20/20 Vision - John Chisum

It was a drizzly autumn morning. I was sitting at my desk in my home office when I spotted a beautiful little bird nestled in some leaves just outside the window. The bird wasn't any bigger than my hand and its wings and body were the perfect blend of golden apple-pear colors with some mottled cinnamon mixed in. I was mesmerized with it as it sat statue-still under the leaves of one of my Camellia bushes, resting its little bird beak and bird eyes from whatever business it had been up to that rainy morning. I was still admiring it when my teen-aged daughter, Aly, came bustling into the office. "Shhhhhhh," I shushed her, stopping her in her tracks. "Look at that beautiful bird sleeping under the Camellia branch," I said. Aly tip-toed over to the window and peered out in the direction I was pointing. She looked for a moment, squinted, and then swung around with typical teen-aged disdain saying, "Dad! That's not a bird! It's a leaf!" No wonder it sat so still. As Aly stomped out of the office I decided to get my eyes checked.


Essential Eye Check
We all need eye check-ups from time to time. Sometimes we're putting up with blurry vision, squinting hard to see things as clearly as possible but not quite able to get them into focus. Sometimes preachers need an eye check. Sometimes worship leaders need an eye check. Sometimes well-meaning believers can mistake one thing for another, especially when it comes to worship, worship music, what corporate worship is supposed to be, and just what the presence of God is all about, corporately and privately. It is easy for our vision to get hazy on these things, especially considering the commerce that has grown up around church and worship music that offers a plethora of CD's, DVD's, books, radio, television shows, and mega-churches, each with their own twist on what "worship" is. With such an array of choices worship can morph out quickly from the purest praises of God into the gray zone of human consumerism. Considering the techno-boom and the unlimited access every church has to information, opinions, and resources, it is no wonder that it has become challenging to see worship from a clear, unadulterated, biblical point of view. How can we make sure we're seeing things correctly-that our vision of worship is 20/20-and that we're not mistaking leaves for birds? Is it possible to get a "vision prescription" from the Scriptures?

Undoubtedly, yes. The Bible is the place we should go for a correct vision of worship, the kind that glorifies our God and Father to the utmost. But how do we do it? Isn't it confusing to try to figure out what is "biblical" and what isn't? Well, yes and no. Yes, it can be very confusing if you try to approach worship from a purely stylistic or methodological standpoint, one that is culturally entrenched in historic church traditions (old or new) and one that depends on formulas alone for success. No, if you approach worship in a holistic, heart-centered, organic manner much as Jesus did (John 4). Jesus clearly broke with multiple layers of cultural, racial, sexual, and religious mores as He dared to speak to a Samaritan woman at a well in broad daylight with no one else around. His purpose was inarguably to correct her vision of worship in order that she could find within herself the deepest satisfaction of a living relationship with God. His purpose is still the same for us. Maybe its time we got our bifocals adjusted.

Here are a few fuzzy-eyed beliefs we cling to that tend to cloud our vision of worship. Cover one eye and read on to see how your worship vision lines up with those little letters on the chart.

"Worship occurs only on Sundays"
 While it is true that the primary Christian Sabbath is Sunday, its primary purpose is to set a tone of praise for the rest of the week. When did Sundays become the last day of the week for us instead of the first? Even accounting for Sabbatarians (those who worship on the seventh day, Saturday, as the Jewish people and others do) the intention of the Sabbath is to establish the practices of faith-filled rest in our lives. When we take a true Sabbath, something very difficult for worship leaders and pastors to do, we're saying that we commemorate God's day of rest in Creation (Genesis 1) and that we celebrate the resurrection of Christ that occurred on Sunday (Mark 16:9). Whichever day it is for you, odds are that you and your people think of this day as the most important day of worship instead of as the communal continuation of praise that has been happening all week in our individual and family lives. We have been so conditioned to think that Sunday-is-the-day-we-worship that it is as automatic as breathing. How do we help people in our congregations see more clearly that Sunday is the coming together of faithful worshipers who have already been worshiping 24/7?

First, we should encourage a lifestyle of worship. It is easier to promote Sundays as the big day because it is the day we are together. The fellowship and the worship can be exciting and fun, as they should be, and it is typical to emphasize this day over the others. This tendency, however, is the same one that has caused the church over many centuries to act centripetally instead of centrifugally, moving in an inward instead of an outward direction (consider John 3:16). In our evangelistic fervor we have tried to bring people into the church instead of living praise and worship outside of the four walls the other six days of the week. Any decent liturgy ends with something like, "Send us now into the world in peace, and grant us strength and courage to love and serve you" versus a prayer for people to flood into our church. If the kingdom of God is working right it looks more like my salad spinner than my vacuum.

