A hush fell over the ministry of worship class during the first session. After the preliminaries, I began my first teaching module, titled “Worship as God’s Communication of Covenant Grace.” In this module, I emphasize God’s covenant commitment to His church as a worshiping assembly. The added emphasis is the work to which God commits Himself as He dwells in the midst of His people worshiping together.

As my class began to comprehend this teaching of Scripture there was quiet, attentive contemplation. When I asked if there were questions or comments, one student asked, “How do we get people in the church to understand these things?”

My response was simple. First of all, a pastor must grasp the concept that, in a preeminent sense, worship involves God’s communication of covenant grace. He must then teach this truth to the congregation and practice it as a guiding framework for corporate worship.

My hope is that all of you reading this article will grasp a new vision of worship and that you will consciously engage in worship, understanding God’s commitment to the congregation to communicate covenant life and covenant renewal to you.

To present this subject in class, I do a brief exposition of 2 Corinthians 6:16-18. Paul connects New Testament worship of the living God with the central covenant promises and themes of the Old Testament. Paul writes to the Corinthian church, “What agreement has the temple of God with idols? For we are the temple of the living God; just as God said, ‘I will dwell in them and walk among them; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people.’”

When the Corinthian church received the letter, it was read to them as a corporate body. Members of the congregation did not receive personal letters. Neither was it like a mass email that was received by individuals who read it themselves. Gathered together as the church, they heard Paul’s message, including the affirmation that they must shun idolatry. Their assembly was sacred. “For we are the temple of the living God,” said Paul. He included himself in their gathering. He was present via his instruction.

The imagery comes from the Old Testament. The temple, which succeeded the tabernacle, was the place of God’s special presence. There the shekinah glory of God inhabited the Holy of Holies. There Moses met with God. There Solomon met with God. Now Paul affirms that the congregation, gathered to listen to his letter, is the New Testament counterpart to the Old Testament temple.

Paul teaches the same concept to the church at Ephesus. “You also are being built together into a dwelling of God in the Spirit” (Eph. 2:22). Peter tells us the same thing. “You also, as living stones, are being built up as a spiritual house for a holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ” (1 Pet. 2:5). The local church assembled for worship is a special place of God’s dwelling. “We are the temple of the living God” (2 Cor. 6:16).

Paul affirms His teaching with a reference to Leviticus 26:11-12: “Moreover, I will make My dwelling among you, and My soul will not reject you. I will also walk among you and be your God, and you shall be My people.” This is the basic covenant promise of God. We find parts of it throughout Scripture, and we find it in different forms. Paul conflates these two verses as follows: “I will dwell in them and walk among them; and I will be their God and they shall be my people” (2 Cor. 6:16).

The word dwell hearkens back to God’s instructions to Israel to build the tabernacle. “Let them construct a sanctuary for Me, that I may dwell among them” (Ex. 25:8). Literally, the people were to construct a sacred or holy place. God commits Himself to dwell there. The word dwell has the same root as shekinah. The glorious dwelling presence of God was the shekinah glory. The gracious presence of God among His people affirmed to them the truth of the covenant, “I am your God; you are My people.”

Paul applies the same concept to the New Testament church meeting in sacred assembly. God commissions people like you and me to construct a sanctuary. This is the worshiping assembly of God’s people, the gathered church. God commits Himself to dwell therein. In this connection, read Leviticus 26:11: “I will make My dwelling among you, and My soul will not reject you.”

This is no vague promise. This is God’s covenant declaration to His people. This is God’s commitment to His people. God says, “My soul will not reject you.” Put positively, “I will embrace you.”

As the church assembles for worship to form a living temple, God further affirms and declares, “I will also walk among you and be your God, and you shall be My people” (Lev. 26:12). God’s commitment to His church assembled for worship involves the promise, “I will be with you to be your God.” And if God is indeed our God as He declares, then we are His people. God therefore commits Himself to be present in worship to declare, confirm, and renew His people in their covenant relationship with Him.

