“O God, grant that what we sing with our lips we may know with our hearts
And what we know with our hearts, we may show forth in our lives.
Amen.”
This prayer decorates the front of my binder of worship music, collected from my leading and singing at a variety of places. I think it’s a fitting place, for all the songs in that binder have served and likely will serve again as words of worship for the body of Christ, and these words are important.
Worship forms and transforms the worshipper. The songs that we sing, the scriptures we read, and the rituals we enact in our worship inform us, teach us, solidify us in our beliefs. The things we do and say in worship find a way into our hearts and, ultimately, begin to shape how we see God, how we see ourselves as children of God, and how we see our relationship to the church and the world.
So, the question is this: to what is our worship forming us? Time and time again, Scripture calls us to a kind of worship that forms us not only in our knowledge of God but our lives as disciples of God. Jesus himself summarized the life of the disciple, saying “The first [commandment] is, ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.” (Mark 12:29-31) We are called to know God and to love God with all that we are, but it does not stop there - we are called to show this love for God in the way we love those around us.
In other words, true, God-glorifying worship forms us, not only as a people who know and love the Lord but who live a life of love for those around us. Worship forms us not simply as believers, but as faithful disciples to the One who is worthy of praise, so that:
“...what we sing with our lips we may know with our hearts
And what we know with our hearts, we may show forth in our lives.
Amen.”
I owe much of this thought to the works of John Witvliet (Director of the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship), Paul Ryan (Associate Chaplain for Worship at Calvin College), and the book The Dangerous Act of Worship by Mark Labberton.
