A few months ago I began a series of articles that would help explain our worship services at Providence Reformed Presbyterian

Part I

The Divine Service of

Covenant Renewal

The first foundation of righteousness is undoubtedly the worship of God.

— John Calvin

There is a great deal of confusion today about the meaning and practice of Christian worship. Why does the church come together on Sunday? What is the purpose of a church service? What is supposed to happen? What part does the congregation have in the service?

One way to answer these questions would be to compose a list of the various activities that we typically engage in during the Sunday meeting. We assemble together, sit, meditate, stand, hear, sing, pray, confess, praise, read, think, eat, drink, etc. Of course, with such a list we have not really answered the question: why do we do those things? To what end? For what purpose? What does all of this hearing, speaking, standing, sitting, singing, praying, eating, and drinking accomplish? At the end of the service what will have happened? What will have changed, if anything? Are we there for an emotional experience? An educational lesson? What is the point of doing all this?

Moreover, if we can ask questions about the grand, overall meaning of the service, we can also ask about the form and content of each specific activity. Why do we do these things and not others? Why do we sing some prayers and say others? Why do we stand sometimes and sit others? Why do we say these words and not others? Why do we sing these hymns and not those? Questions about the sequence of activities must also surface. Why do we do them in the order that we do them? Why does this come first and that second and this other thing third? Specific questions like these are intimately related to the question of the overall purpose of the whole assembly.

Perhaps I should make it more personal. Why do you come to church on Sunday morning? What are you hoping to do? What are you hoping to give? Or what do you anticipate receiving? What do you expect to be accomplished as a result of your being at church? Everyone comes for some reason! Do you come for the right reasons?

Why Go To Church on Sunday?

When you come together as a church. . . —1 Corinthians 11:18

Before we go any farther, then, we must answer this very foundational question: what is the purpose of our Lord’s Day assembly? Why do we come to a church service on Sunday? The answer to this crucial question will help explain why certain words and actions are included in the church’s worship and also determine the way in which the service is ordered from beginning to end.

Unfortunately, there are serious disagreements about the purpose of Sunday worship. There are at least four different popular perspectives on the purpose of the Sunday worship service.

Worship as Evangelism?

First, some feel that the purpose of the service ought to be evangelism. Many “independent” and “community” churches tend to adopt this view, although more and more Presbyterian and Reformed churches also think that outreach defines the chief purpose of the Sunday service. Accordingly, worship becomes a technique for evangelism. Too often, according to this view, results are what counts. The worship service is then evaluated based on the results obtained. At its worst, a church that adopts this posture may end up accepting whatever techniques that it judges to be effective in attracting unchurched people into the service. Churches that choose evangelistic effectiveness as the criteria by which they evaluate their services tend to look for ways to attract and entertain people, and they generally model their services after the broader cultural events (T.V. talk shows, concerts, sitcoms, etc.).

It is important to stop and note that these pop “styles” are not neutral. They embody a distinctly American, 20th century world view. Transforming the worship of the church using these cultural “styles” and the latest technological innovations in communication will affect the mindset and lifestyle of the community which submits to these popular “forms.” Form matters. Style = form. The manner in which doctrine is embodied, communicated, lived, and sung is not neutral. Form is not something entirely “indifferent” (adiaphora). The way we pray/worship is inexorably related to who we are praying to and what we believe about the one we engage in prayer and praise. Style (form) and doctrine are mutually conditioning. Or at least they ought to be. What you believe will influence how you pray, worship, and sing. And conversely, the way in which you worship will impact what you believe. I maintain that we have really not thought through this issue at all in our circles. When we say things like, “I am not concerned with the music style just the doctrine” or “musical style is merely a matter of taste, what’s really important is our confession” or “as long as you believe correctly it doesn't really matter what style of worship you choose,” I think it is frightening evidence of our sloppy theology of worship and music.

These evangelism-driven church services are very carefully engineered to produce the desired results. Ed Dobson describes the seeker church criteria for music selection:

We wanted a musical style that would elicit a response. Unchurched people come to a service hesitantly. Their mind-set is ‘you’re not going to get me.’ Their defenses are up. We felt that a style of music that would get them moving in a physical way (nodding heads and tapping feet) would help break down their defenses. This does not mean that the crowd are on their feet nodding heads and clapping; they seldom clap during a song, but they always applaud at the end (Starting a Seeker Sensitive Service: How Traditional Churches Can Reach the Unchurched [Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1993], pp. 42f.).

