When you come to worship, what do you see? Is it smartly dressed people sitting on pews, surrounded by lots of wood paneling? What do you hear? Maybe a sound system that is never quite loud enough – except for when it is much too loud? What do you feel? Perhaps an air conditioner that must have been set by the same guy doing the sound system? It is easy for us to come to worship God but quickly become distracted by the things we physically see, hear, and feel. Yet, there is more going on in worship than our senses detect.
The Hebrews writer contrasted the reality of worshipping God under Christ’s new covenant from the covenant Israel entered with Moses at Mount Sinai in Exodus 19. “For you have not come to what may be touched, a blazing fire and darkness and gloom and a tempest and the sound of a trumpet and a voice whose words made the hearers beg than no further messages be spoken to them,” he wrote in Hebrews 12:18-19. Because of Jesus, those of us coming to worship God experience something much more than “what may be touched.”
“But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God, the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel” (Heb. 12:22-24). You aren’t coming to a church building: you have come to “the city of the living God”. You aren’t just gathering with family and friends: we are “the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven”. When you lift your voice to praise God, you are joining the song with the angels themselves.
That is reality. It is the reality that Jesus revealed to the woman at the well when He said it would not matter whether you worshipped at the Samaritans’ Mount Gerizim or in Jerusalem: “But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship Him” (Jn. 4:21, 23). We need to pray for “the Spirit of wisdom and of revelation” to enlighten the eyes of our hearts to this reality (cf. Eph. 1:15-21). As He helps us glimpse what is really going on in our assemblies, we will be able to gratefully “offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire” (Heb. 12:28-29).
All throughout the Bible, people experience God's presence, power, and joy when they sing together. It's time for us to join the song!