Our Worship of God

Introduction—A. L. Bietz

Moderator—M. V. Campbell

R. A. Anderson

Charles Keyrner

M. K. Eckenroth

W. Mueller

L. E. Froom     

W. A. Nelson 

Leslie Hardinge

H. L. Rudy

H. W. Lowe

W. C. Webb

L. K. DICKSON: "The subject under dis­cussion is 'Worship.' I cannot think of any­thing more important to the church than this. During the previous panels we have considered our relationship to the world at large, the great unsaved population of this world; also our relationship to the great task of pastoral work. But today, we are considering our relationship to God in wor­ship. To introduce our topic we will call on Dr. A. L. Bietz, pastor of the White Me­morial church in Los Angeles and head of the Department of Religion at the College of Medical Evangelists. Dr. Bietz."

A. L. BIETZ: "Good morning, friends! I did not know that my presentation was to follow so closely that of my brother's at the last meeting. I hope it is all right. Perhaps you have heard the story of the two boys, brothers, who had had a very serious quar­rel in the afternoon. They were accustomed to praying for each other just before they went to sleep. Well, that evening as they were kneeling, and the one brother, who had been the victim of some molestation, prayed his prayer, all was well until he got to that place where he was to mention the name of his brother. But right at that point he stopped. Mother prompted him and mentioned the name of the brother, but the little fellow wouldn't mention the name. She urged him again, but he wouldn't re­spond. Finally, the mother, sensing that something was wrong, said, 'Well, don't you know that the Bible says you should love your enemies?' And the little fellow said, 'Yes, I know that, but he is not my enemy, he is my brother!' Well, I am very delighted for the privilege of following after my brother, who spoke at the devo­tional meeting.

"We have a wonderful topic to consider. Many times as Seventh-day Adventists we have spoken of having a warning message to give to all the world. But at the heart of the Adventist message are the words, 'Wor­ship him.' Adventists are to be primarily a worshipful people. It is not just a task of warning, but it is a task of producing men and women who have the Father's name written on their foreheads. In other words, a group of men and women who are to be filled with the Spirit of God. Adventism to me is not just a creed, and not just a set of doctrines. Adventism, I think, essentially is a way of life. And that way of life is a way of worship.

"Now, I think of a number of reasons for worship. One is as an avenue of winning souls. There are some churches who are gaining thousands upon thousands of mem­bers today and they are doing it through worship. We emphasize evangelism, and that is right and proper. We think of in­structing large crowds in great cities and doing this from great halls. But to me, one of the greatest avenues of soul winning is through worship. And I believe that there are hundreds of thousands of people who could be won to the Adventist message to­day if we brought them to the very heart of Adventism, which is the experience of worshiping God.

"These are days of tremendous sensation, days of noise and bustle. But many people no longer respond to sensation. They are overcharged; too many impulses have struck them. They are tired, they are weary, they are exhausted. Sensational approaches no longer work as they did in days gone by when life was comparatively quiet. If we but realized it, more and more people will respond to the worship atmosphere, and many will be won to Jesus Christ and to the message we love if we provide a climate of worship for them. Not long ago, in Southern California, an outstanding reli­gious leader who is not a member of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, attended our worship service. After the service this person came to me and said: 'I have never been in a service where I felt so close to the living God.' And as she spoke tears were rolling down her cheeks. 'I shall be everlastingly grateful,' she said, 'that you have allowed me to be in your congrega­tion, and to feel the warmth of your con­gregation and the warmth of the God you worship.' This pleased me, and this woman is now coming regularly to the White Me­morial church—won through worship.

"Not long ago—in fact, just a week be­fore I came here—a professional man who had just recently been baptized said to me: 'Would you like to know why I became a Seventh-day Adventist?' I said: 'Indeed, I am always interested.' Well,' he said, 'I came to this service here at the White and you were out in the vestibule when I ar­rived that Sabbath morning. You see, I had been asked to come by a physician, and when I came in, you greeted me. You put your hand on my shoulder, and you said: ^-Friend." Then I moved into the congrega­tion and at once felt an atmosphere of peace. I was surrounded. I can't explain it, nor can I define it, but I felt I was with God's people, and I was with God. And I couldn't be in that service without coming to grips with my own personal relationship with God.' This doctor, now baptized, was also won as the result of the experience of worship.

