Why we do what we do

Why do people go to a watch the Olympics live when the views and replays are so much better on TV, and there’s no inconvenience with travel? Because gathering is such a powerful thing. 

The sociologist Émile Durkheim described gathering in one place as ‘an exceptionally powerful stimulant.’ He continues, ‘Once the individuals are gathered together, a sort of electricity is generated from their closeness and quickly launches them to an extraordinary height of exaltation.’ That might seem a bit over-the-top, but anyone who has been in a stadium for the closing moments of a race knows it’s not always an exaggeration. 

God knows about– in fact, he designed – this feature of human social life. And that’s why he exhorts us in Hebrews 10:25 ‘not to give up meeting together’; why 1 Corinthians 11 talks about ‘when you come together’. It does something, even on a purely social level.

Sociology cannot grasp the most important thing about our gatherings – that we gather in the presence of God himself. Church is emphatically not just a club, a party, or a concert. It is the place where God himself has pledged specially to meet us. 

Of course, we are always seated with Christ at the right hand of God; of course, we can truly expect the transformative experience of coming before him in our private or family prayers. But, just as pagan worship truly involves participation with demons (1 Cor 10:20), so Christian worship truly involves fellowship with God. 

That is what Jesus means when he promises that ‘where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them’; that’s what Hebrews 12 is describing when it says that ‘you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering… and to Jesus.’

I hadn’t noticed before that Hebrews 12 speaks of ‘innumerable angels in festal gathering’ – in other words, that the worship we are joining in with when we gather on earth is fundamentally a joyful thing. When we look back at the gathered worship of the Old Testament, we shouldn’t be surprised. To gather is to celebrate; to gather is to feast; to feast is to rejoice. Psalm 42:4 recalls the ‘glad shouts and songs of praise’ of ‘a multitude keeping festival.’ 

At the same time, the gatherings of the Old Testament are also called ‘solemn assemblies’; they as often involve fasting and weeping as rejoicing. What are we to make of this? 

Our church gatherings truly involve both – we are cut to the heart as the word of God pierces us and strikes us down, and we rejoice with inexpressible joy as the Lord revives and welcomes us. So, our gatherings should be deeply solemn and joyful – do we come expecting that?

Our Sunday services are not thrown together at random or for convenience; they actually follow a structure which not only reflects historic Christian worship and the logic of the gospel, but more importantly the shape of gathering before God revealed in the Bible. 

Although the patterns of worship at Sinai (Exodus 19–24) or at Jerusalem (2 Chronicles 5–7) allows a certain amount of flexibility, the overall shape is fixed: we gather, God calls us before him, we are cleansed, we hear him speak, we have access to God, we are welcomed to his table, we are sent out into the world. 

Others outline it even more simply: call, confession, consecration, communion, commissioning. We do what we do, then, not to perform some elaborate historical re-enactment, but in order to meet with God on his own terms, with an expectation of being comforted, nourished and transformed by him.

People think of some churches as ‘liturgical’ and others as ‘non-liturgical’; the reality is every church has a pretty set order of play, however informal. And there is always some rationale behind that order: it’s traditional, it’s spontaneous (it’s not), it’s accessible to outsiders. 

We want our worship to be ordered by Scripture – and, as #4 explored, Scripture itself reveals an overall gospel shape and particular elements that give us that framework. Within that shape, notice how everything we do is part of a dialogue with God: he calls us to worship, we respond with praise; he convicts us of sin, we repent – and so on. 

But this back-and-forth is not a conversation between equals. On God’s part it is pure grace – he even invites us to his table. On our part it should be pure gratitude and wonder. I find it helpful to recognise where we are in the dialogue as we gather on Sundays – is this God speaking, or us responding? We should listen attentively, and respond gratefully.

The ‘call to worship’ which begins our services is not merely the calling of a courtroom to order or a concert audience to silence. It reflects our conviction that God takes the initiative in all our dealings with him – he summons us from heaven, and welcomes us into his assembly. 

Let us not forget that we are always in God’s presence objectively, and we have access to him subjectively at any moment through prayer. But he calls us into his special presence in our gathered worship. If our worship is a dialogue, it is one where God speaks first, and we respond; God invites, we receive. 

When God calls us to worship, we respond, naturally enough, with joyful songs of praise. The Hebrew word ‘hallelujah’ – literally ‘Praise the LORD’ – occurs 24 times in the Psalms, and is carried directly over into the ‘alleluias’ of Revelation 19, and we respond by praising him. Ephesians, 2 Corinthians and 1 Peter all begin with ‘Blessed be the God and Father…’, and we respond by blessing him.

We can respond rightly to God’s call to worship him in various ways: we can honour him in our hearts, praise him silently or vocally in our prayers, or ‘present our bodies as living sacrifices’ (Romans 12:1). But it’s striking how many of the Bible’s own ‘calls to worship’ are expressly calls to sing: ‘Serve the Lord with gladness! Come into his presence with singing!’ (Psalm 100:2); ‘Praise the Lord! For it is good to sing praises to our God’ (Psalm 147:1); ‘Oh come, let us sing to the Lord’ (Psalm 95:1); ‘singing and making melody to the Lord with your heart’ (Ephesians 5:19). 