There you have it: “breaking down their defenses” and the crowds always “applaud at the end.” You see how marketing and emotional manipulation often play key roles in determining the shape of these services. The inside of the church may look and feel like a concert hall (with a large band and choir up front), a movie theater (where everything is projected up onto a large screen), or an auditorium (with a “stage” up front). Typically, during the service the people are relatively passive: they function less like a congregation of active worshipers and more like an audience. Generally speaking, what happens in practice in these churches is that most of the traditional forms are jettisoned, and the church unashamedly embraces the dominant and omnipresent entertainment models so prominent in American culture.

Worship as Education?

Another segment of the church believes that the Sunday service ought to be for the purpose of communicating truth. Education is the chief end of worship. Churches that have this emphasis tend to degenerate into lecture halls complete with overhead projectors and armies of note-taking members. Presbyterians and Bible churches often fall into this error. The sermon is elevated all out of proportion as the key element of worship. Education is the primary goal. Nothing else is of much importance in the service. Most of what comes before the sermon functions as “pre-game ceremonies” for the main event. People may like to sing, and singing may make them feel good, but they have not really thought through what purpose, if any, hymns and songs ought to have in the overall structure of the service—besides preparing the congregation emotionally for the sermon.

Worship as Experience?

There are others who emphasize the experience of the congregation in worship. They believe that the Sunday service ought to produce some kind of beneficial emotional response in the people. Many liberal churches fall into this category. Religion is reduced to sentimental and pious feelings. Pastors smile all the time and read poems from the pulpit to help the people feel good about themselves. For those who have embraced this philosophy of worship (a kind of liturgical Pollyanna-ism), the focus of the church is anthropological—that is, on man. I recently phoned the office of a church whose biblical orthodoxy is questionable and heard the following answering machine message: “Remember God loves you just the way you are!” Actually, God loves his people in spite of what they are, through faith in Jesus Christ. At all costs, people must leave the service feeling that they are O.K. and believing that everyone else is too. Christianity is reduced to religious sentimentalism. In modern American church services, edification is cut loose from its doctrinal moorings and is blown about by every humanistic, trendy gust of psychological and sociological silliness.

Worship as Praise?

I tried but couldn’t think of a suitable synonym for “praise” that begins with an “e”! From this perspective the purpose of worship is to gather and give praise to God. Churches that emphasize praise as the goal of worship often style their services “celebrations.” All of those passages that call believers to “ascribe” or “give to the Lord the glory due to his Name” can be marshaled in support of the truth that the corporate service is a service of praise (Psalm 29:1-2; 96:7-8). This fourth conception of worship is much closer, but still not quite adequate to express the fullness of biblical worship. Certainly there are numerous passages that exhort us to “Praise the Lord” and to “worship” him. I would caution you, however, that in many cases the word “worship” has not served us very well. It is not the most helpful translation of words used to designate “bowing down” or “prostrating oneself” (e.g. Psalm 95:6). For example, when we are called to “prostrate” ourselves before God, this does not exactly correspond with the way we use the word “worship.” To fall down before God is to allow oneself to be lifted up by him. It is to give one’s self over to the Lord’s service. In effect, falling down before God puts us in the position to be served by God. Much more, therefore, is often going on in these passages than merely ascribing “worth” or “praise” to God.

Often the giving of praise or glorifying of God is set over against the worshiper’s expectation of receiving anything from God in church. Worship is what we give to the Lord, we are told. I will examine the one-sidedness of “worship as praise” in the next section as well, but here let me say that not only is the super-spiritual-sounding assertion that “we just gather together to give praise to God taking no interest in what we might get from him” unbiblical, it may also easily slip into doxological hubris. Presbyterian pastors and theologians are particularly vulnerable to this distortion of the purpose of worship. The slogan “we gather for worship to give not to get” has become something of a Reformed shibboleth. We love to beat other evangelicals over the head with it. It makes us feel superior. As if we don’t go to church because we need anything! We Reformed Christians go to church to give God glory and honor. As I hope to show, this kind of thinking is extremely dangerous.