"Not only our services of worship but the total Adventist message ought to be presented in a worshipful atmosphere. Too often, I fear, we preach with a closed fist instead of the open hand. A few months ago I had the privilege of being in Wash­ington, D.C., conducting the H. M. S. Rich­ards lectureship on preaching, and among those who attended were some evangelists. I received a letter from one of these evange­lists after I returned to Los Angeles. I cher­ish that letter. This man was conducting public evangelism when he wrote the letter. He said: 'After this meeting I changed completely my method of preaching the Adventist message. Into my Sunday night services I have brought the atmosphere of love, of acceptance, and worship, and my wife said to me: "This is what I have been waiting for all these years of your minis­try!" ' But may I say that not only wives of ministers have been waiting for this but thousands upon thousands of people also are waiting—people who want to worship God.

"Now, let us think of worship. But how shall we think of it? Someone has said that worship is the arousal of love of the crea­ture for his Redeemer that carries over to the will and touches all of the springs of human action. It is an attitude in which the mind bows in reverent faith, and the heart is stirred with holy feelings that seek expression in appropriateness of movement of the will in external deed. Worship is achieving fellowship with a loving God and with human agents.

"Let me express a deep personal con­viction that salvation is not by the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, but sal­vation is through Jesus Christ and a wor­shipful relationship to a personal God. Words are necessary, but only as means, not as ends; they are not to be aggressive, but avenues to the living God. And wor­ship always produces a sense of hopeful­ness through total involvement of body, mind, and spirit. How many times I have heard people after a prayer meeting, or after a worship service, having been ex­hausted before they came, say after the meeting, 'Oh, I feel so refreshed. I feel that life has flowed through every nerve and every tissue and every fiber of my whole being. I have been healed.' The Seventh-day Adventist message is a healing message, and no one ought ever to listen to a Seventh-day Adventist sermon without having felt the healing influence of the presence of God.

"As we heard this morning, instead of living abstractions, we need to live with a personal God. Then new life will come into the church and people will say, 'There is a person who is a worshipful per­son.' Now, may I suggest too that worship is not only a great means of soul winning, but worship is to be a means of keeping the people in the church after they have come among us. Why are there so many apostasies? I think one of the reasons may be that we have given good classroom in­struction, but we have not provided wor­shipful churches. These people, having had their lives changed, have come into the church. But have they found it a home of worship? There is too little at-homeness with God or at-homeness with God's peo­ple. People leave the church for motiva­tion reasons, not for intellectual reasons. Those who have left the Adventist Church, have not left it for reasons of doctrine but for reasons of feeling. All motivation to stay an Adventist resides within feelings, and worship motivates a person.

"I was interested in what Elder Ratcliffe had to say the other evening. He spoke of bringing so many people into the truth in Australia, and then a lament. He said: 'We teach these people to fall in love with Jesus Christ, and then we bring them to the church, but the church does not marry them. I think of evangelism as courtship. It is wonderful! It is great! It is thrilling! Yes,' he said, 'and it is sensational. People fall in love, and courtship is a restless type of thing. But marriage, this is what is going to hold the people in the church.' How­ever, I don't think you are going to get married except through the experience of worship. And so in evangelism our evan­gelists teach the people to fall in love with Christ. They give them instruction for mar­riage; that is all right. You have to have the marriage itself, and that is worship, that is the church at worship. Debate pro­duces debate, argument produces argument, definition produces countless definitions, institutionalism produces pressures and counterpressures, but worship produces fel­lowship with God and loving fellowship with God's children within and without the church.

"It seems to me that a pastor is essen­tially a leader in worship. Have we been taught how to lead our people in worship? Have we been taught how to marry our people to God? Is the church a marriage? I have been particularly concerned with the fact that so many Seventh-day Advent­ist young people leave the church. Why? Perhaps we have thought that our instruc­tion would hold them. It does not. Knowl­edge of itself holds no one. But worship does hold them. Just last Sabbath a number of young people came to me and said: 'Oh, we were reared in Seventh-day Adventist churches.' There was a glow on their faces as they said to me: 'I felt God here this morning. It was good to be here.' These young people were teen-agers. Is this what our children feel when they come to our churches? If they do, they will always be with us. If they don't feel this, then I fear we may lose them.

