Physical Actions in Worship as Formation

Transcript

I'd like to ask you to turn with me in your Bibles to Psalm 95, Psalm 95 this evening, and we're gonna read the first seven verses. Psalm 95 beginning in verse one. Hear now the Word of the Lord. O come, let us sing to the Lord, let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation. Let us come into His presence with thanksgiving.

Let us make a joyful noise to Him with songs of praise. For the Lord is a great God and a great King above all gods. In His hand are the depths of the earth, the heights of the mountains are His also. The sea is His for He made it, and on His hands formed the dry land. O come, let us worship and bow down.

Let us kneel before the Lord our maker, for He is our God and we are the people of His pasture and the sheep of His hand. This is the Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. Let's pray together. Father, we once again marvel at the fact that you have called us to come into your presence, we who are sinners and unworthy to be in the presence of a holy God, but that you have called us through the blood sacrifice of your Son Jesus Christ, whose sin atoned for us and paid the penalty that we deserve.

And we praise you that we have the joy of entering into your presence to bring you the glory and the honor that you deserve and to worship at your feet. And I pray tonight that as we continue to consider the fact that you form us and you renew your covenant with us each and every time we gather, that we would have a renewed sense of thanksgiving and praise for what you have done for us and what you continue to do each week. We pray this in Christ's name. Amen. You may be seated.

Probably one of the most common criticisms of Reformed worship that we hear over and over again, the kind of worship that we have been teaching and taking from the scriptures in this entire series, probably one of the most common criticisms of Reformed worship is that we are opposed to the body, that we have reduced worship to a purely intellectual exercise as though the highest act of devotion were to sit perfectly still and think very hard. Well, what I want to do this evening is to address that criticism because it is precisely wrong. Reformed worship, as we have been dealing with all through this series and as we started at the beginning of this series, Reformed worship is worship that is regulated by scripture. That is the heart of the regulative principle. We worship God the way that he has told us to worship him, not according to our own inventions or preferences.

That's really at the heart of what Reformed worship is. And when we open the scripture, we do not find a God who is indifferent to what we do with our bodies. We find a God who, in fact, commands physical gestures. He prescribes bodily postures. He tells his people not only what we are to think with our minds and what we are to say with our lips, but also what we are to do with our bodies in worship.

And so what I'd like to do this evening is to see that the Bible does, in fact, prescribe certain postures and physical gestures, but that because of Pentecostalism, physical expression has become quite unbiblical in our day. And so what we need to do is to correct our understanding of the purpose of physical gestures in worship that are regulated according to scripture. And what we're gonna see is that our physical gestures must fit within the purpose of worship that we have been developing out of the scriptures for this entire series. We have seen over and over again that worship is not primarily about our expression toward God, but it is rather primarily about what God is doing to form us into worshippers who will glorify God with the entirety of our lives. And physical gestures in our corporate worship are one of the instruments that God uses to form us to be the kind of people that God has called us to be.

So first, let's begin with what the Bible actually says about physical gestures in worship. Psalm 95, where we began this evening, contains a rich vocabulary of physical action. In verses 1 and 2, the psalmist commands vocal praise, singing, making a joyful noise. That's not a metaphor. Singing actually requires the body.

It requires lungs and vocal cords and breath. You cannot sing silently in your head and call it obedience to Psalm 95. But the physical vocabulary intensifies in verse 6. Here the psalmist issues three direct commands, and each describe a different bodily posture. The first word, which is translated "worship" in our English translation, literally means to prostrate oneself, to fall face down before a superior.

The second command is to bow down, and the third command is to kneel. So there, just in one verse, we have three verbs, three physical postures, three things to do with your body. But of course, Psalm 95 is not an isolated text. The Bible is, in fact, saturated with commands about what to do with the body in worship. First, we see throughout the scripture that God's people stand for the reading of God's Word.

Psalm 134, verse 1, addresses those who stand in the house of the Lord. When the law was read to the people in Nehemiah 9-3, the entire congregation stood. When Jesus read from Isaiah in the synagogue at Nazareth, he stood to read. The consistent pattern of God's people in scripture is to stand when the Word is read. But second, as we see here in Psalm 95, God's people also kneel or bow to pray.

