Liturgy: Inhabiting the Story of God
Why Liturgy?
‘Liturgy’—some people love it, some people hate it, most people find it confusing. What is it? Why do we do it? Is it any use today? Liturgy means ‘the work of the people’. You might think of liturgy as the set texts that we say or sing in a worship service—the call to worship, the confession, the creeds and so on. But broadly understood, it’s everything we do when we gather together on Sundays. It’s both the ‘what’ and the ‘in what order’ of gathered Christian worship. It is a vital part of how we grow as Christians. It helps us meditate on the Bible, it trains our hearts to love God more, and it helps us inhabit the gospel story.
In this series we’ll be breaking down a typical Sunday service in an Anglican church to understand how the patterns of what we do each week shape us into the people God wants us to be. But first, I don’t want to assume anything, and so I want to help us understand why liturgy is valuable.
First, liturgy is biblical. I mean that in two ways. First, in the bible we see people speaking things aloud together,[1] saying set prayers,[2] and saying creeds and sayings.[3] Secondly, when we participate in liturgy, a lot of the time we are speaking the Bible. What we say together is either Scripture itself or a paraphrase. In the ‘dialogue of worship’, as God speaks to us and we respond, the language we speak is the Bible.
Why is this helpful? In Psalm 1:1-3 we get a picture of a person who is ‘meditating’ on Scripture, listening to it and speaking over it in their heart. Repeatedly meditating on the Bible will make us strong, fruitful and long-lasting. And we do it every week at church, not only in the sermon, or the singing, but also as we speak Scriptural words to God and to one another.
Secondly, liturgy trains the heart. Proverbs 4:23-27 gives an insight into how our hearts work:
Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it. Keep your mouth free of perversity; keep corrupt talk far from your lips. Let your eyes look straight ahead; fix your gaze directly before you. Give careful thought to the paths for your feet and be steadfast in all your ways. Do not turn to the right or the left; keep your foot from evil.
Our whole lives flow from our hearts—they form and cultivate our desires which affect everything we do. In this sense it’s true to say that ‘you are what you love’. And yet our hearts can be influenced by our lives. Jesus said that where your treasure is, your heart will be, not the other way around.[4] So how do we guard our hearts, and therefore our lives, so we can grow in wisdom and godliness, loving God more? We’ve got to speak words of truth, not corruption. We’ve got to fix our eyes on Jesus. We’ve got to orient our bodies towards God in worship. The repetition of liturgy is one of the ways the Spirit trains our hearts to love God in all of life.
As Jamie Smith says:
Worship is the arena in which God recalibrates our hearts, reforms our desires, and rehabituates our loves. Worship isn’t just something we do; it is where God does something to us. Worship is the heart of discipleship because it is the gymnasium in which God retrains our hearts.[5]
Going through the practices of liturgy every week is like going to a spiritual gym—training our hearts and keeping us fit to love God when we leave and go back to our homes, communities and workplaces, where the worship continues.
Thirdly, liturgy helps us inhabit the gospel story. If you are part of a church that uses liturgy you might have noticed a structure to the weekly gathering:
- gathering and declaring god’s praise
- ᐁ
- confession and assurance of forgiveness
- ᐁ
- scripture reading and preaching
- ᐁ
- response, holy communion and sending out
Our gathered worship tells a story—there’s a plot running through it. The story is the story of the gospel, and every Sunday when we come to church we are ‘reenacting’ the gospel. The preparation and call to worship remind us of the call to worship God in all of our lives. We lift our hearts to adore him. As we approach God we become conscious of our sin—we have failed to worship him. But then as we confess and repent we receive his forgiveness through Jesus Christ. As forgiven sinners we have confidence to approach God and to hear him speak—words of comfort and words of calling. We share a meal in communion with God and one another, and are sent out to continue worshipping God in all of life.[6]
We spend our lives listening to and living in all sorts of stories. They tell us who we are, what’s wrong with us, how it can be put right and how we should live in response. But as Christians we are listening to and inhabiting the true, life-giving story. It’s so easy to forget this—not only intellectually but on the subconscious level. Coming to church on Sunday is about being ‘re-storied’. As we reenact the good news of Jesus every week, we tell the story of the gospel and live in it—so that bit by bit, we might live in it all the time.
Liturgy is the ‘what’ and ‘in what order’ of corporate worship. We’ll now turn to look at a typical Sunday worship experience to show how each of the parts and ‘practices’ train our hearts to love God and one another more and help us be part of God’s great story.