"Now, what are the qualities of worship? Let's just quickly look at these. First there is adoration, where the people who come to church feel themselves loved by God. I spoke to a person just the other day who said, 'We went to church last Sabbath and did we get ourselves scolded!' They prob­ably did, but they did not worship. This pastor did not bring them into loving fel­lowship with God. When we come into His presence it is to adore Him. Can we say: 'O God, we love You; it is so wonder­ful to be here this Sabbath morning. We love You and we love God's children, and this love binds us all together and we are healed.' That, dear friends, is worship.

"And then comes confession, where we own up to what we are, where all sham and pretense goes, where heart touches heart and mind touches mind, and people face each other with open faces instead of hiding behind masks. And then, there is fellowship in worship. And one of the most important is thanksgiving. Our people must be taught to worship. So many of our peo­ple feel, for instance, that unless they are hearing a sermon, nothing is happening. What a pity! We need to teach them to wor­ship.

"Now, there are certain techniques that I think must begin in the home. The min­ister himself must create an atmosphere; he must create a climate. I think that there must be an order of worship, a building for total participation, where the congregation is active, and the congregation receives and gives. There must be warmth, there must be built a concept of the church not as an institution, but as a society of loving per­sons redeemed by Jesus Christ, who is the great Lover. Baptism now becomes worship, the Lord's ordinances become worship, every campaign, every fund-raising device is no longer a fundraising device but an act of worship. When we built the White Memo­rial church we did not sell a doughnut or a pie, or a single piece of prepared cloth made by the Dorcas members. We raised that money through worship; worship only.

MODERATOR: "Before we take up the next phase of family worship, I want to say just one more word on personal worship. Most of my life I am not with my family. I am traveling and alone. But one can and should enter into a worship experience in the hotel room by oneself, reading the Bible, pray­ing, and asking God's direction for the day. We need Him to guide every step of the way, and make our consciences tender so that we will do nothing to displease Him. How much more satisfying it is when we can have the wife and our children to­gether and worship as a family! But that is a privilege I have not been able to enjoy a great deal because of my work."

L. HARDINGE: "As Christians we have an advantage over the heathen people, for we have the Bible, and I would like to stress the all-important part that the Bible must play in worship--individual, family, and church. Our knowledge of God cannot be discovered apart from the Bible. What our young people in college need to learn is how they can make their study of the Bible in the morning and the evening really wor­shipful. To eat the Word of God is to take its principles, concentrate the mind upon it, try to understand its ramifications, and then lift up our hearts to God and say: 'God wants me to apply these principles to my life today, and to practice the pres­ence of God every moment of the day. What would the Lord have me to do today? How would He have me to appreciate His will and to show forth that apprecia­tion in my daily life to those with whom I come in contact?' Now, if we can do that personally, then I think our family worship will be more effective."

H. W . LOWE: "Brother Moderator, I was born and raised an Anglican. I left Angli­canism when I was in my teens, but I have wonderful memories of those early days. My father was a very godly man. My mother was the one with the aggressive spirit. She was a wonderful woman and took the lead, but gather had a kindly quieter disposition. One of the things I shall always remember of him was that he would gather us children, and with the open fam­ily Bible on his knee, the big Bible with pictures in it, would tell us Bible stories. Then we would have our little prayer and go to bed. You know it takes more courage and more love to be worshipful in the home than it does to be worshipful in the church. Vas my dad a better or a worse man than many Adventist dads I have met? I would not want to say, but in many of the homes of our people, family worship is too little known.

"I remember a woman at a camp meet­ing not long ago. She came to me bur­dened about her children—teen-agers—and I listened, and then I began to ask ques­tions. Did she go to work? Yes, she was out from early morning until late at night, as was also her husband. And who cared for the children? Well, they waited for her to come home. Did she have family worship? At that question she began to weep. Brethren, that is the reason we are losing many of these young people. Mother work­ing, father working, no worship, no Bible reading. And so I ask again: 'Was my dad, an Episcopalian, better or worse than many Adventist fathers today?'"

