Deutero Q

Most of us associate worship with what happens on Sunday morning when we "go to church" and sing and pray together. And of course that is worship in a corporate setting. But there is more to worship than that.

The apostle Paul said that when a Christian consecrates himself to the Lord, that too is worship (Romans 12:1). In fact, when a Christian serves others in the name of the Lord, that is also a form of worship. We see this in Philippians 2:29, where the apostle Paul referred to a man named Epaphroditus: "Welcome him in the Lord with great joy, and honor men like him, because he almost died for the work of Christ, risking his life to make up for the help you could not give me."

The Greek word for "help," says D.A. Carson in his commentary on Philippians, is a word "that might more commonly be rendered 'religious service' or the like, a word that would used in discussing worship."

The Bible commentator William Barclay put it this way: "Real worship is the offering of everyday life to God." Thus, we should not only say, "I'm going to church to worship God," but "I'm going to the office--or school, or the park, or wherever--to worship God." For the Christian, worship is to embrace all of life. It is both personal and corporate. In other words, worship God with your heart and hands ... on Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and throughout the week!

Phil Johnson over at Pyromaniac has generated a lot of feedback on cessationism (the belief that the miraculous gifts of the Holy Spirit--such as prophecy and tongues--have ceased). As a non-cessationist, I have been in settings where charisms of the Holy Spirit have been exercised in a biblical manner--God was indeed glorified and His people were edified.

I hasten to add, however, that I decry much of the fleshly flakiness and spiritual silliness I see in too many charismatic settings. No more purported leg lengthenings and "shammalammabowtie" parrotted utterances, please! Moreover, I am very concerned that personal visions and revelations come dangerously close to trumping Holy Scripture in some charismatic settings.

Okay, enough of my pet peeves. I acknowledge that earlier in my Christian experience I allowed my presuppositions to affect the way I interpreted the Bible's teaching on spiritual gifts. I was a cessationist, believing that way not because of an honest engagement with Scripture, but because I listened to Christian tapes and read books from a cessationist perspective. Although I would not have admitted it at the time, I filtered biblical teachings through what I read and heard from Christian leaders who denied the present-day miraculous gifts of the Holy Spirit.

Because of my theological bias and negative reaction to what I perceived to be flakiness in some charismatic settings, I concluded that certain spiritual gifts were not really being given today. In all honesty, I did not come to my conclusions on the basis of an unbiased reading of Scripture. I can now look back and see the power of my earlier presuppositions and how they kept me from correctly interpreting the Bible's teaching on spiritual gifts.

Eventually, I came to see that Scripture nowhere teaches cessationism; indeed, I have yet to encounter one biblically valid reason for the belief that miraculous gifts of the Spirit ceased with the close of the biblical canon.

In any event, check out the numerous cessationist comments (both for and against) that follow Phil Johnson's November 11 blog entry titled Whole lotta shakin' (http://phillipjohnson.blogspot.com/).

http://www.wrs.edu/Materials_for_Web_Site/Journals/12-2_Aug-2005/Lyon-Centrality_of_Preaching.pdf

I recently came across these words of Os Guinness, the internationally known Christian speaker. The passage below is excerpted from Parker Williamson's excellent article in the October issue of The Layman.