For example, when Moses stood before the glory of God at Mount Sinai, he quickly bowed his head toward the earth. When Daniel was told that praying to his God would cost him his life, he went home and he knelt three times a day and prayed just as he had always done. And in the New Testament, our Lord Himself fell on his face and prayed in Gethsemane on the night that he was betrayed. Peter knelt and prayed before raising Tabitha from the dead in Acts chapter 9, and Paul knelt on a beach and tire to pray with the believers before departing in Acts 21, verse 5. And then, consider how frequently the Psalms prescribe the lifting of hands.

Psalm 28, verse 2, "Hear the voice of my pleas for mercy when I cry to you for help when I lift up my hands toward your most holy sanctuary." Psalm 63, verse 4, "So I will bless you as long as I live. In your name I will lift up my hands." Psalm 119, 48, "I will lift up my hands toward your commandments which I love." Psalm 134, 2, "Lift up your hands to the holy place and bless the Lord." Psalm 141, 2, "Let my prayer be counted as incense before you and the lifting up of my hands as the evening sacrifice." And Psalm 143, verse 6, "I stretch out my hands to you, my soul thirsts for you like a parched land." Six times in the Psalter alone, the lifting of hands is either prescribed or modeled in worship. Consider also the priestly gesture of lifted hands in benediction, which was of course modeled by Aaron, the high priest, and when our Lord Jesus ascended to the Father, the last thing his disciples saw was his hands lifted over them in benediction. In Luke 24, verse 50, it says lifting up his hands, he blessed them. And in 1st Timothy chapter 2, verse 8, Paul instructs Timothy concerning the ordering of public prayer where he says, "I desire that in every place the men should pray, lifting holy hands without anger or quarreling." So there we have standing, and we have bowing or kneeling, and we have the lifting of hands.

Perhaps the most remarkable passage of all of this is in Nehemiah chapter 8, verse 6, where in one passage the people stand for the reading of the Word, they all answer, "Amen and Amen." They lift up their hands and then they bow their heads and worship the Lord with their faces to the ground. Standing, lifting hands, bowing, and prostration, all in one verse, all in corporate worship. Now, we need to pause and deal with what we have just seen from the Word of God. The Bible does not merely permit physical gestures in worship, it actually commands them. Singing, bowing, kneeling, standing, lifting hands, these are not optional accessories to an otherwise cerebral experience, these are prescribed elements of worshiping that God has regulated in His Word.

So the question is not whether we will use our bodies in worship, the question is what theology of the body we will bring into our worship. Now, of course, a lot of contemporary Christians would look at all of these references to physical expression in worship and they would say, "See, this is exactly why we lift our hands, this is why we're so physical in worship." I mean, if you just Google worship and then look at the images that come up, they are almost all of people with closed eyes and lifted hands, right? The contemporary evangelical world has no shortage of physical expression. But here is the problem, the manner of physical expression that is so ubiquitous in evangelical worship today doesn't actually come from Scripture, that comes from the Pentecostal movement and the theology behind their physical expression is fundamentally different from the theology of the Bible. In Pentecostal and Charismatic worship, physical gesture is understood as spontaneous, individualistic expression of an inner emotional state produced primarily through manipulation of musical atmosphere.

The worshipper is moved by the music, overcome by feeling, and expresses that feeling through bodily action, swaying, lifting the hands, closing the eyes, maybe falling down on the knees. This theology of physical expression is really grounded in a theology of music that treats music itself as a means for encountering the presence of God, what some of them even call musical sacramentality. They view music as a sacrament. And of course, that theology didn't just stay in Pentecostal churches. Through the music of the Charismatic movement, the embodied theology of Pentecostalism has entered churches whose doctrinal statements deny Charismatic theology.