For us, as creatures of God, there can be no such thing as “disinterested praise.” We simply cannot love or praise God for who he is apart from what he has given us or what we continue to receive from him. We are not his equals. The notion that pure love and worship of God can only be given when it is unmixed with all thoughts of what we receive, has no biblical grounding. To be sure, it sounds very spiritual and pious. It even comes across as self-denial. In fact, however, there is no such worship in the Bible for the simple fact that we cannot approach God as disinterested, self-sufficient beings. We are created beings. Dependent creatures. Beings who must continually receive both our life and redemption from God. Our “worship” of God, for this reason, necessarily involves our passive reception of his gifts as well as our thanksgiving and petitions. We cannot pretend that we do not depend upon him. We will always be receivers and petitioners before God. Our receptive posture is as ineradicable as our nature as dependent creatures. We must be served by him. Recognizing this is true spirituality. Opening oneself up to this is the first movement in our “worship,” indeed, the presupposition of all corporate worship. It is faith’s posture before our all-sufficient, beneficent Lord. Praise follows after this and alone can never be the exclusive purpose for our gathering together on the Lord’s Day.

* * * * * * * *

Obviously, there is some truth in each of these four perspectives. A Christian service that does not proclaim the Gospel to the lost (and saved!), engage the emotions of the congregation, teach God’s word, and ascribe to God praise and honor will likely be a distorted, dangerously truncated service. All four of these opinions, however, err to the extent that they reduce the purpose of the church to one of these dimensions. Moreover, those who embrace one of the first four purposes tend to see the Sunday service as primarily a technique for producing a particular effect on the members of the congregation, either on their will, mind, or emotions. All four of these dimensions—evangelism, preaching, edification, and praise—in and of themselves are important. They each have their proper place in the worship service. But the overall purpose of a biblical worship service should not be reduced to any one of them. Moreover, the purpose (and practice) of our Lord’s Day worship service must never degenerate into an attempt to engineer or manipulate some desired effect in the congregation. Worship must not be understood as a technique. “As C. S. Lewis said, ‘The charge is feed my sheep not run experiments on my rats.’ When worship is reduced to a pep rally for the pastor’s latest crusade or to a series of acts that contain the minister’s own hidden agenda, our concern for worship is called into question” (William H. Willimon, Worship as Pastoral Care [Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1979], p. 17). Every conception and form of liturgy that focuses on man will eventually degenerate into intellectual or psychological manipulation.

The Biblical Purpose of The Divine Service

Through Christ we. . . have access by one Spirit to the Father —Ephesians 2;18

What, then, is the purpose of our Lord’s Day service? According to the Scriptures, in corporate Christian worship members of the believing congregation are engaged by the Spirit and drawn into the Father’s presence as living sacrifices in Christ. “Through Christ we. . . have access in one Spirit to the Father” (Eph. 2:18). Our reasonable liturgy, the apostle Paul says, is to offer ourselves as living sacrifices (Rom. 12:1-2). On the Lord’s Day the Lord himself visits his people in judgment and salvation, reconstituting and restoring them for life in his presence and work in his kingdom. In response to God’s covenantal initiative—his drawing near to us—we confess, thank, praise, and pray as renewed creatures who through the Spirit are enabled to give unto our Covenant Lord the glory due his Name.

God’s Serves Us First

In view of the one-sided emphasis in some evangelical (even Presbyterian) circles that the congregation gathers to give praise to God and not to get anything, I must insist on the lopsided, impoverished nature of this teaching. We have been told by well-meaning teachers, even Reformed theologians, that it is downright wrong to come to church in order to get something. A popular shibboleth has it that Reformed or Presbyterian worship stands apart from other theologies of worship in that we don’t come to get anything but to give praise and honor and glory to God. This conception must not be permitted to go unchallenged.