Eugene Peterson translated John 4:23 as, "It's who you are and the way you live that count before God" (The Message, NavPress). When we help our people embrace praise and worship as a lifestyle instead of as an event, they will begin to morph into the character, nature, and attributes of Jesus, just as we will if we live this way. This has the effect of de-emphasizing an unhealthy dependency on Sundays and begins to promote a healthy relationship with Christ through spiritual disciplines. God doesn't just hear us on Sundays, of course, but is present with us around the clock. The goal is for us to become present to Him, as well, and this doesn't happen as effectively when we think we have to be at church to do it.

Second, our vision of what the local church is has to be transformed from the centuries-old notion that church exists for us instead of us existing for the world. A church in my area recently sponsored a gas buy-down at a convenience store, offering to pay a dollar on the gallon for anyone stopping in. They had opportunities to witness and to pray for many people, making a huge statement that they had more to offer this community than services on Sunday. That activity is centrifugal, spinning outwardly, and makes God's presence known to people who would otherwise never darken the doors of the church. This only happens when we move in attitude and in action from maintenance to missional (see Minatrea's book Shaped by God's Heart: The Passion and Practices of Missional Churches, Jossey-Bass, 2004). Regardless of how great our worship services are, they are a "sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal" (I Corinthians 13) if we lack God's passion and heart for the world and for its people all around us. The greatest temptation we face is to lose our focus on the object of God's love, the world, and to place it on our selves and on the maintenance of our local churches to meet our own needs.

"God needs me to worship Him"
 The way worship is presented sometimes leaves us with nothing but the lesser-of-two-evils kind of choice. On the one hand, it seems that God is on an ego trip and wants to be told over and over how great He is. The other choice is that God suffers from low self-esteem (like most worship leaders I know) and that He needs to be pumped up all the time lest He become too insecure and depressed to answer our prayers. Both of these ideas are ridiculous, of course, but my own eyes were clouded on this issue for far too long. Until I matured in my understanding of worship I would have had trouble explaining the purpose of it even though I knew it was a good thing to do.

The ultimate purpose of praise and worship is to honor God as God. It has more to do with putting Him, and ourselves, in our proper places in the universe than with informing God about who He is. So why do we sing song after song that says God, You are righteous, holy, wonderful, incredible, awesome, etc.? We sing them to bring truth present to ourselves and to declare His truth to the nations. Psalm 86:9 - 10 says, "All the nations you have made will come and worship before you, O Lord: they will bring glory to your name. For you are great and do marvelous deeds; you alone are God." Our "You are..." songs follow in a rich heritage of declarative praise to Yahweh. The psalmists understood the principle of bringing present the truths of God and His faithfulness to themselves "through all generations" (Psalm 90:1). David himself said, "I remember the days of long ago; I meditate on all your works and consider what your hands have done" (Psalm 143:5). When we remember, we re-collect the pieces of scattered memory and reassemble a more accurate vision of God and His unchanging nature. This, in turn, encourages our faith and brings out of us a response of worship. The word Eucharist means "The Great Thanksgiving" and in it we re-enact Christ's death, resurrection, and ascension (making them present to ourselves) as we look forward to His return. With the bread and the wine we declare that, "Christ has died; Christ has risen; Christ will come again."

God does not need our worship to be God, but we need to worship Him for Him to be God to us. In His sovereignty, He allows us to worship Him and to be benefited by it. God doesn't profit from worship-we do. Pastor Jack Hayford wrote in Worship His Majesty, "Worship is to God, but for man" (Regal Books, 2000). Though I take some slight issue with this comment if taken out of context, it isn't far off. I don't think worship is totally "for man" because God is blessed by our praises and He does rejoice with us as we love and enjoy Him (see Psalm 22:2, Zephaniah 3:17, Jesus' prayer in John 17, and read a few of John Piper's books). But we greatly benefit from gazing into the eyes of true Deity, Jesus Christ, in the Holy Spirit. We are the ones who should be changed by our songs, not Him. We are the ones who need His transformation and not He ours. We are the ones who are created to reflect Him as our Creator and not He us.

Engaged worship, the kind that connects us with God in the depths of His character, nature, and attributes only begins with the songs we sing. God becomes much more God to us as we inculcate His essence and begin to emulate Him (Ephesians 5:1) in our own hearts, minds, and behaviors. Don Saliers points out that, "our bodily movements, gestures, and dispositions may be the most deeply theological aspects of communal worship. For the human body is itself a primary symbol of God's glory. Again it is the fundamental conception of God incarnate in a human being that gives such theological significance to bodily action" (Worship as Theology: Foretaste of Glory Divine, Abingdon Press, 1994, p.164). I am convinced that we are missing the theological yacht on what physical worship can be for us by limiting it so rigorously to singing. I see grand correlatives to our Judeo-Christian heritage in both Old and New Testament texts that indicate that spiritual power resides in the acts of lifting our hands (Hebrew yadah, towdah), bowing (Hebrew barak, Greek proskuneo), shouting out in victory (Hebrew shabach) and all of the major liturgical expressions of praise and worship. That we have schooled our congregations in mono-expressiveness is a sad indication of our inability to connect Biblical theology with authentic bodily worship. No wonder Matt Redman had to write for us I'll bring You more than a song/ For a song in itself is not what You have required (Copyright worshiptogether.com songs - need further permission to quote...).