When a church with Reformed Baptist confession sings music produced by Charismatic worship groups, the congregation absorbs that theology embedded in the musical forms regardless of what their doctrinal statement says. And one of the most visible effects of that absorption of Pentecostal theology is a particular approach to physical expressiveness, spontaneous, individualistic, and emotionally driven. But each three of those characteristics of Pentecostal physical expressiveness needs to be critiqued from Scripture. And hopefully, because of this series that we've engaged in now for many months, we can see the problem with all three of those characteristics. So let's go through each of them briefly in turn.

First, the Pentecostal approach treats physical gesture as something that just wells up from within, unplanned and unstructured, which they believe to be a sign that the Spirit is moving. But Paul tells us that all things in corporate worship are to be done decently and in order in 1 Corinthians chapter 14 verse 40. Worship that is regulated by Scripture is worship that is ordered, not chaotic. The gestures that God prescribes are not left to the impulse of the moment. Physical gestures that God prescribes for worship are to be woven into the structure of the worship service.

They are commanded at specific points for specific purposes. But second, also in Pentecostal worship, physical expression is really a private act that just happens to take place in a public setting. Each person lifts their hands when they feel like it, sways when they feel like it, closes their eyes when music reaches a certain intensity. But of course, as we have seen in the Bible, the biblical pattern of corporate worship is that it is corporate. Let us worship and bow down.

Let us kneel before the Lord our maker, Psalm 95 says. Every verb is plural. These are things that the gathered body does together as a body, not things that individuals do as private acts of devotion that just happen to be done in public. The congregation bows in prayer together. The congregation stands together for the reading of the word.

The congregation lifts hands together. The unity of the gesture reflects the unity of the body. And then third, the Pentecostal theology of gesture assumes that the purpose of physical expression is just to express what we already feel inside, that the body is just an outlet for our emotion. But again, as we've been seeing throughout this series, worship is not just about what we are expressing toward God because we happen to feel it. No, it is about what God is doing to form our lives of worship.

And so physical gestures are not just outlets, they are instruments. God did not prescribe physical gestures so that we could just show him how we feel. He prescribed physical gestures so that he could form us into the kind of people that he is calling us to be. Physical gestures are not primarily expressive, they are primarily formative, just like everything we do in the context of corporate worship. As we have stressed over and over again in this series, when God calls us to gather, he's not calling us to perform for him.

He's calling us into his presence so that he can act upon us. So that he might speak to us through his word, feed us at his table, renew his covenant with us, and send us out formed and shaped by our meeting with him. Corporate worship, as we've said, is a means of grace. It is one of the primary instruments that God uses to sanctify his people. And once we understand that, which again has been something we've said over and over again, we've seen it in the Word of God, once we understand the formative purpose of everything that we're doing, then the prescription of physical gestures makes perfect sense.

Here's the key. God prescribed physical gestures for the same reason he prescribed everything else in corporate worship, not primarily to be an outlet for what we already feel, but to be an instrument for forming what we ought to feel. Physical gestures are formative, not merely expressive. So how do they do it then? How do physical gestures form us?

Well, the answer lies in the biblical truth that our bodies and our spirits are not separate. They are united. We are not souls trapped in our bodies just waiting to escape. No, what we do with the body is good. Our bodies are good and God-given.

We are embodied souls, and we always will be. What we do with our bodies, and this is God-designed, what we do with our bodies affects our minds and our hearts. The two are woven together by the God who made us from dust and breathed into us the breath of life. And so because of the union of body and soul, what we do with our bodies forms us internally. We already know this from common experience.

Just think about a couple examples. Every athlete knows that physical discipline forms internal character, right? The man who rises at 5 o'clock every morning to run doesn't simply build strong legs, although he does, but he also builds perseverance, self-control, and the capacity to endure discomfort for the sake of a goal. The body is being trained, but the soul is being trained along with the body. Or the same thing with the soldier.

A soldier's drill does the exact same thing. The repeated physical motions of marching and standing at attention and holding formation, those are not just merely physical exercises. Those physical exercises form obedience, unit cohesion, and the instinct to act as one body rather than as a collection of individuals. Or even a child who is made to sit still at the dinner table is being formed. He might not yet understand the virtue of self-control or the meaning of respect, but the physical discipline of sitting quietly in his chair is training those realities into his mind and soul through his body.

