The Holy Trinity
Sunday, May 18, 2008
The Rev. Charles Henrickson
Great Is the Lord, and Greatly to Be Praised (Psalm
145:3)
Great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised. So
goes the Gradual for today, from Psalm 145. Yes, the
Lord is greatly to be praised. But what does that
mean? How do we do it? How do we greatly praise
the Lord? Lets explore that a little bit.
Its certainly fitting that we consider this theme
today, on this day when we dedicate new hymnals for
the praise and worship of God. How do we greatly
praise the Lord? Maybe part of it is that we use
great materials. And Lutheran Service Book does offer
a lot of great resources for us to use. We have here
the traditional Divine Service that developed in
Christendom over many centuries. We have the great
hymns of the church, texts and tunes that have stood
the test of time--most all the hymns you know and love
from TLH, as well as some fine new ones, written
during our own lifetime. There are psalms and prayers
and devotional orders, Matins and Vespers--even the
Catechism is in here. Truly there is a wealth of
excellent worship resources, both for church and for
home, found in this book and in the companion
materials that go with it. I think youre going to
enjoy getting to know LSB and using it over the months
and years to come. Great materials, great resources,
help us to greatly praise the Lord.
But is that all there is to it, having a good book to
use? Surely there must be more. What else do we need
to greatly praise the Lord? What about us? Dont we
need to be great praisers, great worshipers? We
need to worship the Lord with great intensity, great
fervor, dont we, in order to greatly praise him?
That must be it.
Well, yes and no. There is a grain of truth there.
To be sure, it is not fitting--it is truly not meet,
right and salutary--to worship the great God with
dull and listless spirits, with a lifeless, lazy,
lackluster effort. We ought to work at our worship
and give it the best weve got. We ought to be
attentive in our worship, paying attention to the
words were praying and singing. Anything less is not
worthy of the great privilege we have of coming into
the presence of the living God. This is holy ground,
sacred, and we ought to be setting apart our minds,
our hearts, our ears, and our tongues, for the holy
worship of the God whom we serve.
Have you been doing this? Have I been doing this?
Its so easy for us to slip into a merely mechanical
mode and go through the motions. Our bodies are here,
but our minds and hearts are elsewhere. Our ears
become sieves, with the words going out as fast as
they come in. Our tongues go on autopilot, uttering
sounds more familiar than heartfelt. For these sins
of lackluster worship, we need to repent. We ought to
be better worshipers than we are. Great is the Lord,
and greatly to be praised. And there are lots of
times we dont praise him all that greatly.
But great intensity, great fervor--that alone does not
equal great worship. Because our intensity and our
fervor, as a measuring stick for what makes great
worship, puts the emphasis on us. And thats the
wrong place for it to be. Worship is not about us.
We do it, we are the ones who worship, and we should
do it in a heartfelt manner. But worship is not about
us and our feelings and our experience of a worship
high.
Been there, done that. And I even got a few t-shirts
out of it, as I recall. As some of you know, I spent
a bunch of years in the charismatic movement, and Ive
gotta tell ya, they can out-intense and out-fervor
the best of us. The experience of worship, the
intensity of it, was a very big deal in charismatic
circles. But there was a danger there. If you didnt
get that worship high, you tended to feel like there
was something wrong with you, like you were a
deficient, second-class Christian. On the other hand,
if the group did work itself up into a splendid
fervor, then you felt--well, there was a temptation
toward a pride and superiority, like we were really
more mature, victorious Christians. Either way, the
emphasis tended to fall on you, on how you were
performing in worship, and there was an unspoken
pressure to measure up.
Well, the charismatic movement kind of petered out in
the 1980s, but its place has been taken by so-called
contemporary worship, praise bands and the like.
This is really the same thing as charismatic worship,
just without the spooky stuff. Contemporary worship
is charismatic worship mainstreamed. It appeals to
the same spirit. Its just another form of pietism,
appealing to mans desire to make himself appear more
religious and spiritual. And again, contemporary
worship, as it is commonly practiced, puts a lot of
emphasis on us, on our intensity and fervor, on our
feelings, and getting to that worship high.
But you know what? Its largely fluff, without a lot
of substance. The typical praise chorus consists of
Lord, we just wanna praise you, repeated 17 times.
We have come to praise you today, Lord. We just
wanna worship you. One of my fellow pastors has
described it as Three Little Pigs worship: We, we,
we, all the way home.
