Thus says the Lord: "Stand by the roads, and look, and ask for the ancient paths, where the good way is; and walk in it, and find rest for your souls.
But they said, 'We will not walk in it.'" --Jeremiah 6:16

 

14 August, 2007   comments: (0) Today's Worship   Bad Ways To Determine Good Worship - Part 3    Quoting Hart & Muether . . . Yet another example of impoverished discernment in worship is to let a profession of Christian faith become a basis for legitimacy. Just because someone claims to be a Christian does not justify what he or she does in worship. Many today give the benefit of the doubt in worship to people who seem devout, as if Christian charity demands turning a blind eye to unwise or even sinful practices in such other areas as honoring parents or living a chaste life. To be sure, many who advocate the new kind of worship appear to be bible-believing Christians. They appear to be devoted to Christ and are motivated by evangelistic concerns. However . . . We should not forget the lesson that the fundamentalist/modernist controversy painfully taught. Liberals claimed to be good Christians. They rejected the historic meaning of the church's creeds in order to get back to Christ and to the Bible. But conservatives like Machen thought liberals were not speaking truthfully. He argued that liberals, instead of accepting or rejecting the statements of the Apostles' Creed or the Westminster Confession of Faith, "merely 'interpret'" them. "Every generation, it is said, must interpret the bible or the creed in it's own way". And so people who claimed to believe the same things as conservatives departed significantly from a basic understanding of the Christian religion. Of course, we are not claiming that worship innovators are inevitably liberal in the old-fashioned sense. But in Reformed circles, when it comes to the meaning of creeds and catechisms in their teaching on worship, we do find a similar kind of evasiveness about the historic meaning of these Confessional statements. The point is that people will sometimes employ biblical and Confessional language, wrongly understood , to baptize worship innovations. The implication is that Christians should not take other believers at their word but also look into their deeds. And one of the telltale signs of whether a person, congregation, or denomination in Reformed is worship. For faith cannot be divorced from practice. Together these flawed ways of evaluating worship [discussed here, and on this page and this one] call us back to discernment. We must look beyond appearances and ask the hard questions. Does theology come from our worship experience, or is the worship of our churches based on [right] theology? Are we striving to be acceptable to God or the wisdom of market research? Do the people mean what they say when they claim their worship is reverent? Discernment in worship, in other words, requires that we look to the theology that undergirds our worship. From:  With Reverence and Awe   Posted by: Jim B.   Link: http://www.oldtruth.com/blog.cfm/id.2.pid.750   Be the first to post a comment about this article        Home  |   About  |  Videos   |  Calvinism