Reverence for God’s Word in Worship

The Word of God is central to our life as a church. It is the power by which God speaks and creates a Bride for his Son. For us to give God’s Word the reverence, love, wonder, faith, and obedience it deserves, we must think carefully about the role it plays in our life together. 

God makes beautiful things. He makes light that is pure and true like he is. He makes water that refreshes like he does. He makes mountains that are immovable like his covenants.

The way God makes beautiful things is by speaking his Word.

Our hope as a church is that God would be making us a beautiful community, attaining “the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” (Eph 4:13). Such transformation does not happen haphazardly or accidentally. It happens when God’s powerful Word speaks over us, gradually changing us over time.

This year, our church is making a number of liturgical changes. A few of them revolve around the ministry of the Word. The Word of God is central to our life as a church. It is the power by which God speaks and creates a Bride for his Son. For us to give God’s Word the reverence, love, wonder, faith, and obedience it deserves, we must think carefully about the role it plays in our life together. 

Here are two changes we are making:

Standing for the Reading of God’s Word

The first change is that after the Assurance of Pardon and Song of Ascent, we will remain standing for the reading of God’s Word. The liturgy will have a seamlessness to it. We won’t clutter the beginning of the sermon with announcements, but instead the song will stir our hearts in praise and open us up to hear from God.

Our culture tends to be gnostic about things of deep significance, meaning that we think our bodies don’t matter as long as our hearts or souls are in the right place.

The posture of standing is the posture of worship in the Bible. We are God’s servants who have come into the court of his throne room. His book is open, and he will address us, his subjects. Before such a king, our posture should be reverent and honoring. Hence we stand.

Standing is mentioned in the Final Judgment of Revelation 20. There we find that our posture on Sunday mornings is a small preview of what will happen on the Last Day:

“And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened.” (Rev 20:12)

For much of church history, Christians have stood through the whole worship service. They saw it as dishonoring to sit in God’s presence. Our culture tends to be gnostic about things of deep significance, meaning that we think our bodies don’t matter as long as our hearts or souls are in the right place. “As long as I love grandma in my heart, there is no need to stand when she comes into the room,” because honor is an act of mind, not of the body. The Bible does not teach this. Instead, it says we will be judged for the things we do in the body (2 Cor 5:10). The body matters deeply to God, and it reflects what is in the heart. So, in our services, we stand, we speak, we sing, we lift hands, we eat—and maybe someday, we will kneel during confession as well. In the meantime, this is our next step in making our bodies important parts of worship. 

Bringing Your Bible to Church

Jen Moline, our Women’s Ministry Lead, pointed out in a staff meeting that our church is out of the habit of bringing our Bibles to church. We are grateful that her love for the Bible has prodded us to rethink some of our current practices. From early on we decided to print the sermon passage in the bulletin so that visitors or non-Christians present would be able to see the text before them. (We don’t have places to put whole Bibles in our pews.) An unintended result has been that few people bring their personal Bibles on Sunday morning, which means they also don’t turn to the passage the sermon is on, don’t make notes on new insights they hear, and aren’t able to train their children on where to turn in the Scriptures.

We are hoping this year for a habit change. I am now encouraging my children to bring their Bibles to church. With Bibles in hand, parents have more discipleship opportunities as they help their children during the service. I am adjusting my own practices as well. I now read the text not from the bulletin, but from my own Bible. And when I reference another passage during the sermon, I will take the time to turn to it in my Bible, and I will ask everyone else to do the same. This might be an adjustment for all of us, but I believe it will only be for our good.

We believe that one of the most important qualities of a healthy church is that the whole community loves God’s Word and studies it passionately. God’s Spirit, speaking through his Word, is the power that transforms us into a group of individual sinners, into the Bride of Christ, the hands and feet of Jesus.