The Bible is full of this same kind of pattern. Consider just one example. Consider fasting. When God commanded his people to fast, he commanded a physical discipline, the deliberate denial of food to the body, but it's a physical discipline that trains the soul independence upon God. The body hungers and the hunger teaches the heart that man does not live by bread alone.

And Paul brings all of this together in the text that Pastor Dylan preached last week, Romans 12 verse 1, when God commands us to present our bodies as living sacrifices holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Notice the presentation of the body is itself spiritual worship. The body is not an obstacle to the spiritual life. It is an instrument of spiritual life. So what this means is that the body is not just a passive container for an active soul.

No, the body is an instrument through which the soul is trained. And the fact of the matter is, if we're honest, that our minds and our hearts are often easily distracted. We often come to a Lord's Day gathering burdened, anxious, scattered. Our thoughts may be on the work week that's coming, on conflict at home, on the bills that we can't pay. We're not in that moment spiritually prepared to worship.

But then the call to worship comes, the congregation stands, and we stand with them, and something happens. The physical act of standing begins to tell our distracted hearts what our minds might not yet have grasped, that we are in the presence of the King. The body leads and our hearts follow. John Calvin expressed this well in his commentary on Acts chapter 20 verse 36, where Paul kneels to pray with the Ephesian elders. Calvin makes a few comments about the the benefits of kneeling to pray.

Calvin says, "Through physical gestures, we are jolted out of our laziness by this help." You can see the formative purpose. We are jolted out of our laziness through physical gestures. Those gestures aren't just decorations that we add to worship when we feel sufficiently spiritual. They are instruments that God uses to awaken sluggish hearts. They are helps by which God drives truth from the mind through the body and into our affections.

So this is why what we do with our bodies in corporate worship is not an indifferent matter. Every physical posture communicates something and every physical posture then forms something. If we sit passively through an entire service and do nothing with our bodies, our bodies are telling our hearts that nothing particularly important is happening. But when we intentionally do certain things with our bodies corporately at specific times in our services, our bodies are helping our lazy minds and hearts to engage in what God is doing to and for us in that moment. And so let's just consider a few ways in which we use our bodies in corporate worship that helps and hopefully help us to understand why we use our bodies in these particular ways.

For example, why do we stand for the reading of Scripture? Well, when we stand for the reading of Scripture, we are honoring the Word of God with our bodies. We would do the same thing if a king entered into the room. We rise because the king is speaking. Standing says, "I am at attention.

I am ready to hear. I am not passive or indifferent. I am alert." When you stand to hear the Word of God read, your body is fighting the sluggishness that would otherwise let the words just wash over you without penetrating your heart. The posture recruits, for some reason I couldn't say that. Your posture recruits your muscles and your spine and your physical frame.

Maybe it's because some of my muscles aren't really being recruited lately. That posture recruits your muscles, right, and your spine and your whole physical frame into the act of listening. And what begins in the body then works its way into your mind. You listen differently when you are standing than when you are slouched in a pew. What about bowing our heads in prayer?

When we bow our heads in prayer, we are engaging in the most basic physical act of submission. It's inherently submissive. Think about what that communicates. In every culture, in every age, lowering the head is an act of submission. It is the opposite of what pride does.

Pride lifts the chin. Pride looks around. Pride holds the head high and keeps the eyes scanning for who is watching. But bowing the head says, "I am not the center. Someone greater is here.

I place myself under his authority." When you bow your head in prayer, your body is training your heart to be submissive to God. Your neck bends and your will bends with it. The physical act of lowering your head reinforces the spiritual act of lowering your pride. Also, do you know that we sit for confession of sin intentionally? It's not just so that you can have a break from standing.

We've been standing for a while, so Pastor Matt just, you know, thankfully lets us sit for a few moments. No, it is far more intentional than that. There's a deliberate purpose. When we sit for the confession of sin, we are assuming a posture of quiet, humble, inward reflection. We are stilling our bodies and our hearts so that our hearts can examine themselves before a holy God.