I have argued that when Hebrews 13:15 says ‘let us continually offer up a sacrifice of praise to God’, it is calling us to offer thank offerings of song to God, just as David arranged for singers to praise God musically at the tent he set up for the Ark in Jerusalem. Our singing, then, is important, not mere padding for sermon or sacrament. It is our joyful, obedient response to God’s call to worship him, not only in our lives but with our lips.

James 5:13 says, ‘Is anyone among you suffering? Let him pray. Is anyone cheerful? Let him sing praise.’ Though the songs of the Bible itself very often express lament and anguish in trouble, the fundamental character of singing is joy and gladness: ‘come before him with joyful songs’ (Psalm 100:2); ‘let us make a joyful noise to him with songs of praise’ (Psalm 95:2); ‘play skillfully, and shout for joy’ (Psalm 33:3). In much the same way that feasting and rejoicing are inextricably bound together – though of course it’s possible to feast miserably – so singing and rejoicing are made for each other. God himself ‘rejoices over [us] with singing’ (Zephaniah 3:17).

Many of us, perhaps especially in Britain, feel a great self-consciousness about our singing; it takes quite a lot for us to disarm ourselves enough to sing with joy in our hearts. But that is what we should aspire to and aim towards, especially as we come to praise our mighty and gracious God. This is why we begin our services with songs of praise and thanksgiving – and with cheerful, upbeat tunes!

What should we sing? However we respond to the secondary questions – old or new, upbeat or meditative, thee or you – surely the most important answer is ‘biblical songs’.

 Colossians 3:16 says, 

‘Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God.’ 

That implies, I think, two kinds of biblical song: first, songs that are richly informed by the word of Christ, such that they amount to wise teaching of one another; second, songs that are the word of Christ: ‘psalms and hymns and spiritual songs’ (the three terms are probably the types of song mentioned in the superscriptions in the Psalms). 

Evangelical churches today are good at the first kind of biblical song, even to the point of sacrificing lyrical or musical accessibility in favour of rich, edifying words. But, strangely, we are not so comfortable with the actual songs of the Bible! That’s why we’re working through the Psalter both in our sermons and our singing in our evening services – because if we’re Bible people, then we should sing Bible songs.

‘Oh sing to the Lord a new song, for he has done marvellous things!’ (Psalm 98:1)

The psalms repeatedly tell us to sing ‘a new song’ (33:3; 40:3; 96:1; 144:9; 149:1). In fact, in the Bible that God’s most wonderful acts in his people’s history usually inspire new songs: the rescue from Egypt (Exodus 15), David being rescued from his enemies to become king (Psalms in general), the restoration from exile (Isaiah 12), the incarnation of Christ (Luke 1), the death and exaltation of Christ (Revelation 5:9–10). 

Though we have no further new history-shaking ‘marvellous things’ until Jesus returns, Christians have understandably and rightly been moved to write and sing more new songs in light of the salvation Christ has won for us – songs that express in every tongue and musical idiom our praise and thanks to God. That means, I think, that as the gospel progresses through the world new songs will continue to be written. Many new songs, however sincerely intended, are not really worth popularising. But we want to enjoy the best of those fresh songs to praise God and edify one another, even though most of them have a short shelf life.

C. S. Lewis gives the following advice in his essay ‘On the Reading of Old Books’:

‘if somebody must read only the new or only the old, I would advise him to read the old… precisely because he is an amateur and therefore much less protected than the expert against the dangers of an exclusive contemporary diet.’

I’ve often mused on how that applies to our hymns and songs. All the old songs (many of which are not actually that old) were new once, but now they are well-worn and time-tested; only the cream of the crop from each era remains. So as a matter of prudence, not to mention gratitude and honour to our forefathers in the faith, we should treasure the old songs, which nurtured those who went before and often still serve us well today. And, as a rule of thumb, the things which have already endured a long time are most likely to endure as long again. These are the songs which our children and grandchildren will most likely inherit, which we will sing on our deathbeds, and perhaps they will too. This is not to say new classics won’t ever emerge, or that old classics won’t ever fade away – but for now we have already stored up a  rich treasury of old songs to enjoy, and with which to glorify God.

I remember finding an old home-bound book of worship songs in a previous church. Judging by the copyright notices it must have been produced in the early 1980s. Yet despite having grown up in evangelical churches since not long after that, I only recognised a handful of the songs, and even the ones I did know were throwback classics at best. And that’s fine!

If we want new songs (see #10) and accept that only a few of the new songs mature into old songs (#11), most have to fade away. Charles Wesley wrote over 6,500 hymns; we might still sing 20 of them – that’s 0.3% of the prolific output of one of the greatest hymnwriters of all time.

