This Coming Sunday Night

This weekend, the Laparra brothers will lead worship singing at the new weekly Sunday night service, authorized by the elder council after evaluating the monthly Sunday night services held through the summer.

Consider the following excerpts from John Piper’s sermon, “Worship God!”:

“There are no gatherings called ‘Worship Services’ in the New Testament. In the epistles of the New Testament there is very little instruction that deals explicitly with corporate worship—what we call worship services.

“Jesus said, ‘Something greater than the temple is here,’ referring to himself (Matthew 12:6), ‘Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up’ (John 2:19). He is pointing away from worship as a localized thing with outward ritual to a personal, spiritual experience with himself at the center. Worship does not need a building, a priesthood, and a sacrificial system. It needs the risen Jesus.

“What makes worship worship is what happens ‘in spirit and in truth’—with or without a place and with or without outward forms. True worship is not oriented on a place or an event.

“How radically non-place- and non-event-oriented the New Testament view of worship is. We can see what is happening in the New Testament. Worship is being significantly de-institutionalized, de-localized, de-ritualized. The whole thrust is being taken off of ceremony and seasons and places and forms, and is being shifted to what is happening in the heart—not just on Sunday, but every day and all the time in all of life.

“In the New Testament there is a stunning indifference to the outward forms and places of worship. And there is, at the same time, a radical intensification of worship as an inward, spiritual experience that has no bounds and pervades all of life.”