What is God-Pleasing Worship?
Jordan Thomas is a husband, father of six, and founding pastor of Grace Church, Memphis. After preparing for the ministry through college and seminary, Jordan went on to train in church planting at Bethlehem Baptist Church before returning to Memphis, Tennessee to plant Grace Church in 2007. Jordan now continues in local church ministry through shepherding the fold at Grace Church and leading with Treasuring Christ Together Church-Planting Network.
Christ Our Treasure: Enjoying the Preeminence of Jesus in the Local Church is an 8-week multimedia Bible study by Jordan Thomas that invites you to to return to Scripture to behold the beauty of Christ, contemplate the role of the local church in the Christian life, and learn what God says about the purpose of each body of believers: to treasure Christ above all else, together.
We cannot please God the Father with any attempt to approach Him unless we come through the exclusive Way through whom He has provided access.
God will always detest Christ-less praise. The sober, yet very good, news is that you can’t manufacture Christ-centered conviction on your own. God alone injects the glory of His Son into the sights of His people (Psalm 118:22–24). Although you cannot produce a love for Jesus that excels all other loves, you must possess such a love in order to honor God. The Lord Jesus declared that God has given all judgment into Christ’s hands “so that all will honor the Son even as they honor the Father.” God-pleasing worship is Christ-centered worship. Jesus went on to add, “He who does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent Him” (John 5:23). If Jesus is absent from your worship, it is abhorrent to God. We cannot please God the Father with any attempt to approach Him unless we come through the exclusive Way through whom He has provided access (John 14:6). In conversion and in communion with God, Jesus is “the only Mediator between God and man” (1 Timothy 2:5).
The problem with our choosing to sin is not that the temptations are too big but that our desires are so small.
When we say that sin is ultimately a worship issue, we mean that people have traded in the superior delights of the fullness of Christ by seeking satisfaction in some cheap imitation that will never satisfy. The thing or the experience in which we seek satisfaction, or the person from whom we seek satisfaction, is—ultimately—the object of our worship. The problem with our choosing to sin is not that the temptations are too big but that our desires are so small. If we opt for drinking sewage when God has provided the artesian well of our Savior, it is an exposé on how shriveled our souls are.
Seeing Christ as compellingly beautiful leads to embracing Him as our all-satisfying treasure.
To overcome sin, what we most desperately need is what Thomas Chalmers referred to as “the expulsive power of a new affection.” Seeing Christ as compellingly beautiful leads to embracing Him as our all-satisfying treasure. Sin is accomplished when we consume inordinate lusts (James 1:13–15). We enjoy true satisfaction when we are consumed by rightly ordered, Christ-centered love. This is the heart of Christian worship. “Though you have not seen Him, you love Him” (1 Peter 1:8). And love to Christ is shown by “rejoicing in Him” (1 Peter 1:8). In other words, worshiping Jesus is in essence the treasuring of Jesus. Loving Him begets rejoicing in Him. Greater pleasure in Jesus expels the lesser “pleasures” of sin. “Bondage to sin is broken by a stronger attraction—a more compelling joy” (John Piper). Christian worship is an all-of-life experience of being preoccupied with all that God is for us in Christ (Romans 12:1–2), and local churches are to be comprised of people who treasure Christ in such a way. Ultimately, Christians want Christ. Our greatest joy is enjoying Him (Psalm 16:11; 27:4; 43:3–4), albeit imperfectly. Heartbreakingly, we often fall into sin and sinful patterns. The sins we choose over delighting in Christ are the fruit. Worship is the root. Similarly, Christ-centered worship is to prefer Him over everything, including life itself (2 Corinthians 5:8; Philippians 1:21). To worship Christ is to have a constraining ambition to “be pleasing to Him” in this lifetime, and to be pleased forever by being with Christ in the life to come (2 Corinthians 5:9).
Local churches are to gather weekly to be reminded of, refocused upon, and riveted to the grandeur, glory, and gospel-love of our Beloved. We don’t come to church to perform for God. The gathering is not meant to gain God’s approval. Rather we come to receive. To bask. To imbibe the blessings that our Redeemer has purchased for us; namely, Himself. Like the mist that rises from a waterfall, as churches gather to see and receive God’s grace to us in Christ, our hearts respond by giving Him proper adulation and praise.