Why church shouldn’t be called a ‘worship experience’
This is adapted from a video that you can watch here.
“Experience” is one of the most popular buzzwords in the pop evangelical church, especially charismatic churches. A church near me publicizes its services as experiences, often combined with “worship.” So much emphasis in these churches is placed on feelings and sensations, sights and sounds.
The Bible has no shortage of spectacular incidents that stirred people’s emotions — often terrible fright. We’re going to look at a couple of them to examine what effect sensuality has on God’s people, and the place of it in the Lord’s priorities. We’ll see what He wants us to “experience.”
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A god they could see
You probably know the story of the exodus. Moses led God’s people out of Egypt, and they witnessed astonishing wonders: plagues like a river turning to blood, and an unnatural darkness over the land. They walked between walls of water, and were led at night by a pillar of fire.
Maybe they got accustomed to those signs. They got used to seeing the work of God and experiencing His presence. Likewise, many Christians today want something they can see and feel. They want their senses to be stimulated — that’s what sensuality is.
See also: The sensual mysticism of Bethel’s ‘The Physics of Heaven’
Experience, by definition, is self-centered. “Experience” says, I’m here for me. This is about me. We’ll see that when the Israelites were brought to Mount Sinai, they made it about themselves.
When they arrived, Moses went to the top of the mountain to be with God and receive His commandments. One thing the Lord told him was, “You shall not make anything to be with Me — gods of silver or gods of gold you shall not make for yourselves” (Exodus 20:23). Of course, that’s exactly what the people did.
Exodus 24:18 says Moses was on the mountain forty days and forty nights. So down below, the people are waiting and waiting. This is not what they’re used to, just standing around with no spectacular sign they can see. But they still want to worship something visual. They want some kind of religious experience. If God’s not giving them one, they’re going to make one themselves.
In chapter 32, verse 1, the people said to Aaron the priest, “Come, make us gods that shall go before us; for as for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.”
Again, they want a god they can see. They want God manifest to them in a sensual way. They want an image of God — something that’s relatable and limited. Something they can control. Something that will just stand there while they do what they want to do.
This is why people make images of God, like an old man with a flowing white beard. It’s a visual that we can be comfortable with. When we do that, God is who we determine him to be.
For a long time, I saw this story as the Israelites worshiping a foreign god. But look at what they call the golden calf that Aaron made: “This is your god, O Israel, that brought you out of the land of Egypt!”
It was not their intention to worship another god, like Baal or Molech. To them, this thing that they made is God; this is Yahweh (Aaron uses the Lord’s name in verse 5).
Their sin was not that they were worshiping the wrong god, but they were worshiping the right God the wrong way. They were misrepresenting the one true God. It’s not the first commandment that they’ve already broken (“You shall have no other gods before Me”); it’s the second (“You shall not make for yourself a carved image”).
The second commandment is about making an image of God. God forbids that because any image we make can never come close to depicting His glory and His holiness. Any image we make will be unholy and fail to represent God. It will distort Him and reduce Him to our level.
Once we fashion our own image of God, we also decide what we can do in relation to him. We set the terms of our relationship, and that makes us our god. We’re in charge; we’re in control.
For example, in verse 5, Aaron made a proclamation: “Tomorrow is a feast to the Lord.” A feast to the Lord? Says who? God would tell them what feasts they’re to celebrate. It’s God alone who decides how He’s worshiped, not us — no matter how good we think our intentions are.
Worshiping their way
And the Israelites were not done doing things their way:
6 Then they rose early on the next day, offered burnt offerings, and brought peace offerings; and the people sat down to eat and drink, and rose up to play.
On Sunday mornings, that church I mentioned near me puts signs outside that say, come join the party. They call church a party. In some churches, it’s like a romper room. I’ve been in charismatic gatherings that descended into chaos, where all the people do is whatever feels good to them.
Likewise, for the Israelites, this was a big party for them. In verse 18, Moses says he heard the sound of singing. If this were modern times, it would resemble a rock concert. Down in verse 25, it says the people were “unrestrained.” They just did whatever they wanted.
