Lifestyle Worship

The Worship God Intended Then and Now

David V. Adams

• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN:
  9781608995837
  9781498257664
• eBook ISBN:
  9781621892328
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

With the onslaught of books on how to do worship, Dr. David Adams' conversational book, Lifestyle Worship, is a breath of fresh air. Highlighting the current concept of worship, Dr. Adams explains the contrast and similarities of biblical worship within our contemporary definition of worship. Sprinkled with humor, Lifestyle Worship gets to the heart of what true worship is and offers practical suggestions to deepen your walk with God. With years of research behind him, Dr. Adams is quickly garnering attention as one of the leading authorities on worship and cultural theology.

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The Act of Worship

“Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth,” (John 4:23–24).

The first commandment from God is to worship him. God spoke and said, “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me,” (Exodus 20:1–3). Throughout scripture we are encouraged to walk, follow, listen, and love God with our whole heart (Deuteronomy 10:12; 19:9; 30:20; Matthew 22:37). Our whole heart is our whole being. However, the postmodern church is culturally bound to the contemporary definition of worship. This linguistic juxtaposition creates a climate of mediocrity. In Isaiah God remarks that, “These people come near to me with their mouth and honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. Their worship of me is made up only of rules taught by men” (Isaiah 29:13), which shows how mediocrity has lead to false faith.

Has the church strayed from its biblical foundations or improved on ancient traditions? Maybe we should take heed to Amos’s admonition, “I hate, I reject your Festivals. Nor do I delight in your solemn assemblies. Even though you offer up to Me Burnt Offerings and your Grain Offerings, I will not accept them. And I will not even look at the Peace Offerings of your fatlings. Take away from Me the noise of your songs. I will not even listen to the sound of your harps. But let justice roll down like rivers. And righteousness like an ever-flowing stream,” (Amos 5:21–24). The plague of indifference between history and marketable worship is the ability to distinguish between the motives of the heart, God’s will and eternal intention. The act of lifestyle worship is an individual experience. It is the meeting of the supernatural with the natural.

This Isn’t Your Daddy’s Church

As we look at history we can see the big picture of God’s hand at work through the millennia in snapshots of time and how paradigm shifts through the centuries affected Christendom. These great paradigm shifts transformed new thoughts that evolved into exciting flashpoints of God’s miraculous work. The Protestant Reformation put into action by Martin Luther changed the landscape of Christianity. The great evangelists of the early 1900s like Smith Wigglesworth, Frank Bartleman, Billy Sunday, and E. Stanley Jones, to name a few, had an amazing impact on the world. The great fervor of these great evangelists changed millions of lives. The great Asbury Revival of 1970 created a ripple effect with Evangelical Christians that has lasted decades. Woodstock-type music festivals have popped up all over the world because of God’s work at the Asbury Revival.

Social Ecologist and Management guru Peter Drucker weighs in with his comments about historical flashpoints saying, “Every few hundred years in Western history there occurs a sharp transformation . . . Within a few short decades, society rearranges itself—it’s worldview; its basic values: its social and political structures; its arts; its key institutions. Fifty years later, there is a new world. And the people born then cannot even imagine the world in which their grandparents lived . . . We are currently living through just such a transformation. It is creating the post-capitalist society . . .”[1]

During the latter part of the last century we were faced with an unusual war: the worship wars. It has continued to taunt us for many years. New thoughts on how we do church are still creeping into mainstream evangelical thought. Disillusioned with traditional approaches to worship many leaders are turning to active practices of movements like the Emerging or Emergent Church, and the Open Church. These movements are the outcome of skepticism towards the consumer driven approach to worship and the nonchalant attitude of justifying cultural practices as biblical directives. There are many new movements currently in action throughout the world such as Meta-Church, Cell Church, Covenant and International Communities, Home School movement, and Servant Evangelism. However, the reason for singling out the Open Church and the Emerging Church movements is their emphasis on change and restoring the heart of the early Christian church.

A cursory look at the Open Church and the Emerging Church will give us a better understanding of what is happening in our Christian culture and the impact it has on Lifestyle Worship. If you could watch a parade from high atop a building so you were able see the beginning and end of the parade, you would be able to witness diffe...

Table of contents

• Title
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Worship Here, Worship There
• Palmolive Prayers
• The Act of Worship
• The A.D.D. Saint
• Know God
• Disturbances
• Appendix
• Glossary
• Bibliography