In 2 Corinthians 3 the Apostle Paul is discussing the glory of the Old Covenant as compared with the New Covenant. In verses 9-11 he writes, "If the ministry that condemns men is glorious, how much more glorious is the ministry that brings righteousness! For what was glorious has no glory now in comparison with the surpassing glory. And if what was fading away came with glory, how much greater is the glory of that which lasts!"  That was seven glories! It is interesting to note that the Hebrew word for glory is kavod, denoting weightiness, heaviness, and substance. The Greek word Paul uses here is doxa (think "Doxology") and is translated in the New Testament as glory, honor, praise, and worship. The cool thing to know is that both of these words refer directly to the Shekinah, the glory that appeared in the tabernacle, the temple, and on Mt. Sinai to Moses that many scholars like Jonathan Edwards say was the pre-Incarnate Christ shining as beaming rays before them (Munk, The University of Toronto, 1972).

So, here's the gist of what Paul is saying here: the New Covenant God has made for us in Christ is way better than the old one for this reason-the Shekinah glory has moved out of the temple and into our hearts! He writes in verses 17-18, "Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we, who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord's glory, are being transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit." Paul had such a crystal clear vision of the work of Christ that he could say with confidence that we are being transformed literally from praise to praise! As we speak, sing, and act out our worship the net effect is nothing less than a transformation of our lives into His image-we literally reflect Him, the brightest Sun of Righteousness (Malachi 4:2). Poor Israelites-they only saw God's glory and we get to have Him in our hearts (Colossians 1:27). Our songwriters would do the body of Christ a great favor to concentrate more on the indwelling presence of God than on seeking the outward manifestation of the Spirit in our services. None of us live at church. Our transformation from praise to praise is an ongoing work (Romans 12:1-2) as we live each day aware of His life in us, drinking the living water He promised to the Samaritan woman that still flows to us today.

"All I need to do is worship God"
 If you approach worship holistically with the understanding that all that you do in life is worship this statement holds true. If you view worship in a fragmented way, i.e. that worship only happens when you sing or go to church, this statement is false. The critical element is your definition of the word worship. For most Christians, this word is synonymous with music. The Bible never refers exclusively to music as worship or vice versa, yet we cannot use either word without confusion these days. This is an endemic cultural challenge for us-how do we delineate the very real distinctions in these words and why is it important that we do so?

For worship leaders the distinction is crucial. If worship is music then the success of a worship service rests with us. If the music is bad the service is bad. If the music doesn't fit our tastes then we cannot worship. If the worship leader is having a bad day then all of us have a bad one. If the people don't seem to respond we have failed. If worship is music the Sr. Pastor is held at arm's length and may become passive because he is not musical or even antagonistic and unsupportive for the fact that he is uninvolved in the planning and execution of creative arts. This is death to engaged worship. Worship leaders must embrace the challenge of educating their teams, pastors, and congregations on the very important concept of worship as encompassing all that we do in life versus singing en masse only. The pressure put on worship leaders to create "wow moments" is outrageous and completely unbiblical. The only one who can create anything life-changing and worthy of a "Wow!" is God the Holy Spirit. Anything less than the transformative work of the Holy Spirit in us is a trip to Disney. My friend Nancy says, "There's no such thing as a bad Communion."

Richard Foster identified twelve Christian disciplines in his classic book Celebration of Discipline: the Path to Spiritual Growth (HarperCollins, 1998). He included worship as a corporate discipline to be practiced with the body of believers. My question is, however, how can you be good at anything that you only practice for one hour a week? How can we reasonably expect to come together in meaningful corporate worship when we never take the time to practice the discipline of personal devotion and worship through prayer, Bible study, service, and the other equally-important disciplines Foster identified? I say that worship is first personal then corporate. I don't become a worshiper by attending church any more than I become a biscuit by crawling into an oven or a squirrel for climbing a tree. Considering our current programmatic approach to one-hour services that cater to the myriad cultural preferences of Americans, how can our corporate worship be called a discipline at all? It's no wonder we're seeing cross-eyed these days. We are the fuzzy-eyed leading the nearly-blind when it comes to intentional worship that even remotely resembles anything Scriptural. Maybe Jesus needs to spit on the ground and rub some mud in our eyes (John 9:6).

