In the days of John Calvin and John Knox the rule for the reformation of Christian worship was: “Make it Biblical.” The Reformers then threw out of the church sanctuaries all the painted images of the saints. They substituted a plain communion table for the High Altar. They stripped from the order of service what they judged to be “superstitious practices.” They swept out the elaborate music of the mass and sang instead the Psalms of David set to simple and chaste tunes.  One writer in the Swiss Reformation said that the worship services in the Reformed churches became plain with a “bald Biblical simplicity.”

The rule for the reforming of Christian worship in the time of Calvin and Knox was “Make it Biblical.”

Now-a-days we keep hearing urgent demands for a reformation of our contemporary worship.  And the rule universally urged is: “Make it relevant to contemporary life” — “Make it vital.”

Sincere Christians in our day complain that what makes worship in the churches of our time so insipid for them is that the same stereotype is repeated endlessly, no matter what the occasion.  Others complain that our organized religious establishments encourage people to feign more than they feel and to try to traffic in faith as a commodity that can be had second-hand, when it never can.

One of the great services of the critics and philosophers of our time, both those who are Christian and those who are not, has been their insistence that all human beings act from “good faith” and not from “bad faith” — that their thinking, emoting, and acting, be “authentic” and genuine, geared to real life, both within one’s own being and in the world without.

So, the over-riding rule for the reformation of Christian worship in our time has become, “Make it relevant to life.”

So, I’m suggesting for us in this Lenten Season that we try to be true both to our Reformed tradition and alive to the temper of our time.  Let us dedicate ourselves anew to making all our worship — private worship, family worship, and congregational worship — both Biblically rooted and vitally relevant to life.

In carrying out such a reformation of our worship may I suggest three additional rules essential for the successful accomplishment of such a mission?

First, let us try to make all our worship honest.  Be honest and sincere in private worship, in family worship, and when we come with the congregation into the sanctuary.

Jesus warned his disciples against using “vain repetitions such as the heathen do” in their prayers to God.  He told the parable of the Pharisee and the Publican which draws the contrast between a man who tells God the truth about himself as a sinner, and that poor pretender who paraded his virtues in the false notion that he was really paying.

Jeremy Taylor gives as the chief rule in prayer, “Do not lie to God.”  And Arthur Gossip advised: “Do not pose and pretend, either to God or yourself, in your religious exercises; do not say more than you mean, nor use exaggerated language that goes beyond the facts when speaking to God whose word is truth.”  (A.J. Gossip — The Secret Place of the Most High)

So, when we are sorry for our sins, let us in all sincerity say so.  “But at other times, when we are not really much disturbed about it. . . it were better to tell God the truth, not using unreal, heaped up language — not saying that we are over-whelmed with sorrow for our sinfulness, if it is not so; but rather this: ‘In all our sinfulness, we have added this last and crowning sinfulness, that we are not much worried about it.  Be pleased, in pity, to grant us such a measure of sorrow for our failures as will lead us to a true repentance; and, through that to a new way of life.”’  (Gossip –Ibid.)

How much better the honest prayer of that Scotsman who prayed: “I may today, O Lord, forget thee, but do thou not forget me.” God wants the truth from us.  He must have the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, or we cannot really worship.  Let us take this fundamental rubric for reforming our own personal worship and our common worship: First, Tell God the truth.

Second, I suggest this rule for us if we are sincerely concerned about reforming our own and all worship: “Be alert.  Be there.”

How account for so much fruitless worship — so much perfunctory church attendance — so much “going and getting nothing out of it?”

The answer is so simple and obvious I hate to mention it.  Though physically present, so often we are mentally and spiritually absent — when we sit in church, and when we kneel at our bedside at night.  Of course, God has no chance to get at us for we are not there with Him in that glorious venture of the soul called worship.

When we attempt to worship, be there, be alert, and something will happen.  Of course, sometimes, praise God, something happens, even if we aren’t alert — aren’t attentive — if we are just faithfully present.  At least we are giving God his chance at us.  His Holy Spirit can use so many things in worship, especially music and scripture, to get at us and jerk us to alertness.

