True Worship (2002) – Vaughan Roberts

5
The temple is made redundant once Jesus comes. It contained only symbols of God’s presence, tablets of stone with his commandments, pointing to his holy character. But with Jesus comes more than a symbol; he is the reality itself, God himself in human form. So if we want to meet with God and worship him, we do not have to go to any special place – be it Gerizim, or Jerusalem, or a church building. We must come instead to a special person, the Lord Jesus. He rose from the dead and is alive today, and through him we are able to entre into a direct and personal relationship with the true and living God.

6
Worship means submitting to Jesus Christ in every area of my life, and that is something I cannot do by myself; it is impossible for me because it clashes with my natural desire to live to please myself rather than the God who made me.

8
We need to be born again. We need a miracle if we are ever going to bow down at Jesus’ feet and become true worshippers of God. Because that miracle comes only through the Holy Spirit, true worshippers must worship ‘in Spirit’.

9
To ‘worship in Spirit’ is to acknowledge Jesus as God and live accordingly. It is conversion and the life that flows out of it. John’s Gospel never divides the work of Jesus and the work of the Spirit; they belong together. It is the Spirit who brings us to Jesus and enables us to worship God in the first place and then empower us to continue doing so. True worship is impossible without the Spirit.

12
I assume you are already a follower of Christ and are trying to live a life of worship. That began when God enabled you to understand the truth about Jesus and respond to it with faith and repentance. If we are to continue to worship him properly we need to keep hearing the truth about him. Worship never begins with us; it is always a response to the truth. It flows out of an understanding of who God is and what he has done for us in Christ. It begins with his revelation and redemption. So we must ensure that the Bible, which contains that revelation and points us to God’s work of redemption, stay right at the heart of tour meetings and our own spiritual lives.

13
True worship is impossible without Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit and the truth. Do you see how those three points really merge into one? True worship is only possible through Jesus, because of his unique revelation and redemption. But we cannot respond to him unless we hear about who he is and what he has done - we need the truth. But even that is not enough, because I will never respond to the truth without the help of the Holy Spirit, who is referred to in John’s Gospel as ‘the Spirit of truth’.

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Romans 12: 1-2 teaches that worship requires a remembrance of God’s mercy, an offering of my body to God and an obedience of God’s will in all parts of life.

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The word ‘spiritual’ (Romans 12: 1-2) is perhaps better translated ‘reasonable’ or ‘rational’. The Greek word Paul uses is logikos, from which we get our word ‘logic’. It implies t hat our worship is connected with our minds.

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We all need to remember God’s mercy towards us. And then, in grateful response, we should offer our bodies to God, making sure that that offering is worked out in practice in all parts of life.

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How do I know that my experience is a genuine encounter with the living God? Music has great power to generate emotion. No doubt you have been deeply moved at a concert or just listening to a favourite CD – Beethoven or the Beatles, Rimsky Korsakov or Robbie Williams. But you did not call that an experience of God. How can you be sure that the feeling you had at that Christian meeting was God’s presence with you rather than just the effect of some good music?

The Bible never teaches that a feeling can take us into the presence of God. If that had been possible, God would have sent us a musician rather than a saviour. Only Christ can take us into the Most Holy Place in heaven, where we have direct access to the Father through faith in him.

91-92 The Lord’s Supper
The average non-Christians (and sadly, many Christians too) would assume from the way many churches conduct the Lord’s Supper that the focus of the action is on the present. That was certainly the impression I received before my conversion. I noticed that all the important action was taking place in what seemed to be a special part of the building behind a rail, which kept most people out. Only special people entered, wearing special clothes and gathered around an elaborately adorned special table. Clearly those involved considered that something very important was happening, but I was left baffled as to what it was.

All that ritual served to focus my attention on the present, while preventing me from seeing beyond the present to the past, to which it should have pointed. I was left with a vague belief that somehow the ‘priest’ was making God specially present on the ‘altar’ in a way that he had not been before. I therefore assumed that I got closer to God at a communion service that than any other time.

91-100 The Lord’s Supper
1) Look back / Past(Remembrance) – The Christian’s heart and emotions, on the other hand, are affected indirectly, via the mind, as his or her attention is focused in a visible, tangible way on the wonder of the gospel of the cross. Unless the mind has been directed back in remembrance to the cross, no true Lord’s Supper has taken place.

2) Look up / Present (Communion) – As we receive the bread and wine we may have ‘communion’ or ‘participation’ with Christ. As we remember the death of Christ, through the symbols of bread and wine, we are called to receive the benefits of that death by faith, which is symbolised by the act of eating and drinking.

Cambridge dictionary
Communion - a Christian ceremony based on Jesus Christ's last meal with his disciples
Commune - a group of families or single people who live and work together sharing possessions and responsibilities

3) Look around / together (fellowship)

4) Look forward / Future (hope) – What we do at the Lord’s Supper is a foretaste of heaven. When we finally get there, we will be gathered together with all of God’s people, enjoying perfect communion with him and praising him for Christ’s death on the cross which made that possible.

Source: True Worship (2002) – Vaughan Roberts