We must remember that we can never experience God as our “blessedness and reward, but by some voluntary condescension on God’s part, which He hath been pleased to express by way of covenant” (Westminster Confession of Faith, 7:1). God condescends to meet with us in worship. It is His commitment to confirm and renew His covenant with us when He does so. Geerhardus Vos says, “The covenant is…the fresh, living fellowship in which the power of grace is operative….The covenant is the totality from which no benefit can be excluded” (“The Doctrine of the Covenant in Reformed Theology,” Redemptive History and Biblical Interpretation, p. 256). Using the words of Vos, worship is living fellowship with God in which the power of God’s grace operates and in which no benefit of grace is excluded. God is present in worship to confirm and renew His covenant with His people.

Paul confirms this line of thinking in 2 Corinthians 6:17: “Therefore, ‘Come out from their midst and be separate,’ says the Lord. ‘And do not touch what is unclean.’” The context of this reference in Isaiah 52:11 is the return of God’s people from Babylon. Isaiah is looking ahead, not only to the captivity but to the subsequent return from slavery. Isaiah reminds Jerusalem, “My people went down at the first into Egypt to reside there; then the Assyrian oppressed them without cause” (Isa. 52:4). Israel was captive in Egypt. Then Assyria plundered the Northern Kingdom of Israel. It fell in 722 B.C. Then, speaking as though it has already happened, Isaiah says, “‘Now therefore, what do I have here,’ declares the Lord, ‘seeing that My people have been taken away without cause?’” (v. 5). Babylon had no reason to destroy Jerusalem except for greed.

But God still rules. This is the message of victory and deliverance. “How lovely on the mountains are the feet of him who brings good news…and says to Zion, ‘Your God reigns!’” (Isa. 52:7). This is significant from two perspectives. First, because God is sovereign and keeps His promises, He will deliver His covenant people and return them to Jerusalem. Second, Paul also refers to this text in connection with the preaching of the gospel. “How will they preach unless they are sent? Just as it is written, ‘How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news of good things!’” (Rom. 10:15). That is another direct connection with the New Testament church.

Looking ahead, Isaiah then declares, “Break forth, shout joyfully together, you waste places of Jerusalem; for the Lord has comforted His people, He has redeemed Jerusalem” (Isa. 52:9). What are the people to do as a result of this redemption? Verse 11 answers. “Depart, depart, go out from there, touch nothing unclean; go out of the midst of her, purify yourselves, you who carry the vessels of the Lord.” Redemption means deliverance from captivity. The people must therefore leave pagan Babylon with all of its idolatry.

Their departure from Babylon also means returning to Jerusalem. In addition, it means rebuilding the temple and reestablishing the true worship of God in Jerusalem. Isaiah speaks of those “who carry the vessels of the Lord.” Those vessels are all the furniture, implements, and tools used in the temple and the sacrifices. They had been taken to Babylon. Now God indicates they will be brought back to reinstitute the proper worship of God. This is God’s commitment to His people. God intends to renew His covenant with His people.

Paul applies the concept of redemption from Babylonian slavery and return to worship in Jerusalem to the local church at Corinth. God redeems people like you and me from slavery to sin in order to form us into covenant, worshiping communities. In turn, God commits Himself to each worshiping community and assembly as discussed above.

Paul, speaking under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, adds a few telling words. When God’s people return to Him in worship, God promises, “I will welcome you” (2 Cor. 6:17). As mentioned above, God’s covenant commitment is to meet with His people in worship, to embrace them, and to welcome them. The you of verse 17 is plural. This is corporate encounter with the living God. God’s message to the church body continues. “‘And I will be a father to you, and you shall be sons and daughters to Me,’ Says the Lord Almighty” (v. 18). The you is plural once again. God promises to meet and greet His people as a father greets his children and welcomes them home.

The church assembled for worship is the covenant community gathered in God’s presence to receive the needed benefits of the covenant God freely condescends to graciously give His people. Public worship is therefore God’s covenantal purpose for His people in which He applies His promises to more and more make them His own. From my perspective teaching on worship, the implications are profound. I believe that when this perspective informs our worship it affects all we do in worship.

