The “worship wars.” That’s one way to describe how churches navigate the changing and contested nature of music ministries. Conversations become heated when people argue for the superiority of certain forms of music or certain types of instruments. 

But if you think that Sunday morning worship is merely a matter of personal taste, then you are missing one of the greatest blessings that the Lord has given his people. He has not left us to our personal preferences, he has given us truths we can trust when we gather together to worship him. Here are seven of my favorites.

1. God is worthy of our praise.

There is only one being in the universe who is worthy of worship — the true and living God. Psalm 115 describes the difference between “the idols of the nations” and the one true God. The idols, the psalmist tells us, have “eyes but cannot see and ears but cannot hear,” and “hands but cannot feel; feet but cannot walk.” By contrast, the true and living God has eyes that see (Gen 16:13) and ears that hear (Ps 86:1). He has saving hands (Deut 26:8; Ps 136:12) and running feet (Luke 15:20).

In short, the idols of this world are useless. They must be carried around by the people who support them (Isa 46:1–2), but the true and living God carries his people (Isa 46:3–4)

All true understanding begins with the truth that God alone is worthy of worship. We cannot understand ourselves as created people until we understand God as our creator; we cannot understand sin or evil until we understand the good to which it is opposed. So, when the church declares that God is “worthy,” we are declaring that he defines our very existence and the aim our lives are to take. 

Make no mistake about it — the one true God is not like the idols. Trusting in idols is an exercise in futility. God is worthy of our praise.

2. Creation calls us to praise.

One way we know that God is worthy of our praise is through the testimony of creation. Indeed, the creation calls us to praise. God may be a spirit invisible to our physical eyes, but the Bible tells us that we can clearly perceive what it describes as his “invisible attributes.” The Apostle Paul tells us that God’s “eternal power and divine nature” are clearly evident to people “in the things that have been made” (Rom 1:20). The God who is worthy of our praise has gloriously revealed himself in creation.

But this glorious revelation comes with a great responsibility. Because people can clearly perceive these attributes of God, they must to respond to God’s worthy character with worship, obedience, and love. To perceive God’s eternal power and divine nature and not respond with worship is to sinfully proclaim that God is unworthy — and nothing could be further from the truth.

This is not a new phenomenon. The Bible tells us that our first ancestors, Adam and Eve, were created to worship God — to glorify him with perfect love and obedience, to declare his worthiness by ordering their lives around his glorious life. But they failed to worship him, and so have we. We offer, in the words of songwriter Leonard Cohen, a cold and broken hallelujah. 

It is the tragedy of the ages to say that people have not rightly responded to creation’s call to praise.

3. Jesus’ sacrifice qualifies our praise.

Our sin is a tragedy that threatens the purpose of the universe and our joy as people. But this tragedy — our sin — does not have the final word.

The Christian faith testifies that the Son of God came as our substitute to do what humanity failed to do (Rom 8:3–4). He offered the Father the worship of which the Father was worthy. Jesus Christ, as the one true servant of the Lord, glorified God with a perfect life of love and obedience (Isa 49:6; Mark 10:45). Or, said another way, Jesus worshiped God perfectly.

Keep this truth in mind. In our churches, our worship services involve many external activities — songs, hymns, prayers, statements of faith, testimonies of grace — but under and in all of those activities is the finished work of Jesus (Heb 10:10). Instead of drawing encouragement from our own praise — the excellence of our music, the fervency of our singing, the size of our gatherings — let us build our faith upon the finished work of the Lord Jesus Christ, of whom the writer of Hebrews says: “by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified” (Heb 10:14).

Why does the Father hear our singing? It is because of the Lord Jesus. His perfect worship — with all its excellence, fervency, and magnitude — has been counted to us. He is praying for us. And as our advocate

 (1 John 2:1) he qualifies our worship — taking our prayers and our praises, cleansing them, and presenting them to our Father as our ultimate worship leader (Heb 2:12; 1 Pet 2:5).

4. The Spirit enables our praise.

How does this joint prayer ministry work? How can we be animated by and joined to God’s activity? The short answer is our fourth truth you can trust: The Spirit enables our praise.

The Lord meets us in corporate worship through the person of the Holy Spirit. In the midst of our singing, preaching, and celebrating the ordinances, the Holy Spirit mysteriously connects earthly practices with true heavenly participation (Heb 12:22–24). 

And we need the Spirit’s work in our services. As we have discussed, our worship is a cold and broken response to God’s glory. But the Spirit helps us in our weakness. He makes our own dead spirits come alive (John 3:6) and bears fruit in us (Gal 5:22–23). He helps our prayers, our songs, our ministry to one another by interceding for us himself (Eph 5:18–20). He satisfies our thirsty souls (John 4:14) by making Christ’s Word clear and compelling to us (1 Thess 1:5; 2:13). Through his spiritual intercession, the Spirit lifts us to Christ. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words (Rom 8:26). 