The posture itself quiets us and humbles us. It trains the heart in the very thing that confession requires, which is humility before a holy God. But then, when we stand for the assurance of pardon, we are enacting in our bodies the truth of the gospel. You were low in confession, but now God has lifted you up. He has forgiven your sins.

He has declared you righteous in Christ. And your body rises to meet the truth that your ears have heard. The physical movement from sitting to standing rehearses the gospel itself. You were dead, but now you are alive. You were bowed under the weight of sin, and now you are raised to new life.

And over time, that pattern of sitting in confession and rising in assurance trains your heart to feel the weight of sin and the relief of grace. Your body learns that gospel rhythm, and your soul learns it through your body. And when we lift our hands over the congregation for the benediction, we are performing the physical gesture rooted in the Aaronic blessing of number six and in the example of Christ himself, who lifted his hands and blessed his disciples. The lifted hands of the pastor says God is giving you something. This is a divine blessing being pronounced over you by the authority of God's Word through God's appointed minister.

And when you, the congregation, extend your hands to receive the benediction, you are enacting in your bodies a posture of receptivity. Open hands say, "I am not sufficient. I need what God is giving. I receive it." And that gesture trains our hearts of dependence. It focuses our minds and hearts upon what is actually happening in the benediction.

And by the way, when we receive the benediction, our faces should be raised and not bowed. Why? Because God is making his face to shine upon us in the benediction as the Aaronic blessing says. We have nothing to be ashamed of now as forgiven sinners and so we stand with our hands extended and our heads high as God stamps his name upon us. First Timothy 2.8, as I read earlier, commands men to lift holy hands when they pray.

What does that communicate? The lifted hands say, "We're not praying to a ceiling. We're not praying to ourselves. We are praying to a God who is enthroned above, who is transcendent, who dwells in unapproachable light." The physical gesture of lifting the hands pulls the heart upward. It counters the gravitational pull of earthly anxiety that would keep our prayers earthbound and self-focused.

And likewise, there is a formative purpose when the Psalms command, "Lift up your hands to the Holy Place and bless the Lord." That gesture is corporate and it is meant for our formation. John Calvin comments on this as well. This was the practice of the church in Geneva. This is the historic practice of Reformed churches that the congregation would lift hands together. Calvin says that the attitude of lifting hands is in accordance with true godliness because it reminds us that we ought to seek God in heaven and lay aside carnal affections so that nothing prevents our hearts from rising above the world.

And again, even with the lifting of hands, it is corporate. It must be ordered. Just like there are specific times to sit and specific times to stand, there need to be specific times to lift hands. It's not a matter of individual preference or spontaneous impulse. If everybody just lifts their hands whenever they personally feel moved to do so, we no longer have corporate worship.

You have a collection of individuals having private experiences in a shared space. But corporate hand lifting means the whole congregation lifts hands at the same moment together as one body for a specific purpose. In many Reformed churches today, this is accomplished by the whole congregation lifting hands during the doxology. That's a fitting place for that gesture. The doxology is a song of pure praise directed towards God.

It's sung each Lord's Day. And when every member of the congregation lifts hands together during that song, they are forming their hearts corporately to lift their hearts above the cares of the world and to join in with the heavenly worship of the angels and the saints surrounding the throne. And by the way, notice what biblical hand lifting looks like. It's not the arms sort of dramatically stretched at the ceiling, eyes closed swaying to the music. That's the charismatic posture.

Individualistic, theatrical, driven by emotional atmosphere. The biblical posture is different. In fact, the word that is used in Scripture when it commands us to lift our hands is the word for open palms. Not this, but this. This is biblical hand-raising.

The hands are lifted with palms open and upward. Again, the posture of a supplicant, one who is receiving, one who is open before God. It's the same gesture you would make if someone were handing you a gift. Palms up open and receptive towards the blessings of heaven. This is why the Psalms so naturally connect lifted hands with prayer and with blessing.

Again, that gesture says I am empty and I look to you, God, to fill me. I am needy and I look to you to supply. I am the creature and I lift up my hands to the Creator. And when the whole congregation does this together, I've been in church services where the whole congregation does this every week as a corporate event during the doxology, it's a beautiful thing. Not just every person doing what is right in their own eyes, but the whole congregation as one body at the same appointed time, that corporate gesture declares to one another and to the watching world that we are a people who depend on God.