So theres a lot of we, but not a lot of why. Why
do we want to praise the Lord with such intensity and
fervor? Thats often the missing element in much of
contemporary worship. I once did a study of the
content of contemporary worship services. I took the
bulletins from a series of several weeks of
contemporary services at a large church-growth
congregation in St. Louis--LCMS, Im sorry to say. I
looked at the texts of all of the songs sang there
over a couple of months. Most were praise choruses
simply addressed to a Lord, but without identifying
him any further. They could have just as well been
sung by a Muslim or a Mormon. You couldnt tell that
the songs were addressed to the only true God, the
triune God. And out of a couple dozen songs total,
only a few even mentioned the name of Jesus Christ.
Fewer still said anything specific about what God has
done, that we should worship him. Hardly any said
anything about Christ crucified for the forgiveness of
our sins. No, the emphasis overall was just on the
fact that we want to worship God a whole, whole bunch.
You see, by way of this negative example, now were
getting at what really does make for great worship.
Its not about us; its not primarily about our
feelings or fervor or intensity. Hooray if that comes
as a byproduct, but thats not the main thing. No,
the Lord is greatly to be praised most of all by
focusing on who God is and what he has done for us.
Great is the LORD, and greatly to be praised. And
notice, thats LORD with capital letters. That
identifies this God whom were praising as the God of
Israel, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. This is
the God who makes himself known to his people, the God
who makes covenant with them, who remembers his
covenant and acts to save them. This is the God whom
we worship. This is God with a name, Yahweh, in the
Hebrew of the Old Testament.
And now in the New Testament, he has revealed himself
even more clearly as the triune God, in the name of
the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
One name, three persons. Three persons, one God. A
profound mystery, beyond our finite reason, but not
beyond the faith that this same God gives us. The
amazing thing is that we know and believe in and can
truly worship this triune God. Imagine that, blind
and lost sinners like us, worshiping the Holy Trinity!
But thats whats happening here today. Great
praise, great worship, not because of how great we
are, but because of how great God is, and the great
things he has done to make its so.
This one true God, the triune God, has created
us--indeed, he has created all the heavens and the
earth and all that dwell therein. He is the God
Almighty, the maker of all things, visible and
invisible. Thats who made you and formed you to be
his own.
But you and I, we rebelled against this good God, just
like our father and mother did, and their fathers and
mothers before them, going back all the way to the
garden. Each of us made a god in our own image, and
that god looks a lot like us. We like to be our own
god, and make our own decisions about whats right and
wrong. That is the essence of sin. It is our
original sin, it afflicts us all and infects us all,
and it brings the curse of death down upon our heads.
God is good, though, he really is. He is the God of
all mercy. He has compassion on his fallen creatures,
and he acts to save us, save us when we never could.
That is just what God has done. The loving Father
sent his beloved Son to be our one-and-only Savior.
The problem was sin, mans sin, our sin, and the
eternal death that goes with it. Who will man up
and live right and fly straight and worship God with
true obedience? The Son will do that, the Son of God
come in the flesh as a man, the man Jesus Christ, who
lives the life of worship we should live. He then
offers himself as the perfect sacrifice on the cross,
the perfect sin-offering, the perfect once-and-for-all
act of worship that truly pleases God. Christ is only
perfect praiser and worshiper, and our feeble praise
and worship finds acceptance in Gods sight only
through him.
This Jesus, delivered up according to the definite
plan and foreknowledge of God, this Jesus won the
forgiveness of sins for you on that cross! And
because he did this, fulfilling the will of his
Father, this Jesus God raised up on Easter morning,
showing his victory over death and Hades. This Jesus
is your Savior, in whom you have eternal life!
Being therefore exalted at the right hand of the God,
and having received from the Father the promise of the
Holy Spirit, this same Lord Jesus Christ has poured
out on his church now--he has poured out on you
now--the Spirit he gave you in your baptism. You,
dear Christian, you are baptized in that saving name,
the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy
Spirit. The one true God has put his name on you and
claimed you for his own. The Father is now your dear
Father, and we are his dear children. The Son, Jesus
Christ, is now your Savior, who has washed away all
your sins. The Spirit, the Holy Spirit, dwells within
you, keeping you in the one true faith through the
means of Word and Sacrament.
What a great thing it is, on Gods part, that you and
I have come to know and believe in and worship the
only true God, the Holy Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit! That, ultimately, is what makes for great
worship: who God is, and what he has done for us!
Excellent worship resources are great; theyre a
blessing from God. Intensity and fervor and feeling
are great, and thank God that he lets us experience
that. But most of all, great worship is about the
great God, and his wondrous works. Great is the
LORD, and greatly to be praised. Let us give glory
to him because he has shown his mercy to us.
Charles Henrickson
4749 Melissa Jo Ln
St. Louis, MO 63128
(314) 845-8811 (home)
(314) 779-8108 (cell)
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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