Does how we worship really matter? (Part Two)
This is Part Two in a series of articles on worship. To read Part One click here.
As I sit and write these words, I can hear my two children playing outside in the garden. Surrounding our garden is a fence, beyond which there is a field where cattle often graze. When you think about, the fence around our garden performs two functions, simultaneously. On the one hand, the fence limits the freedom of my children as they play, so that they don’t wander off into the field. The fence stands between the garden and the field and implicitly says to my children, “Don’t go there!”. The fence limits their freedom.
However, on the other hand the fence also protects the freedom of my children as they play. The fence prevents the cattle from wandering into the garden where they would trample on the flowerbeds and (worse still!) harm my children. I can let my children play outside safe in the knowledge that the fence is there, keeping them safe from bovine intruders. It says to my children, “Be assured of your freedom.” The fence performs these two functions simultaneously: limiting freedom and protecting freedom.
In the first part of this series of articles on the regulative principle of worship we defined the RPW as follows: “the worship of God must be regulated by the word of God.” We saw how this principle is applied both in Old Testament and New Testament worship.
In this article I want briefly to explore how the RPW performs a twofold function, rather like the fence around our garden.
1. THE RPW LIMITS THE CHURCH’S FREEDOM IN WORSHIP
Just as the fence around our garden stands between the garden and the field and implicitly says to my children, “Don’t go there!”, the RPW stands between true worship and false worship and implicitly says to the church, “Don’t go there!”
The RPW therefore puts a wise, God-given limit upon our freedom as we worship God. We can’t just ‘do what we like’ when it comes to worship. We cannot invent novel ways of worshipping God not prescribed for us in God’s word. It is not enough for us to say, “God has not explicitly forbidden this, so it must be OK.”
Without the ‘fence’ of the RPW, how quickly we would wander off into the dangerous territory of false forms of worship. The boundary between true and false worship would be blurred, ambiguous. Indeed, the biblical testimony and the witness of church history both show that churches have often hopped over the fence in search of new expressions of worship. We need to remember that the fence is there for a reason; to limit the church’s freedom in worship.
Let’s remind ourselves again of how this first function of the RPW is summarised in the Westminster Confession of Faith:
“[T]he acceptable way of worshipping the true God is instituted by himself, and so limited to his own revealed will, that he may not be worshipped according to the imaginations and devices of men, or the suggestions of Satan, under any visible representations or any other way not prescribed in the Holy Scripture.” (Westminster Confession of Faith, 21.1)
2. THE RPW PROTECTS THE CHURCH’S FREEDOM IN WORSHIP
It would be wrong, however, to suggest that the RPW only performs a ‘negative’ function in limiting the church’s freedom in worship. As well as this, the RPW performs the ‘positive’ function of protecting the church’s freedom in worship. Just as the fence around my garden protects the flowerbeds and children from being trampled upon by intruders, the RPW protects our freedom in worship by keeping it safe from being trampled upon by ‘intruders’ who overstep the mark and seek to coerce the church into a particular form of worship to the exclusion of all others. When that happens, we can give thanks that the ‘fence’ of the RPW is there to protect us, implicitly saying to us, “Be assured of your freedom.” As Derek Thomas has written, “Without the regulative principle, we are at the mercy of “worship leaders” and bullying pastors who charge noncompliant worshipers with displeasing God unless they participate according to a certain pattern and manner.” [1]
This second function of the RPW is summed up by the Westminster Confession of Faith with these words:
“God alone is Lord of the conscience, and hath left it free from the doctrines and commandments of men, which are, in anything, contrary to His Word, or beside it, in matters of faith or worship. So that to believe such doctrines, or to obey such commands out of conscience, is to betray true liberty of conscience: and the requiring of an implicit faith, and an absolute and blind obedience, is to destroy liberty of conscience, and reason also.” (WCF 20:2).
I wonder, as Reformed Christians have we become very quick to apply the first function of the RPW, and in so doing started to overlook its second function? When it comes to debates about how worship ought to be conducted, are we very quick to say, “Don’t go there!”, whilst seldom encouraging one another by saying, “Be assured of your freedom”? A truly biblical handling of the RPW will simultaneously limit and protect the church’s freedom in worship.
This all raises the question, how do we know what is a matter of freedom in worship, and what is non-negotiable? Stay tuned for part 3…
Footnotes
1 The Regulative Principle of Worship by Derek Thomas, available online at https://www.ligonier.org/learn/articles/regulative-principle-worship/