The Spirit lifts us to the ascended Christ, who has not ascended to heaven in order to abandon believers on earth, but, as Calvin says, “to rule heaven and earth with a more immediate power.” Indeed, by ascending, Jesus “fulfilled what he had promised: that he would be with us even to the end of the world, as his body was raised up above all the heavens, so his power and energy were diffused and spread beyond all the bounds of heaven and earth.”

This is truth you can trust. Christ is ours — in all his finished redemptive work as well as in all his ascended presence and activity — because the Spirit enables our praise.

5. God’s people gather to praise.

If we see worship primarily as a solitary experience, where my singular heart fixates on my personal relationship with God, we are missing something essential. Because God is a glorious Trinity, he calls us to commune with himself and one another. Worshiping only by yourself is an exercise in missing God’s triune point.

But it’s a messy point, because there are some people in the church who are difficult to be around. However, one of the reasons we go to church is to love people who are different from us. People generally want to spend time with people who have the same amount of money, have the same skin color, are their same age, like the same food, and watch the same TV shows. Other kinds of people are strange to them.

But there is a big danger with that type of separation, because the world is filled with many people who are very different. If we only spend time with people like ourselves, we will be tricked into believing that we are better than those who are not like us (see the warning in James 2:2–6).

At its best, gathering for worship helps us avoid that problem. Worshiping with God’s people reminds us that, fundamentally, the most basic thing about us is not our money, our skin color, our age, or our favorite tastes. The most basic thing about us is that we are sinners who need a Savior (1 Tim 1:15). Because of that, our church is filled with people who are different from us, all of us learning that we are not better than others but in need of the same grace (Eph 4:7; Phil 1:7).

We gather with strange people and remember that we were also strangers, and we recognize that the gospel reunites estranged people with their God.

6. Scripture directs our praise.

We are not left to speculate about how to worship this splendorous God. Sinful humanity has never been able to please him, and so it should not surprise us that God has told us how to worship him. Indeed, the praise of God must be shaped and informed by the Word of God.

Not all believers agree about how this principle works itself out in the local church. Some insist that believers ought to only perform the acts that the New Testament specifically commands in worship. Others argue that believers are free to practice anything that Scripture has not forbidden. My sense, as a convinced Baptist, is that local churches ought to navigate these issues for themselves.

Christians from a large spectrum of beliefs share a wide agreement about the main aspects of a Christian worship service. Believers gather to praise God’s name (Heb 13:15), to sing (Eph 5:19), to pray (1 Tim 2:1), to celebrate the ordinances (Acts 22:16; 1 Cor 11:26), to hear God’s written Word (1 Tim 4:13), to receive God’s proclaimed Word (2 Tim 4:2; James 1:21), and to respond with holy living (Rom 12:1–2).

At their best, all of these activities serve as a foretaste of heaven, appetizers for the coming feast.

7. The universe will be filled with praise.

The final truth to remember is that praise is the ultimate goal of the universe, the final destination of all our activity. 

The Bible tells us that “the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea” (Isa 11:9). And that should come as no surprise — the glory of God has been the plotline throughout all of human history. God created the universe for his glory (Isa 43:7), and that glory drives the entire story of the Old Testament (Ps 106:7–8; Exod 14:4; 2 Sam 7:23; Ezek 36:22–23). The angels sang about God’s glory at Christ’s birth (Luke 2:14), and glorifying God was the purpose of Jesus’ entire life (John 7:18). It’s the reason why our prayers are answered (John 14:13) and it is the motivation for all Christian activity (1 Cor 10:31). People who spurn God’s glory reveal their foolishness and invite God’s judgement (Rom 1:22–23; Acts 12:23). And God’s glory is the reason why Christ is returning (2 Thess 1:9–10).

Seeing God’s passion for his glory, it is little wonder that the universe ends with the full display of his glory (Hab 2:14). God keeps his promise, “Truly, as I live, … all the earth shall be filled with the glory of the Lord” (Num 14:21). God answers the prayer that concludes Book Two of the Psalms, “May the whole earth be filled with his glory! Amen and Amen!” (Ps 72:19). 

And since the whole earth will be filled with the glory of the Lord, our whole lives will be a response of praise. Seas have shores and oceans have floors, but throughout eternity God’s people will never reach the bottom of his glory. Because Christ’s riches are immeasurable (Eph 2:7), our discovery of them will never end. Because Christ’s perfections are endless and his beauty is infinite (2 Cor 4:4–6), we will never run out of new discoveries of his wonder and greatness.

And every time we discover some new aspect of Christ’s riches, our renewed and perfected hearts will burst with joy. Our renewed and perfected voices will leap into song. I imagine that people will run toward their pipe organs, grab their guitars, and turn up the volume. Heaven will involve the discovering and delighting of the height and depth and width and breadth of God’s love for his people (Eph 3:18). And that discovery and delight will burst in unhindered praise.

And so, may we keep our eyes upon that day. On that day, to paraphrase Psalm 46, God will make wars to cease — even all of our worship wars. May we live for the day when all of creation will know that he is God. “I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth!” (Ps 46:10).