First, and above all, we are called together in order to get, to receive. This is crucial. The Lord gives, we receive. Since faith is receptive and passive in nature, faith-full worship must be about receiving from God. He gives, and by faith we receive. We are given his forgiveness, his Word, his nourishment, his benediction, etc. We come as those who receive first and then, second, only in reciprocal exchange do we give back what is appropriate as grateful praise and adoration. More and more I am discovering how crucial (at least in our current situation) such a conception of worship is. Too often in current Reformed and evangelical circles worship or liturgy is described first of all as the “work of the people.” While I do not deny that we “work” during worship, I do regard this definition as dangerously one-sided. Whatever we “do” in worship must always be the faithful response to God’s gifts of forgiveness, life, knowledge, and glory—gifts we receive in the service! Much of what goes by the name “contemporary” worship has evacuated the Sunday service of God’s service to man! It is all about what we do. The reduction of Christian worship to “praise” and “giving worth to God” by well-intentioned pastors desirous of purging the church of superficial worship forms will only continue to feed the very thing that they oppose.

For example, to name one side effect of this kind of thinking, the disappearance of the pastor as the Lord’s representative and spokesman, the ordained man through whom the Lord gives, is tied to this kind of mentality. Many pastors no longer lead the worship service. This departure of the leadership of the pastor in contemporary worship follows from the kind of one-sided conception of the Lord’s Day service that I have been critiquing. If what the people are doing in worship is merely getting together to praise and pray and offer God all kinds of human devotion, then we can all just do it together and anyone can lead us. If, however, the Lord himself is meeting us and giving us his gifts, then the ordained minister will be prominent so that the people can be left in no doubt that it is the Lord himself who is speaking, forgiving, baptizing, offering us food and drink, and finally blessing us and sending us out into the world to further his kingdom.

That is not to say that the Lord serves us in worship exclusively through the pastor, since the Lord is at work even in the corporate praying, reciting, and the singing of the congregation. How many times have we been truly served by God as we listened to and joined in with the united voice of the church in prayer and praise? The Lord, then, serves us on the Lord’ Day as his Spirit speaks through both the voice of the minister as well as the voices of his people. We should never lose sight of the primacy of the Lord’s service to us when we gather to him on the Lord’s Day.

Moreover, the terminology we use to describe what happens on the Lord’s Day can be confusing. We’ve inherited the designation “worship service,” which, to my mind, tends to introduce confusion. “Service” comes from the Latin servitium, as in servitium Dei (“the service of God” or “God’s service”). This older way of designating the Christian liturgy is delightfully ambiguous. In the “Divine Service” or “the service of God” who’s serving whom? Is God serving us? Or are we serving God? Or is it both? Classically, the “Divine Service” was thought to include both God’s service to us and our service to God. Even so, our fathers in the faith considered God’s service to us (the forgiveness of sins, the ministry [service!] of the Word, the Sacraments, etc.) as primary and our service to him as secondary response. But this emphasis is exactly what is lost when we call our corporate, Sunday assembly “worship.” This term comes to us by way of the Anglo-Saxon word “worth-ship,” which simply meant to accord someone his proper worth. What we appear to be emphasizing with this term is not God’s gifts and ministry to us through his Word and Sacraments, but our ascribing “worth” to him. Some Reformed writers have a tendency to miss this. We are too ready to accept the misleading definition of liturgy as “the work of the people,” which is in fact only half of the story, and the second half at that! What happens on Sunday is the continuation of the service of the ascended Lord Jesus for his people. “For who is greater: the one at the table or the one who serves? The one at the table, surely. Yet here am I among you as the one who serves! (Luke 22:27; see also Matt. 20:28; John 13:5-16; Phil. 2:7-8).

Allow me to hammer this point home. Without this understanding, our worship inevitably degenerates into paganism with a Christian veneer. Our service is not first of all for God. We first receive from God, then, secondly, we give back to him with gratitude precisely that which he graciously continues to give us. He stands in no need of our service or praise. He has not created us primarily so as to get glory for himself, but to distribute and share the fullness of his glory with his creatures. He is not like the pagan gods who need to suck up as much of the glory and praise as they can. With the true God the determination of the amount of glory possessed by him and us is not a zero sum game. If he has all glory, that does not imply that we have none. If we possess glory, it does not come at the expense of his glory. Only when we refuse to acknowledge the source of our glory and assert our own over against his do we then fall under the condemnation of the prophets. Thomas Howard rightly challenges this distortion:

If God alone is all-glorious, then no one else is glorious at all. No exaltation may be admitted for any other creature, since this would endanger the exclusive prerogative of God. But this is to imagine a paltry court. What king surrounds himself with warped, dwarfish, worthless creatures? The more glorious the king, the more glorious are the titles and honors he bestows. The plumes, cockades, coronets, diadems, mantles, and rosettes that deck his retinue testify to one thing alone, his own majesty and munificence. He is a very great king to have figures of such immense dignity in his train, or even better, to have raised them to such dignity. These great lords and ladies, mantled and crowned with the highest possible honor and rank are, precisely, his vassals. This glittering array is his court! All glory to him, and in him, glory and honor to these others (Evangelical Is Not Enough [Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1984], p. 87).