Jesus had precious little to say about worship, per se. The organic quality of life in God seemed more important to Him than the outward expressions, but then again, He was discussing it with a woman who had very strong religious opinions (John 4). She had been steeped in tradition, though the tradition didn't help her line up well with God's loving purposes for her life. Jesus revealed to her His knowledge of her adulterous lifestyle, bypassing the religious argument that kept her from knowing God. He saw immediately through her pretensions and that, in our politically correct parlance, she was unable to sustain a meaningful relationship with a significant other. Once she tasted the living water, though, she became the first evangelist to the Gentiles, from prostitute to preacher in one easy step! Historically she has been known as Photina to the Greek Orthodox and as Svetlana to the Russian church. Tradition has it that she became a powerful evangelist who even converted Caesar's wife and some of his family members and was later executed for it. The point is that Jesus' concern for worship is that we connect with God in the way that she did, viscerally, on a gut-level basis, and not merely that we perfect a proscribed style of creativity to express our praises. This, my friends, is a merciful thing or we would still be arguing over what He meant when He said anything else about it. It is a miracle we don't have churches built in the shape of Jacob's well.

The discipline of worship must be corporately and privately practiced. Neither is complete without the other. We need sweet times of personal prayer, Bible reading and study, fellowship, serving others, fasting, and solitude to make the corporate times all that they should be. Paul taught that when we come to church "everyone has a hymn, or a word of instruction, a revelation, a tongue or an interpretation" (I Corinthians 14:26), but we rarely employ the song of the people anymore. Our heavily programmed churches have returned us closer to the Medieval Latin mass performed from a platform with passive congregations. The further we go into performance ministry the less the congregation gets to participate in the one worshipful action that we universally applaud, singing. J. Michael Walters has spoken well in Can't Wait for Sunday, "If no one in the congregation is singing, it doesn't matter how good the worship band is" (Wesleyan Publishing House, 2006, p. 134). Most worship leaders I know can hardly get their congregations to sing. Could this be because we have so conditioned them to passivity that we have robbed them of the Biblical reasons that they should sing? Forget asking them to raise one hand past half-mast. Our praise teams have all but forgotten that we exist to facilitate the song of the redeemed and not the other way around.

Worship is all-encompassing in the Biblical purview. With both general and specific Hebrew and Greek words that speak from the pages in a wide range from physical acts (bowing, kneeling, shouting) to harder-to-grasp words like bless, the psalmic (and therefore 1^st Century Jewish) understanding of worship was a lavish, colorful, explosive, and communally celebrative thing. Halal, the root of the universal worship word hallelujah, means to "jump up and to spin about wildly". When was the last time you were so excited about Jesus that you did that in church? It is true that "all we need to do is worship" only if worship is all that we truly do.

 "A Bespectacled Beauty"
  Do you remember getting glasses as a kid and hating them? I was one of the lucky ones who didn't need them until later in life, but I remember several kids in grade school who struggled with their specs. There was one little girl, I can see her chubby little face though her name is long-forgotten to me, whose glasses were thicker than the bottom of Coke bottles. She was better off wearing them than not because she could then avoid bumping into walls, doors, and people. She could read clearly with them on, too, which helped her in school. Maybe you wear glasses or contact lenses and life appears much clearer with them on like for that little nameless girl. My wife only wears glasses to drive and I feel safer if she has them on when I ride with her. I never wear glasses except to read and work at the computer, but the little letters on the screen line up better if I have them handy when I need them.

The Scriptures paint a picture for us of a glorious Bride for Christ that is being prepared "without spot or wrinkle" (Ephesians 5:25-27). This will happen, no doubt, through her engaged worship (no pun intended) of Him in "thought, word, and deed". My family attended a wedding this past weekend and the bride was spectacular, of course, but no match for the glorious beauty of the Bride of Christ to come, the Bride that we will someday be. I am convinced that God's work in our lives will be so complete, so thorough, and so purifying that we will one day radiate His glory and be ready for Him to claim us fully as His own in that mystical union. Worship prepares us for that day like earthly brides prepare themselves with purifications, ointments, and lotions. I bet that little nameless girl with the thick glasses has grown up and married by now. I bet she, like all the other sensible brides who need bottle-thick glasses to see half-way down the aisle, got some contacts a few weeks before the wedding to look her best for her groom. One day we will meet our Groom, too, but until then, we need to keep the specs on and make sure to get our eyeballs checked every now and then. That way, we'll be less likely to trip down the aisle on our way to meet Him.


John Chisum is a worship leader, music publisher, producer, arranger, seasoned songwriter, clinician, and President of Firm Foundation Worship Ministries. John has had over 400 songs published in his career and is probably best known for the song "Can He, Could He, Would He?" recorded by The Cathedrals. John has co-written and produced eight children's and youth musicals and his compositions are in print with every major choral music company including Integrity Music, Word Music, Lillenas Music, Lifeway Christian Resources, and Allegis Music. John Chisum will also be a speaker at the National Worship Leader Conference this year.

Song DISCovery Volume 94
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