Recording technologies – first vinyl, then tapes, then CDs, mp3s, YouTube – accelerate the aging process. Try listening to the biggest new songs of 2014 or 2004 in 2024 – a lot of them already sound quite tired. Again, that’s fine! Often those songs come with nostalgia and gratitude for God’s faithfulness and grace to us over the years, and that’s a good thing. However, it does mean that songs come and go in church life. Some churches overwhelmingly opt for fresh songs; at All Saints we lean towards the time-tested songs. But how many even of those old classics will still be in circulation in a generation? In ten generations? Not many. And that’s fine.

The first of Martin Luther’s famous Ninety-Five Theses reads,

‘When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said “Repent,” he intended that the entire life of believers should be repentance.’

Daily we pray, ‘Forgive us our sins’. So it is right that we acknowledge our sins in prayer when we gather together, as well – in a way the whole Old Testament system of public sacrifices for sin bears witness to this.

The lovely thing about heartfelt prayers of repentance is that their answer is immediate and guaranteed – the Lord is watching for our return, that he might run to us and embrace us.

Our weekly confession of sin follows the natural and biblical pattern: first we are convicted, then we confess, and finally we are assured of pardon. So, in 2 Samuel 12, in verse 10 God says through the prophet Nathan, ‘you have despised me and have taken the wife of Uriah the Hittite to be your wife’; in verse 13 David says, ‘I have sinned against the LORD’, and immediately Nathan responds, ‘The Lord also has put away your sin’. There’s a similar pattern in Psalm 32:3–5. And so that’s our pattern, too: conviction, confession, assurance of pardon.

Christians down the ages have spoken of a ‘threefold use of the Law’ – that is, of the moral law revealed by God in various ways: especially in the Scriptures, even more particularly in the Ten Commandments. 

One use of the law is to restrain sin in the world – so, even unjust nations have somewhat just laws because of God’s kindness, even wicked people are somewhat held back from evil by the pangs of conscience. 

Another use – traditionally, the ‘third use’ – is to show us what righteous living looks like for God’s people. 

But the use of the law we’re considering here is the one described in Romans 3:20: ‘through the law comes knowledge of sin.’ It is a mirror which displays the perfect holiness of God and our utter failure to match up to it, so that, ‘feeling our weakness under the law, [we] may learn to implore the help of grace’. 

Perhaps we come to confess our sins on Sundays with certain things already burdening us, but reading God’s commands may convict us of still more. A glimpse of the holiness of God causes us to cry out with Isaiah, ‘Woe is me! For I am lost!’ (Isa 6:5), and with Peter, ‘Depart from me, for I am a sinful man’ (Luke 5:8). But – wonder of wonders – the Lord replies, ‘Do not be afraid.’

Psalm 32:3: ‘When I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long’.

It is good to confess – that is, not simply to groan under the burden of the guilt and consequences of sin, but actually to say sorry to God, out loud, for the offence of our individual sins (see Joshua 7:20–21). The tax collector prayed, ‘Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner.’

This, I think, is a much neglected part of our personal devotional lives – and our life together as people who are instructed to ‘confess… your sins one to another, and pray one for another’ (James 5:16).

We also confess our sins corporately, just as Ezra gathered those who ‘trembled at the word of the God of Israel’ to say, ‘we are before you in our guilt, for none can stand before you’ (Ezra 9).

The Bible contains many clear assurances of what happens when we confess our sin: ‘you forgave the iniquity of my sin’ (Psalm 32:5); ‘he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness’ (1 John 1:9); ‘I tell you, this man went down to his house justified’ (Luke 18:14).

So we should take confessing our sins seriously – because they are serious, and because restoration leads to rejoicing, both for us, and in heaven itself (Luke 15:7).

Jesus once told a man, ‘Take heart, my son; your sins are forgiven’ (Matthew 9:2). Okay, so the paralysed man in question was probably hoping for, even expecting, something rather different – he wanted to be healed. But think, once he had been healed, how precious those words from Jesus must have been. The healing itself was just to prove the point: Jesus has authority to forgive sins, to tell people beyond a shadow of a doubt that their sins are forgiven.

Or, to return to an Old Testament example, think of the comfort it was to David to hear, immediately after he’d admitted his wrongdoing, the prophet Nathan say, ‘The Lord has put away your sin’ (2 Samuel 12:13).

Of course, we can confess our sins to God in the silence of our own hearts and be assured of his forgiveness when we’re entirely alone. But God has set things up so that we are greatly encouraged by hearing from the lips of another person that God loves us, that God welcomes us back. As one writer put it, ‘The Christ in his own heart is weaker than the Christ in the word of his brother; his own heart is uncertain, his brother’s is sure’.

This is part of what it is to ‘speak the truth in love’ to one another (Eph 4:15). And this is why, in our services at All Saints, when we confess our sins we hear the reassuring reminder: ‘God forgives you.’