It is this cruder form of the doctrine that is too often the popular view. If anyone has an ounce of glory, then it must be confiscated by God. This is pagan, not Christian. Rather, we must say that if anyone has an once or two pounds of glory, it has been bestowed by God from the plentitude of his own glory and so all glory in the world must ultimately redound to him. “For of Him and through Him and to Him [are] all things, to whom [be] glory forever. Amen” (Rom. 11:36).

Christian worship provides the occasion for God’s service to the church, that is, in the liturgy God serves us by granting us the gifts of the kingdom, which includes, but is not limited to knowledge. We gather to receive. The Lord gives. So, for example, I believe, the diminishing place of the pastor in the Sunday service corresponds to the deformation of the service from what God does for us to what we do before God. When the robed pastor is prominent the people are left in no doubt that God is speaking and acting through the instrumentality of the office of the Ministry to deliver his gifts to the congregation.

Thus, God’s operations on us come first and our actions are in grateful response to God’s gracious activity. [Note: I do not mean to suggest that our response is not also included in God’s gracious provision in Christ. It is. It is not as if God works but then stops just where our human response begins. Rather, God’s grace includes precisely that human response to the extent that our human response takes place “in Christ.” God is at work in us even when we are at work praising him. We “work” at thanking and praising him because he is at work in us (1 Cor. 12:3; Rom. 8:26; Phil. 2:13). The entire process of covenant renewal or sacrificial worship can only be performed as we are graciously given to participate in the priestly work of Jesus Christ. Our offering of ourselves as Christians will always be a participation in Jesus’ own priestly offering of his humanity to the Father in the Spirit.

If the Church’s worship is the place where God himself distributes his life-giving Word and Sacraments, if it is the occasion for God to serve the congregation, then with this understanding we can, to some degree, transcend the rigid dichotomy regarding the purpose of the Sunday service—is it for evangelism or worship? Why do we have to choose between one or the other? Is worship for the people of God or unbelievers? Well, primarily for the people of God, but if unbelievers are present they may be served as well. If through the liturgy God graciously delivers gifts of forgiveness, life, and salvation, then he offers them to everyone present, the people of God as well as those who are not yet part of his people. Inasmuch as the Lord’s Day service is the place and time where God comes through his Word and Sacrament to serve people, it is obviously beneficial to both. The Spirit can enliven any unbeliever present and use his Word as it is read, prayed, sung, and preached to bring them new life. What else is this but evangelism?

Therefore, the fundamental purpose of the corporate Sunday service is to receive by faith God’s gracious service in Christ and then to respond with thanksgiving in union with Christ worshiping the Living God. This is what we call “covenant renewal worship.”

Covenantal Worship

Why do we use the word “covenant” to describe the renewal that God accomplishes in the service? The Bible uses the word “covenant” over three hundred times in the Old and New Testaments to describe the precise nature of God’s relationship to his people. God enters into, remembers, and renews his covenant with his people (Gen. 6:18; Deut. 5:3; Ezek. 16:60; Heb. 8:10; Luke 1:72; 22:20, etc.). The people must not break, but remember and renew their covenant with God (1 Chron. 16:15; Psalm 103:18; Hos. 6:7, etc.). In our American cultural climate we need to stress that our “relationship” with God is not merely a “personal relationship,” but a covenantal relationship. This is an important qualification. The phrase “personal relationship” is used rather freely in popular culture. It usually describes very informal, often casual relationships between people. Popular television sitcoms like “Friends” and “90210” celebrate “personal relationships.” These kinds of relationships can be on one day and off the next. They involve no formal or binding responsibilities. They bend, sway, and stretch according to the desires of the individuals involved in these “relationships.” They have no objective shape or form. This is not the case with covenantal relationships in the Bible.

