HT to Douglas Wilson:
Present Your Bodies as Spiritual Worship (Exhortation)
Over the years we have emphasized the importance of ritual. Rituals are significant in the Bible, and they ought to be significant to us. We have also emphasized the importance of worshipping God with our bodies and not just with our minds. We have sought to resist the temptation that many Reformed Christians deal with, which is the idea that God gave us bodies as carrying cases to get our brains to church.
And of course, it would be better to have your mind at church and your body elsewhere, than to have your body at church and your mind elsewhere. But fortunately, we don’t have to choose, and under ordinary circumstances, we must not choose. And so here is a brief reminder of the doctrinal reasons for some of the very physical things we do in our worship of God.
We sing throughout the service, which should be strenuous, we kneel in confession, we eat bread and drink wine, and we raise our hands in the Gloria Patri. We worship God physically for three reasons.
First, we believe that Scripture requires this kind of thing of us. Continue reading “Wake Up! A New Perspective on Sleeping During Church”