The RPCNA is contemplating the matter of covenant renewal in worship through its work on a new Directory for Public Worship. We have a firm commitment to the regulative principle of worship; so it is easy to focus our attention on what we must do in worship. However, the biblical accent in worship is not on what we do but on what God does. If we first understand God’s profound covenant commitment to His people in worship, we will more readily seek to use the means of grace He appoints for our worship.

If pastors understand worship as the circumstance in which God is present to apply His covenant promises to His people, it transforms preaching. Preaching can no longer be teaching and lecturing with efforts to get people to do certain things. Preaching becomes God’s declaration of His covenant love and faithfulness to His people. The preacher knows God will work faith and love in His people. This is God’s commitment. God is present to affirm to the people that He is indeed their God and that they are His people. They hear, know, and begin to live the message, “Your God reigns.” Sin does not reign. Evil does not reign. Christ reigns.

With this perspective, God’s people come to worship anticipating they will meet with their Lord, sit at His footstool, be renewed in His covenant, and be refreshed for work in an alien world. This is covenant renewal in worship. This is worship as God’s communication of covenant grace. It is a needed biblical and Reformed perspective.

Following years of intensive committee work, the RPCNA Synod approved in 2003 a position paper on worship. One goal was that this would lead to a revised Directory for Worship,which is currently in process. Several excerpts of the position paper are printed here as sidebars.

1.1. Contemporary Perspectives on Worship

In considering the debates about worship in the Church in our day, it is necessary to keep three things in mind. First, the form of contemporary Sunday services of evangelical churches lacks continuity with many of the past worship practices of the Christian Church. Worship in American churches, and increasingly in other countries, has been greatly influenced by the practices of American evangelicalism, which grew out of the 19th century camp meeting. In the camp meeting there was a three-part form: music to attract a crowd and put it in the right mood, preaching to convert sinners, and an altar call to secure a decision. The goal of these meetings was to convert sinners; they were not the public worship of God by the Church. Second, dispensational theology has conditioned many Christians, even those who reject dispensationalism as a system, to approach ethics, doctrine, and worship by asking only what the New Testament teaches. The Old Testament is undervalued and the historic Christian traditions are held in suspicion and rejected. In this climate of thought, many churches imitate what seems to succeed in the “megachurches,” often with little thought given to the doctrinal consequences of their decisions. Third, we must bear in mind the constant effort of our unseen enemy to distort and corrupt the worship of God in order to obscure His glory and the only way of salvation through Jesus Christ (Matt. 4:9; Eph. 6:11-12; Jas. 4:7).

1.2. Reformed Confessional Perspective on Worship

The Reformed Presbyterian Church of North America is a confessional Reformed church with organic ties to the great catholic tradition mediated through the national church of Scotland. Therefore we do not view ourselves as a generation of practical innovators commissioned to find out what works. We are servants of Christ, told “to contend earnestly for the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3). Through our Confession and Testimony, we recognize the spiritual unity we share with our fathers in the faith. We affirm the continuity as well as the discontinuity of the Old and New Covenants, and the continuity of the Church through the generations.

From ancient times through the Reformation, and until recent times, the Christian Church understood the unique character of its public worship. It was different from the rest of life. At the Reformation, all parties agreed that the Church must gather weekly on the Lord’s Day to worship God, even while they argued about the specifics of that worship. The Reformers taught that Christians should obey and serve God in the home, the workplace, and the public square, and that they should maintain daily times of private and family prayers. But godly life and worship in such venues was not the public worship of God. Our confessional documents thus move quickly from a general definition of worship to how it should be carried out in church meetings on the Sabbath day. The worship of God by the Church was a sacred gathering set apart from the rest of life and governed according to its own rules by God’s Word.

