More About Worship

I have been considering the subject of worship again. To recap the last series on worship, I believe we should worship God with our whole life. Now I would like to touch on worship through music. As I said earlier, worship styles and sounds are being strongly contested in many places, and I believe the Holy Spirit will bring us into unity on these things and give us a new sound as we stay before Him.

For the last few weeks, though as I have thought about worship music, two seemingly contradictory ideas keep coming to mind: inductive reasoning and deductive reasoning. Inductive reasoning starts with specific instances and tries to generalize, while deductive reasoning starts with general truths and tries to prove them with specific instances. How does this apply to worship?

Some people need to start with the general truths about God and His character to bring them to faith concerning what He can and will do for them. They need to focus on His holiness, justice, righteousness, love and faithfulness before they can believe He is willing to help them. Others need to focus on what He has done for specific people in specific situations to bring them to the place of believing that He will help them and also to believing that those qualities exist in God at all times in all places whether they personally see His work in a particular area of their lives yet or not. This is why we need worship and praise about God and His attributes coming from both angles.

There are problems when either of these approaches to God get out of balance. Too much thinking on God's character in general can leave us without a personal faith, because we think He's so holy He doesn't want to bother with helping us in our (we think) mundane lives. On the other hand, when we focus almost exclusively on God's personal care for us, we can lose sight of the bigger picture and reduce Him to our personal problem solver, instead of God of everything who always was, is, and ever will be. He even wants His people to be able from sincere hearts to say that "though He slay me, yet will I trust Him" as Job says, and that though everything is wrong in my life, I will rejoice in God as it says in Habakkuk 3:17-19. That ability grows the longer we know and trust Him.

The truth is God is love. He is also holy, righteous, just, true, faithful and many other things through all time and eternity-before human beings existed, now and forever in the future-even when time ends. Even if He had never created us, He would still be those things. It says in His Word that He will never change (Heb 13:8 and Malachi 3:6), and that is why we can trust Him and ask Him to help us. For these

One other issue I need to mention is that of singing about God or singing to God. I may sing that God is or has done all these things, and that is good. That is praise. But I need to at least sing equally to God about who He is-both who He is generally and who He has shown Himself to be in my life. That is worship. If we can incorporate these things rightly in our lives, our worship and praise will be pleasing to God, and it will help us. The more we say and sing the truth, the more we will know it, and the more we know and practice it, the more we will have to say and sing concerning our wonderful God.