How Shall We Worship - What Idols Tempt Us Away from Worshiping the Only True God?

I grew up in a conservative, church-attending, God-talk-giving, people-shunning culture. The denominations in which I grew up tended to use the word "idolatry" to judge "those people out there," or the people who weren't sitting in church pews on Sunday mornings. If I hear one more sermon about how people outside the church are worshiping things other than God, I think I may scream: why was that news to us? Why did it surprise us that people who have chosen not to worship Jesus will worship something/someone else? Why did we spend so much energy railing against people who worship idols when they were not there in the service to hear our railing in the first place?

We likely spent so much energy trying to name other people's idolatry in order to hide our own (55). I think Dawn struck gold in this chapter, not only because she affirms something I've thought for awhile now. She struck gold because she nailed the very reason why God would communicate to God's people in the Scriptures why God hates idolatry. It was to God's people that the reminder was offered in Psalm 96:5 that the gods of the nations are mere idols. It was to God's people that a reminder was offered that God is great, God is our Creator, that God is worth our praise, that God is above any false god. It is fitting, then, that Dawn would invite God's people to consider what idols tempt us away from worship in spirit and in truth.

This fifth chapter (and most vital question so far, in my books) observes how quickly God's people will replace God with anything else in worship. Here Dawn calls out how many of our worship practices, rituals, ideologies, etc., become more important than God when we worship God. If God's people truly responded to God's worthiness of our adoration, then we would "resist all idolatries of self and comfort and ease, all divinizing of worship leaders, all sacralizing of our tastes and preferences, all gods of power or success" (49). It is inappropriate to elevate a person, a program, or a function of the church to receive our adoration and highest appreciation. It is inappropriate for God's people to stress one side or another of several worship tensions like those listed on p. 53: is worship about hearing God's truth or responding to God; is it about the head or the heart; is it about keeping fresh or maintaining continuity with the past; is it contextualized or universal; is it an opportunity for new expression or familiarity for the sake of congregational participation; is it about order or freedom in the Spirit; is it about joy, delight, and elation, or sorrow, penitence, and lament; is it about enthusiastic expression or silence; is it about ritual or spontaneity; is it about simplicity or complexity? The answer should be, "Yes."

This is why I think the word "balance" has been such a trap for God's people who worship in 21st century, North American churches. I recoil at the word "balance" because discussions around "balance" generally begin and/or end in anything but balance. We have convinced ourselves that we have two poles in each of the questions above. Each polar extreme (e.g. freshness vs. continuity with the past) is placed on a scale. If we have enough freshness and enough continuity, then the scale will balance, and we'll all live to see another day in church. If, however, there's too much freshness or too much continuity, then the balance will tip to one side or another, and we are left in despair. Maintain that balance above all else! we say.

This simply cannot be. Because the answer to each of the above polarities is, "yes," we cannot strive so hard to strike balance with every tension we encounter. Seeking balance requires that we have just enough of this and just enough of that. The question becomes, "Who decides how much of one thing equals a balanced amount of something else?" Does one fresh skit in worship have so much weight that it means we should sing Doxology to Old Hundredth after the offering, recite the Apostles' Creed, and end with a hymn just to "balance" things out? Maybe doing one "old" hymn is enough to require a fresh video clip, a liturgical dance, and a praise chorus? This is nonsense that leads precisely where Dawn indicates: an idolatrous worship of the things we do rather than the One for whom we do them (52-56). Triune God has triumphed over all other gods threefold, as Father, Son, and Spirit, and, therefore, God has triumphed over things like worship elements, the appearance of a worship space or those leading in worship, our reputation in the community and our denomination, and whether we are "current" enough. If we spent as much energy worshiping God on every level listed above as we do on balancing, I suspect our worship gatherings would become revolutionary for our faith and, ironically enough, more interesting to people not in our faith.

Dawn's solution to moving away from an idolatrous balancing act into true worship of our only true God is genius. She invites the reader to consider another tension in Scripture: that between fear and love. Fortunately, she clarifies that "fear" is not synonymous with terror or feeling scared, nor is it simply reverence and awe, as we often hear it said in our camp. It is actually a realization that we are unworthy when compared to God, so we do not take God's love and mercy for granted (50). When we worship, then, it is to include both a proper sense of fear and a proper sense of love (both God's love for us and ours for God). Resolving this tension by worshiping in both "moods" better enables us to connect with and to elevate God in a way that rescues us from the snares we lay for ourselves in worship. As the Bible seems to indicate, the solution to a faith problem is neither working it out in a frenzy of self-urgency nor ignoring it so it will go away. The solution to our faith problems is to worship - to worship God, who is worth it, with all that we are in every way that we can, keeping God as our focus. It's as if Jesus meant it when He told the disciples to seek God's Kingdom first or that Paul meant it when he instructed those reading his letter to keep our eyes fixed on Jesus.

This chapter certainly unearthed some huge questions and opinions from me, but I close wondering how many of the idolatries Dawn exposes are present in my daily, personal worship. How many are in our worship at IBC? (I think I can tell you some of them....) How many are so prevalent in our present-day North American churches that we wouldn't even recognize them as a problem?! God, have mercy.

Great quote: "We spend our lives choosing what pleases us, so it is decidedly countercultural to search instead for what pleases God" (55). I like being countercultural. :)