God’s personal relationship with us takes the form of a covenant. The “covenant” structures God’s personal relationship with us. We do not merely have a personal relationship with Jesus. That might mean almost anything. To some it simply means that Jesus is going to take them to heaven when they die because they prayed a prayer or walked an aisle in church. To others it might mean more, so that they talk to him when they are in trouble or come to church to think about him occasionally. A covenantal relationship, however, is a formal, binding relationship between God and us. Like marriage (which is a human covenant modeled after God’s covenant with us, Eph. 5:22ff.), God’s covenant with us has a definitive shape and content. The covenant contains promises that are made to be kept (by God and us), privileges that we are to enjoy, and stipulations that we must strive to obey. Furthermore, there is distinctive way of renewing covenantal relationships in the Bible, and that is by way of sacrifice (Gen. 8:20-9:17; Gen. 15:8-18a; Exod. 24:4-11; 34:15; Lev. 2:13; 24:1-8; Num. 18:19; 1 Kings 3;15; Ps. 50:5; Luke 22:20; Heb. 9:15, 18; 9:20; 12:24; 13:20).

This means that we could also call our corporate service “sacrificial worship,” because God renews his covenant with us by way of sacrifice. That is, the Lord himself graciously gathers us together as the church to draw us anew into his glorious, life-giving presence by way of sacrifice. What is this “way of sacrifice”?

Worship as Sacrifice

The word “liturgy” is a Bible word and ought not to scare us, if we properly understand and qualify its meaning. In Romans 12:1, for example, we are urged, in response to God’s mercy, to offer our bodies as living sacrifices. Such a course, we are told, is holy and pleasing to God; it is our “reasonable service.” The word translated “service” (or “worship” in some translations) is the Greek word latreia, which refers to the sacrificial “service” or “liturgy” by which the worshiper presents himself to God (Phil. 3:3; Heb. 9:9; 10:2; 12:28).

In Acts 13:2, for example, the Antioch church’s worship on the Lord’s Day is described as follows: “On one occasion, while they were engaged in the liturgy of the Lord and were fasting, the Holy Spirit spoke to them” (my translation). Many newer translations speak of the church “ministering” to the Lord. The word “ministering” means “serving,” and the Greek word is leitourgeo which refers to public, congregational service—whether God’s service to the people or the people’s before God is hard to know. The language of Acts 13:2 (“the Lord’s liturgy” or “service”) is ambiguous, maybe purposefully so. Nevertheless, the assembled congregation at Antioch was engaged in what we would today call a “worship service.” We gather on the Lord’s Day as the church, not to serve ourselves, but to be served by and to serve God.

In Hebrews 9:6 the word “liturgy” (latreia) refers to the ceremonies or rites of the priests in the Old Covenant tabernacle and temple. In the New Covenant God’s people as a whole are priests. United to Jesus our high priest, the entire congregation has sanctuary access as “saints.” Therefore, as New Covenant priests the people of God perform priestly service (latreia) . This mode of “sacrificial living” should characterize our daily lives, to be sure, but on the Lord’s Day there is a special sense in which we are gathered together by God as the body of Christ in order to be drawn into God’s presence as “living sacrifices.” But we are not used to thinking like this. Robert S. Rayburn explains why:

Part of the reason why so many Christian worship services have no logic, no order, no movement, is because those who superintend those services of worship have not paid attention to the Bible’s main instruction in the formation of a worship service because that instruction is found in the Old Testament. . . . It is this disregard for the importance of what is done in the worship of God and the order or logic with which it is done that has lead to the common pejorative use of the words ‘liturgy’ and ‘liturgical’ in many evangelical and even Reformed circles. This is a mistake in more ways than one. Every church service is a liturgy, if it has various elements in some arrangement. That is what liturgy is. Liturgical churches are churches that have thought about those elements and their proper order. Non-liturgical churches are those which have not. It is no compliment to say that a church is a non-liturgical church. It is the same thing as saying it is a church that gives little thought to how it worships God (Robert S. Rayburn, “Worship From the Whole Bible,” in The Second Annual Conference on Worship: The Theology and Music of Reformed Worship, February 23-25, 1996 [Nashville, TN: Covenant Presbyterian Church, 1996], pp. 22-23).