I remember telling you before of a never to be forgotten personal experience when I was a stranger in a distant city and came to worship in a church where I had never been before.  The minister leading the service began in a monotonous drone the responsive reading: “Bless the Lord, O my soul; and all that is within me, bless his Holy name.”  And I joined my voice inattentively, almost unconsciously, with the weary voices of those unknown fellow Christians in the well-known response: “Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits.” But how listlessly, woodenly, I began.  My thoughts were far away.  I was angrily brooding over a slight and a wrong that I thought had been done to me.

But suddenly, something happened to me — with a rush there came into my consciousness an overwhelming sense of the presence of God and of his goodness to me.  Ringing in my ears were the old familiar cadences, worn smooth by much repeating from the great 103rd Psalm: “Who forgiveth all thine iniquities, who healeth all thy diseases, who redeemeth thy life from destruction, who crowneth thee with loving kindness and tender mercies.” But in a split second the words came alive, and flooding through my soul were the rushing currents of poignant personal memories, driven on by the swelling tide of the sense of the goodness of God.  Pushing aside all encumbrances that irresistible stream stirred my slumbering soul to its deepest depths and I saw how in deed and in fact my God in his wonderful goodness to me had forgiven all my iniquities, healed my diseases and the ills of my loved ones, saved even me from ever threatening catastrophes and crowned my life with loving kindness and tender mercies.

My whole life I saw in a flash, as I have heard that drowning people sometimes experience – from childhood to maturity all spread out before me: our family in the old house, my Mother, and Father and my brothers about the table at home, the adventures and misadventures of boyhood, the struggles with others and myself, and then the family God had given me.  I saw it all, I say, in one ecstatic moment, as I ought always to see it, as the gracious gift of God, but never before had so completely experienced it.

O, what a revelation, to glimpse in a fleeting second the whole of my life bathed in the glorious, golden light of the goodness of God as streaming from my Creator, my Redeemer, My Heavenly Father who had made me and taken care of me.  So, I wanted to cry aloud in that strange congregation my overwhelming conviction of the goodness of God:

            “How good is man’s life, the mere living!

                        How fit to employ

            All the heart and the soul and the sense

                        Forever in Joy.”

As a third and final rubric for our continual concern about keeping our worship Biblical and making it relevant, I suggest this: that we remain ever ready to be changed by our worship experience.

What was our expectation as we started out for church today?  That we would see friends and family here – maybe meet some visitors – sing some hymns, or listen while the choir sang – go through all customary motions of another Sunday service, and then, when church turned out, leave for our usual Sunday noontime meal?  Is that our habitual expectation as we come for Sunday worship?

And what do we expect to come from our kneeling to say our prayers at home, or to result from our reading the Bible?

Oh, if only we could remember that the very nature of true Christian worship requires a readiness on our part to be changed by our worship experience.

Dare we forget that when we come for Christian worship we come, not to bend God to our point of view, but to be inclined to His will; not to give God our orders, but to receive His commands for us to carry out; not to correct his omnipotent righteousness, but to hope that feeble, ignorant, erring humanity (which we all are) may be corrected, cleansed, and empowered for the mission God has for us.

George MacDonald once wrote that, “Nothing is inexorable but love.”  That is, nothing is inflexible, invincible, save only love.  There is nothing that cannot be moved or persuaded to change, but love.  “Therefore, all that is not beautiful in the beloved of God, all that comes between and is not of love’s kind, must be destroyed.  Our God is a consuming fire.  It is not that the fire will burn us if we do not worship thus, but that the fire will burn us until we worship thus.  The wrath will consume what we call “our self,” until the self God made shall appear.  For that which cannot be shaken will remain.  The man or woman whose deeds are evil fears the burning.  But the burning will not come the less because he or she fears it, or denies it.  Escape is hopeless.  For the divine love is inexorable.  Our God is a consuming fire.” (George MacDonald)

In worship we present ourselves to God for His cleansing, His correcting, and His saving power to go to work within and through us.  How much more rapidly responsive to the Eternal God we can be if we remain ever ready to be changed by our worship experiences.