2.8. Summary of the Westminster Assembly’s Doctrine of Worship

Two themes run through the Confession of Faith’s teaching about worship. The more obvious theme is the emphasis on purity of worship. A church is pure according as its worship is pure, both inwardly and outwardly. True worship is done according to the Scriptures, which are sufficient to guide the Church in its worship. Pure worship not only does not contradict the Scriptures, it also does not go beyond them. Worship should be offered to God according to His rule (from L. regulare, “to control by rule, direct”). This principle is called the regulative principle of worship.… The second theme in the* Confession’s* teaching about worship is less clearly spelled out, but it too is fundamental. The public worship of the Church is a covenant ceremony. The parts of public worship—prayer, Scripture reading, the sacraments, preaching, and singing psalms—are all means of grace by which the Covenant of Grace is brought to bear on the believer. The Covenant of Grace, administered for a time in the dispensation of law, and now given its permanent and catholic form in the gospel, provides the content of public worship in the Church.

4.4. Covenant Renewal Worship Under Old and New Covenants: What Was Done?

The pattern for the assembly’s activities appears in the covenant review on the plains of Moab. God called His people to meet with Him. Moses reminded them of God’s past dealings with them in the Exodus and making a covenant with them. He declared His law to Israel and exhorted them to obedience. Through Moses God pronounced His blessings on obedience and cursings on disobedience. Also, a way was established to commemorate and renew the covenant in the future (Deuteronomy). After Israel entered Canaan, they renewed the covenant on Mounts Ebal and Gerizim, with the ark of the covenant in the midst of the people (Josh. 8:30-35). At a later covenant gathering called by David to announce plans for building the temple, Israel’s assembled leaders listened to David declare the covenant that God had now made with him, in faithfulness to the covenant promises He had made with Israel. They offered materials for the new temple. David prayed to Israel’s covenant God. They all celebrated God’s faithfulness and bowed before the Lord (1 Chron. 28). The Scriptures record the restoration of temple worship and the renewal of the covenant made by Hezekiah. They began the worship of God again, the temple being sanctified. Sacrifices resumed (2 Chron. 29:29-30). They brought thankofferings, the Levites sang the words of David and Asaph, and the people rejoiced.

Consider now the New Covenant assembly. Weekly the saints rehearse and confirm their covenant commitment to be the Lord’s. The historic public worship of the Church in its solemn assemblies moves generally through the parts of a covenant ceremony. The parties to the covenant know themselves and each other to be called by God to meet and worship Him. At their baptism, the saints remember how the covenant was established between them and God through Christ. They review the requirements of the covenant, they are reminded that blessings and curses are attached to the covenant, and they reaffirm their part in the covenant by a pledge. The Lord’s Supper is a covenant reminder: “This cup is the new covenant in my blood” (1 Cor. 11:25).

There is a correspondence between the elements of worship as defined by Westminster and the parts of a covenant ceremony. For example, the parties to the covenant communicate in the reading of Scripture and in prayer. The saints are reminded of God’s past dealings with them in hearing the Bible read and explained. In particular, God’s people are reminded how Christ by His death redeemed them from death and gave them life. Through the reading of the law and in the preaching of the Word, the saints are exhorted to live loyally to God. In singing psalms, the Church praises its God and instructs itself at the same time. In the Lord’s Supper, the Church has a memorial sign of Christ’s salvation, the experience of its present communion with God in Christ, and a reminder that it awaits the return of its King. The benediction expresses the blessings of the covenant, while the warnings against unbelief (Heb. 4:1) and the exercise of church discipline in its gatherings remind the Church of the curses attached (see 1 Cor. 5:4-5; 11:29).

4.5. Summary of a Biblical Theology of Worship

God commanded His people under both the Old Covenant and the New Covenant to assemble before Him. There is some discontinuity in the nature of these assemblies, since Christ has now fulfilled the shadows of the earthly temple, the sacrifices, and the priesthood. There is also continuity in these assemblies because they are times for pledging loyalty to the God of the covenants and for being equipped by Him to persevere in the terms of the covenant. There is likewise continuity in the provision of sacrifice to atone for the sins of the worshipers; but whether before or after Christ’s coming, true efficacy of sacrifice is found only in Christ’s blood. Continuity can be found also in the covenant renewal of the assembly’s worship in which Scripture is read and explained, prayers offered, psalms sung, and the covenant signs observed. The Westminster standards’ understanding of the public worship of the Church as being fundamentally covenantal is correct.