We're not self-sufficient. We are beggars with open hands and our God fills them. The point is this, every one of these biblically commanded gestures does the same thing in different ways. It uses the body to focus our minds and hearts on what our minds and hearts should be doing. Physical gesture, there it is again, recruits, why can't I say that word?

Physical gestures recruit the whole person, not just the intellect, not just the emotions, but the embodied whole into the act of worship. And over time, through habitual practice, Lord's Day after Lord's Day, these gestures do their quiet, patient work of formation. They train the affections. They cultivate reverence and humility and gratitude and praise, not as momentary spikes of feeling, but as settled dispositions of the soul. Really, if you think about it, when we use physical gestures like these, we are doing what we will continually do for all eternity.

When we see glimpses of heavenly worship in the book of Revelation, what do we see? We see bodies. We see 24 elders falling down before the throne. We see them casting their crowns before the Lamb. You see every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth in the sea singing.

You see a great multitude that no one could number from every tribe and nation standing before the throne and before the Lamb, and you see them falling on their faces and worshiping God. This is the worship of heaven and the worship of the age to come. The saints in glory don't worship with disembodied minds floating in a spiritual ether. They worship with resurrected bodies, bodies that fall, bodies that stand, bodies that sing, bodies that bow. The God who formed us from the dust, who took on flesh in the incarnation, who raised Christ bodily from the grave, who will one day raise our bodies from the dust, that God has always intended worship to be a physical act.

He made us with bodies so that we can worship him with bodies, and the worship of the new creation will be the perfection, not the not the abolition, but the perfection of everything that we practice now for our transformation into the image of Christ. We have spent all of these Sundays in this series asking this central question, what happens when we worship? We've considered who calls us, that worship is not our idea but it is God's summons. We've considered what authority governs our worship, that we don't just invent our own forms, but we receive them from God who has given them to us in his word. We've considered how God renews his covenant with us every Lord's Day calling us, convicting us, assuring us, feeding us, and sending us out.

We have considered how we commune with the saints, how we sing a new song, how even in the act of giving it is an act in which God is working upon us. And this evening we have seen that even what we do with our bodies, our standing, our bowing, our lifted hands, our sitting, that's not incidental to worship but it is central to worship. Every one of these things points to the worship of heaven. Every one of these things prepares us for what we will do for all eternity. So don't take lightly what happens in this room.

Don't come to worship as a spectator. Don't come to sit passively while God is at work. Stand when you are called to stand. Bow when you are called to bow. Sing with a full voice.

Open your hands to receive the benediction. Bring your whole self, mind and body, heart and hands, voice and knees, and offer it to the God who made you, who redeemed you, and who is forming you for his own glory. He is our God. We are the people of his pasture and the sheep of his hand. And so let us worship and bow down.

Let us kneel before the Lord our maker. Let's pray. Father, we praise you for the reality of what happens when we worship. That you have given us specific commands from your word, not to be a taskmaster and to put a burden upon us, but to give us a grace and a blessing. We thank you for the blessing that our corporate worship is to us.

That you are forming us week in and week out, as you call us to worship, as you renew our covenant with you, as you remind us of our sin but forgiveness in Christ, as you feed us with your word, as you prepare a table before us that represents your son's broken body and shed blood, as you send us out with your benediction. All of these are such wonderful graces that you have given to us. Help us to respond with hearts of thanksgiving to these wonderful things that happen when we worship. And help us this evening to recognize the purpose of these bodily gestures to simply reinforce this even more significantly. Help us to stand for your word, to sit under the weight of our sin, to stand once again forgiven, to lift our hands to receive your great blessings, all for your glory, recognizing all of this to be a grace to us that prepares us to give you the glory and honor that you deserve.

We long for the day when we will be able to do this in your presence in heaven. But until that day, help us to practice now in our corporate worship each week on the Lord's Day. We pray this in Christ's name. Amen.