The meaning of “liturgy,” therefore, according to the New Testament, is intimately connected with the biblical practice of “offering” and “sacrifice.” More important than finding the word “liturgy” in the Bible, is the recognition that God has established the way of approaching him. God’s way of graciously drawing us into his presence is not arbitrary, but follows a predictable sequence that is controlled by his holy and merciful character as the Triune God. According to the New Testament, the way or order in which God draws the sacrificial animals into his presence in the Old Testament symbolizes God’s appointed way of drawing sinful human beings into his holy, but life-giving presence. This is the way of sacrifice. Sacrifice answers the question: “How are we drawn into God’s presence?” The sacrifices are qorban, “that which is brought near” (Lev. 1:2; 2:1; 3:1-2; 4:23; 5:11; 7:38). Biblical Sacrifice is not a technique invented by man in order to secure something from God. Rather, God has graciously provided man with a way of entering into his presence, and that way is the way of sacrifice. The worshiper is mercifully brought near to God’s presence by means of the substitute/representative animal. Ultimately this is the way of Jesus Christ’s life, death, resurrection, and the resulting incorporation of his (and our) humanity into the Trinitarian family life of the Godhead. Jesus Christ offered himself by the Spirit to the Father once for us all, and we, too, united to Christ, must follow his lead. By the Spirit we are drawn into God the Father’s presence through the priestly work of Jesus Christ. This is what happens every Lord’s Day in the worship service. This is the way of sacrificial worship—united to Christ we are not only brought together by the Spirit, but by the same Spirit we are drawn into the Father’s presence by cleansing, consecration, and communion.

The primary focus of Part I is on issues surrounding the order of the service. Even though this dimension of biblical worship has been almost totally neglected in our own tradition (the emphasis instead being on the “elements” of worship), I believe that discovering the biblical order or sequence of man’s approach to God in the service may be the key to resurrecting a powerful Bible-based liturgy in our churches. You will find very little help from our own tradition in this area. Most Reformed theologians and pastors do have a proper sense of how a worship service should be ordered, but they may not have thought through why this order is appropriate. I believe that the traditional Christian liturgical order arose in the early church from a gut-level familiarity with the biblical way of approaching God, even if church theologians have not always explicitly identified the biblical source of their intuitions. What I offer is a reasonable biblical explanation of the order of Christian worship as the corporate, sacrificial, covenant renewal service of God.

The Three Crucial Steps in the Service

Without going into too much detail, the basic order of sacrificial/covenantal worship ought to be clear in your mind before we proceed to explain the service in detail. You might think about the three major “sections” or “movements” within the service as three “steps.” The movement of the service is something of an “ascent” into God’s presence along the pathway he has established. (In some sense it is also God’s “descent” as well, but we will discuss that aspect when we come to the Communion meal.) Just as every sacrificial animal passed through three “zones” and underwent three major “operations” on its way up the altar and into the presence of God, so also the human worshiper travels the same sacrificial pathway up the “holy mountain” into God’s presence. By faith we understand our progress during the Lord’s Day service to be God’s graciously drawing us into his presence, making us fit, in Christ, for fellowship with him.

The three steps are cleansing, consecration, and communion. These are just convenient labels that we attach to the three major operations performed on the sacrificial animals as the Lord drew them (and the worshipers symbolized by them!) into his presence. Each sacrificial animal is always 1) killed and its blood splashed on the altar (cleansing), then 2) washed, skinned, cut up, and arranged on the altar grill (consecration), and finally 3) turned into smoke and incorporated into God’s presence as food (communion). This is the sacrificial pathway/liturgy that every animal/worshiper experienced as God brought him near.

Contrary to popular Christian opinion, the New Testament does not abrogate sacrifice, but rather, Jesus Christ fulfills and establishes the genuine meaning and practice of sacrifice and offering. Sacrificial images and rites are part of the central core of the biblical revelation of the personal relations between God and man (from Gen. 3:21 through Rev. 21:22-27), possibly even constitutive of the personal relations within the Godhead. The sacrificial language and imagery is not merely fulfilled in the work of Jesus Christ, but also serves to define and shape the life of the believer in Christ. In the Old Covenant both the work of Christ and the work of the believer in Christ is couched in the symbolic structures of animal sacrificial rites and all the accompanying things— altars, bowls, knifes and other assorted hardware. In the New Testament the Old Testament sacrificial typology is fulfilled