Worship is a party - New Hope Christian Fellowship of Shepherdsville, KY

Jesus answered, "Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, 14but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life." 15The woman said to him, "Sir, give me this water so that I won't get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water." 16He told her, "Go, call your husband and come back." 17"I have no husband," she replied. Jesus said to her, "You are right when you say you have no husband. 18The fact is, you have had five husbands, and the man you now have is not your husband. What you have just said is quite true." 19"Sir," the woman said, "I can see that you are a prophet. 20Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem."

21Jesus declared, "Believe me, woman, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. 22You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews 23Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. 24God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth."

Occasionally I will hear someone refer to a church’s music and worship style as “like a rock concert.” Now I am sure that you are aware that they do not mean this as a compliment. In using this phraseology they are trying to imply that the driving force, the pervasive instrumentation, and the high decibel level make it more like a rock concert than it is like what they think church should be. Of course the underlying idea is that the music reveals the entire service to be “secular”

Without getting into a long discussion about secular verses sacred, let’s talk about what does happen at a rock concert. Last year a friend of mine graciously bought me a ticket to the Van Halen concert at the AA center. Being a sucker for “hair metal” and an inescapable fascination with reliving the 80’s (and what really is the 80’s without Van Halen’s “1984”), I was energized by the idea. It is amazing what people will pay to attend a rock concert…probably more than they would pay to attend your typical church service…but let’s move on, that is not the point.

In addition to discovering that the mullet and sleeveless denim shirts have not fully disappeared from the scene, I made another very interesting observation. People were worshipping. Everyone stood. Most sang. Many raised their hands. Eyes were closed and people seemed to be basking in the moment. It was true worship. That’s right – the people around me were worshipping. The problem was not the expression of the worship, it was the object of their worship. If I made a video of the people around me and put Christian music all around it you would have thought these people really loved God. It wasn’t phony – it was just misdirected.

When it comes to worship environments it can be easy to confuse the issue. The real issue is not the location or administration of the worship “event” but rather the object of our ongoing worship. Most get trapped arguing about song selection, music volume, preferred instrumentation, how long we should stand, and in the case of the woman quoted above, which mountain is better for a truly legitimate worship encounter. It is almost like we have missed the point entirely. When the woman at the well was confronted with her sin she attempted to divert the conversation by turning it into a discussion about worship geography. There was an ongoing debate between the Jews and Samaritan’s about where REAL worship should occur and she attempted to use that to deflect the attention from the REAL issue – how would she respond to this revelation of the Christ. What she (read: “we”) fail to realize is that worship is not an event but a true spirit led response to the almighty God. At the heart of the matter is a question: How will you respond to Christ? Worship cannot be reduced to a place, a formula, or a style – we worship on a spiritual level and the ONLY legitimate object of that worship is the person of Christ (John clearly identifies “the truth” with Christ – see - John 1:14 and 14:6). So before you spend a great deal of effort trying to legitimize your own personal preferences, let’s make sure we don’t ignore the real issue. Worship is His party.