Today, a lot of churches’ worship is unrestrained. Anything goes. Whatever gives you the feels. That’s why we see a burlesque number during a Christmas show, like what Hillsong London has done. That’s why we see Beatles songs during “worship” time at Andy Stanley’s church. That’s why we see jerking and screaming and writhing on the floor at Bethel Church in California.
Verse 25 indicates that it was Aaron’s job to restrain them, and not doing so was shameful. Worship, to a certain extent, must be restrained. That’s because, even as Christians, we can still get carried away in the flesh and determine our own ways of worship.
That doesn’t mean we have to sit there with hands folded with stone faces. We can clap, raise our hands, and shout; we can even dance, because those things are in the Bible. God has revealed in Scripture that those are acceptable forms of worship. But we can only go as far as God has told us, and not go beyond what is written, as 1 Corinthians 4:6 says. Jesus said God is to be worshiped in spirit and truth — not in the flesh, and not in falsehood. His way, not our way.
When the Israelites worshiped God their way, that provoked His wrath. The Lord wasn’t like, “They mean well. They’re trying to worship Me. I delight in that, whatever form it takes. I don’t want to put them in a religious box or invalidate their feelings.” No, in verse 10, God says, “Now therefore, let Me alone, that My wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them.”
Fortunately for them, the Israelites had an intercessor, a mediator — Moses, a type of Christ. God spared them from annihilation for his sake. But they weren’t spared the Lord’s discipline — Moses smashed the Ten Commandments, symbolizing the breaking of God’s law. He ground the golden calf into powder and made the people drink the foul disgust of their self-determination. We see later in the chapter that 3,000 of them died, and God sent a plague upon them. Worst of all, He threatened to remove His presence from them, but again, Moses interceded.
That’s how seriously God takes how we worship Him. In Leviticus 10:3, He said, “By those who come near Me I must be regarded as holy” — right after He killed the sons of Aaron for offering “profane fire before the Lord, which He had not commanded them.” They worshiped their way.
Related: Fire! Glory! And God killing His anointed ones
But that’s the Old Testament, you might say. Let us, then, look at a spectacular New Testament experience and how it points to how God wants us to worship.
The more sure word
Whatever experiences we seek today, none of them will match what Peter, James and John witnessed when they saw Jesus transfigured in all His glory and heard the audible voice of God. However, there is something that is even more trustworthy, wrote one of the men who was there that day.
Peter describes the transfiguration in 2 Peter chapter 1: “… we heard this voice which came from heaven when we were with Him on the holy mountain” (verse 18). From the gospel accounts, we know that Peter was so caught up in the experience that he wanted to stay there; he didn’t want to come down from the mountain.
But in the next verse, he says, “we have the prophetic word made more sure.” What could be more sure than hearing the voice of God Himself with your own ears? What prophetic word is he talking about? The answer is in verse 20 — the “prophecy of Scripture.”
Do you catch that? Scripture is “more sure” than what Peter experienced. The word translated “sure” means firm, grounded, confirmed. That’s what God’s written word is compared to anything we sense, even God Himself. That’s not because of any shortcoming on God’s part, but our senses are fallible. We might not hear things correctly. We might not remember them accurately. Our sight may be tainted by what we want to see. But the Bible is written as if in stone, ever unchanging. You open it today, and it will say the exact same thing weeks, months and years later.
That, therefore, is what our worship should be based on and revolve around. Not what we can see, hear or experience, but what we can read.
When we gather to worship, we don’t have to usher in the tangible presence of the Lord; He’s already there. We are always in His presence. God doesn’t need any of our gimmicks or entertainment or stagecraft, and we don’t need any sensual aids. We don’t need to sense God, because we know He’s there.
That’s what faith is, isn’t it? We walk by faith and not by sight (2 Corinthians 5:7), right? Faith comes by hearing the word of God (Romans 10:7), right? Then go to church for that. Advertise that. Let the most exciting thing you hear in a church gathering be the rustling of pages. Because the Bible is certainly the most powerful and trustworthy thing there. Thus says the Lord.
