture is someone who is bored in the presence of God, or someone who walks away from an encounter with the living God and says "that was irrelevant."

There is no encounter a human being could ever have that is more relevant to daily life than meeting up with the living God. ... You were not created to be bored by the glory of God, you have to be spiritually dead to be bored by the glory of God.

I think those words are worth heeding whenever we feel tempted to "jazz up" our worship for the sake of capturing the attention of the "audience."

Have you ever noticed that people typically find another family's home videos to be boring? Ever wonder why? It's because we don't have a deep personal investment in that family's life. In the same way, when we don't have a deep personal investment in the presence of God, then we will tend to find worship boring unless it is jazzed up with glitz and aplomb.

Mind you, I'm not saying that worship has to be dull and mechanical. Not in the least. Rather, I'm addressing the claim that worship has to be made entertaining to keep someone's attention. Rather, our duty is to set a proper example in worship -- to be God-focused and reverent, while simultaneously expressing our joy. Our goal should be to teach people what worship is all about, rather than buckling under and giving people what they want.