Worship Is More than Music

This past year at the NRB convention—the annual National Religious Broadcasting convention—there were seven or eight thousand people in the audience. And they had an extravagant service that ran for about two hours that was supposed to culminate in the preaching of the Word. And what I remember vividly about what took place on that occasion was that prior to the reading of the Scripture and the preaching of the Word, they had a season of forty minutes of music, and the leader said, “We’re going to have our time of worship before we hear the message.”

I’m still scratching my head about that. What is it that is going on in the contemporary church that divorces preaching from worship, as if listening attentively to the Word of God was not a vital part of worship? Since when is the offering of our tithes to the Lord on Sunday morning not an integral part of worship? Since when is prayer not an essential dimension of the assembling together of the saints in worship?

There’s something wrong here, folks, something deeply wrong about our understanding of worship. And what my burden is about this in the church today is really here is where the Christian community experiences the eclipse of God, which is the last place in the world the people of God should be placed in darkness about His character.