A Note on Worship

We have been learning our undoubted catholic Christian faith recently by taking up the great themes of the Atonement. We have been considering different constituent aspects of the Atonement such as Reconciliation answering alienation and Redemption and Ransom answering our problem of being captive. We understand that we have been only grazing the mountain tops of the subject. We can hardly do justice to these great themes without spending months on each subject. For example, we could have spoken a great deal more about Alienation and Reconciliation as pre-figured in the OT in how God first reconciled Himself to our first parents by clothing them in skins made from animals, thus covering them at cost of blood poured out. For example, we could have looked at Redemption and ransom in the OT where Israel is Redeemed from their bondage with the payment of the ransom price of the blood of the Passover lamb. We could have talked about Boaz and the idea of a Kinsman Redeemer. All of this prefigured and shouted the coming of another who would be the fulfillment of these OT shadows.

And we come here week by week to continue to learn these and the other great truths of our undoubted catholic Christian faith because we understand this is who we are and that it makes no sense to say that we are Christians apart from knowing what we believe and why we believe it and what we don’t believe and why we don’t believe it. Why take to ourselves the name “Christian” if we don’t understand, at some level, these grand themes that we have been considering? Why take to ourselves the name “Christian” if we refuse to have an ever-increasing understanding of the faith?

I don’t call myself a farmer if I don’t understand at some level animals and their maintenance, crop rotation, prices on the bushel, and what is needed for return in order to provide for my family. I don’t call myself a Pilot if I don’t know about lift, flaps, and landing gear. Why should we call ourselves Christians if we don’t know about and have no interest in the great themes that we take up here week by week? Themes that include Reconciliation, Redemption, Ransom, Propitiation, Sacrifice, Penalty, substitution, satisfaction, the abiding validity of God’s Law in its General Equity? We are Christians and so we desire to always be going further up and farther in when it comes to understanding and knowing our God and our faith.

Is it really Christianity if we were to reject laboring over these great themes to understand them ever-increasingly? Is it really Christianity to say we believe in Christ and the Cross and yet have precious little concrete understanding of it? Is it really Christianity if we chop it up and say … “Well, yes we believe it when we are in the Church but when we are outside the Church, well then, we operate not by Christianity but by Natural Lawianity and a bastardized version of common grace?”

No, we want the great themes articulated here. We want to talk about not only Christ for us but also about Christ in us. We want to talk about grace but we also want to hear about how gratitude for grace drives the embrace of the ongoing validity of God’s law in its general equity. We want to hear the 1st use of the law but we also want to understand how grace makes us mavens, once in Christ, for the third use of the law. We want to understand the culture, philosophy, history, sociology, and all of life from a Biblical standpoint.

We do not gather to hear about how good we are. We are not good. We do not gather to talk about “your best life now,” or to hear how God is seeking your best. God is not seeking your best. God is seeking His best and has brought you along for the ride. We gather not in order to get God to do something. We gather to worship because God already has done a grand something … God has placed us in Christ and our gathered worship is to express our ongoing gratitude to the triune God for rescuing us from our sin and misery.

That is why we gather week by week. That by worshiping the God who is we might increasingly become what we have been freely declared to be as in Jesus Christ as instructed by the Spirit.