Encountering God Together

Leading Worship Services That Honor God, Minister to His People, and Build His Church

David G. Peterson

• Publisher: P Publishing
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781596387065
• eBook ISBN: 9781596387072
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Ministro del culto cristiano

David Peterson helps us reclaim our sense of truly encountering God as a body of believers. He explores the foundations and meaning of the church service and describes the shape and flow it should take.

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Conscience is a neglected word that not many of us take seriously. But have you ever considered examining your conscience as part of daily life? What if doing this were the only way of know the joy of feeling clean inside?

Is such joy possible without self-righteousness or even self-deception? Christopher Ash argues that it is, wonderfully possible, through the good news of Jesus Christ. Here is an invitation to rediscover your conscience and what the Bible has to say about it. Ash examines what the conscience is, what a guilty conscience tells us, the choice our conscience presents us, and the conscience’s role as a guide, to offer us the pure joy of a clear conscience day after day.

“How refreshing to see a thoughtful and richly biblical book on the conscience. Christopher Ash performs a vital service for the church by opening up God’s truth about this neglected and therefore misunderstood area of biblical truth.”

—Tedd Tripp, Pastor, Author, Conference Speaker

1 . In Engaging with God: A Biblical Theology of Worship (Leicester: Apollos; Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1992) I show how the theme of worship relates to the developing story of the Bible and relates to topics such as creation, sin, covenant, redemption, the people of God and the future hope.

2 . To some extent this section draws on the argument of a 2008 report by the Doctrine Commission of the Synod of the Anglican Diocese of Sydney, entitled ‘A Theology of Christian Assembly’.

3 . I have discussed this more fully in D. G. Peterson, Engaging with God: A Biblical Theology of Worship (Leicester: Apollos; Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1992), pp. 23–49.

4 . L. Burns, The Nearness of God: His Presence with His People (Phillipsburg: P. & R., 2009), shows how the theme of God’s presence with his people is expressed in the Bible from Genesis to Revelation. Burns draws particular attention to the transforming implications of God’s presence with us through the incarnation of his Son and the gift of his Holy Spirit.

5 . Although Matt. 18:20 and 1 Cor. 5:3–5 specifically focus on meetings for disciplinary decisions, the promise of Christ’s presence can be applied to any assembly in his name. But Matt. 18:20 does not mean that any gathering of two or three believers constitutes a church. In Matt. 18:17 ‘the church’ is clearly a larger entity than the ‘two or three witnesses’ mentioned by Jesus.

6 . I have modified the niv translation of Rom. 12:1 and Heb. 12:28 to indicate that the Greek more literally means ‘serve’ or ‘service’. The next chapter will explain this and show how worship terminology from the Old Testament has been adapted in the New Testament to describe the work of Christ and the response we should make to it.

7 . E. Underhill, Worship, 3rd ed. (London: Nisbet, 1937), p. 3.

8 . J. E. Burkhart, Worship: A Searching Examination of the Liturgical Experience (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1982), p. 17.

9 . G. Kendrick, Worship (Eastbourne: Kingsway, 1984); Learning to Worship as a Way of Life (Minneapolis: Bethany House, 1985), p. 32, rightly condemns a narrowing of worship to praise: ‘as if the highest achievement of our whole pilgrimage on earth was to enter some kind of praise-induced ecstasy!’

10 . The Hebrew verbal form hištaḥăwâ literally means ‘bend oneself over at the waist’. It is regularly translated by some form of proskynein in the Greek version of the Old Testament (the Septuagint). On these and related terms, see D. G. Peterson, Engaging with God: A Biblical Theology of Worship (Leicester: Apollos; Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1992), pp. 55–63.

11 . The first term in such references describes the gesture (‘he bowed down’) and the second explains its significance (‘and worshipped’
or ‘paid homage’).

12 . The Greek text of John 4:23 literally reads ‘in spirit and truth’. However, niv (2011) has rightly interpreted this to mean ‘in the Spirit and in truth’. Jesus has just offered the woman at the well ‘living water’ (4:10), which will become ‘a spring of water welling up to eternal life’ (4:14). This clearly anticipates the offer of the Holy Spirit, which is expressed in similar terms in 7:37–39.

13 . In Greek these were words based on the seb- stem or words in the phoboun group, g...

Table of contents

• ABBREVIATIONS
• INTRODUCTION
• THE GATHERING OF GOD
• WORSHIPPING GOD
• EDIFYING THE CHURCH
• PATTERNS OF SERVICE
• LISTENING TO GOD
• PRAYING TOGETHER
• PRAISING GOD
• SINGING TOGETHER
• BAPTISM
• THE LORD’S SUPPER
• EPILOGUE
• SUGGESTED FURTHER READING
• INDEX OF SUBJECTS
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