C. KEYMER: "I would particularly like to speak about the matter of music in the church worship. As ministers we do not know, or are not acquainted with, our Church Hymnal as we ought to be. Many of us know the titles of a few songs, but when it comes to choosing a hymn, we do not really know our hymnbook, and con­sequently do not always make the right choice of hymns. Some of the very beautiful hymns we so often overlook and neglect. I would like to encourage every minister to take his hymnal and study it, rather than just look at it occasionally or rapidly in trying to find some kind of song that might fit, and hurriedly choosing it. I find it very helpful to study the hymnal, and notice particularly the contents of those hymns. Not only the first stanza, but the second and the third stanzas. There are some very beautiful thoughts expressed in those hymns that we overlook so many times. They can appropriately be connected with the message of the day, or with a theme of the Scripture reading that might be given.

"I have taken the time to make a list of worship hymns, of devotional hymns, of hymns of praise, of hymns that would be more appropriate at the close of the sermon. I have those typed out on a sheet that I have inserted at the back of my Church Hymnal. And so when it comes to choos­ing hymns for worship, I have a list of ap­propriate ones from which to choose.

"To select a hymn of praise at the begin­ning or opening of a service of worship is important, for certainly our worship serv­ice should be an adoration to our God. Too often we choose songs that are really inappropriate and out of place for our wor­ship services. Then the closing hymn is most important. To have a hymn that fits the message that you have tried to present brings a response from the hearts of the people. And after all, the response of the worshipers is the real purpose of worship."

MODERATOR: "Brother Eckenroth, I have noticed that sometimes in your campaigns you have not had a singing evangelist, and yet I have found that the people sing heart­ily, and that you seem to be able to choose music that interests them. What guides you in your evangelistic choice, and is there a difference between evangelistic music and worship music?"

M. K. ECKENROTH: "Well, there is very definitely, Brother Moderator. I am very much impressed with what these other men have said. And really I have found it hard to keep still up to this time. Actually, when Brother Keymer was speaking, I thought of this quotation in the book Evan­gelism—our trusted sword—page 498 and top of page 499. We read that the early morning often found our Saviour in some secluded place, meditating, searching the Scriptures, or in prayer. 'With the voice of singing He welcomed the morning light. With songs of thanksgiving He cheered His hours of labor, and brought heaven's glad­ness to the toilworn and disheartened.'

"I first read that quotation, I just pictured our Lord singing in the early morning and along through the day. As He saw the toilworn and the disheartened, He not only preached to them but He sang to them as well. Now, thinking of our differ­ent services, I feel that too often our wor­ship breaks down in our public meetings because we use the same music that we use in Sabbath school or in the evangelistic meeting. These testimony songs are good in their place, but we need to teach our people to sing more of the rich hymns of the church, especially in our worship serv­ices. I was at a workers' meeting some time ago and this question of music came up. One of the workers lamented the fact that our hymnal did not contain some of the good old songs that were in Christ in Song. And that expresses a great cross section of our thinking. All too frequently our con­gregations are asked to content themselves with inferior music. That which is in one section is what is often used in all the other services."

R. A. ANDERSON: "Brother Moderator, could I break in for just a moment? I would like to read something again from the in­spired pen of the messenger of the Lord on page 505 of Evangelism: 'Music can be a great power for good; yet we do not make the most of this branch of worship.' Now, although they were singing quite a good deal when this was written, yet we are told that we do not make the most of it. Then again: 'Music should have beauty, pathos, and power. Let the voices be lifted in songs of praise and devotion.' We see, then, that music is to exert a power in our worship. But it must be the right kind of music.

"The apostle Paul speaks of being filled with the Spirit, speaking to yourselves (that is to one another, as a group in fel­lowship), in psalms and hymns and spir­itual songs. Note the three types of singing —psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs. The hymn is generally an ascription of praise to the high and holy God. Spiritual songs, or testimony songs, have their place, but worship demands more than testimony or rally songs. The great hymns of the church are stairways, as it were, on which devout souls of other days ascended into the very presence of God. And in worship our con­gregations can ascend those same stairways if rightly led. We need to give a great deal more thought to this matter of singing, I be­lieve, in our worship services and even in our family worship.

R. A. ANDERSON: "Mr. Moderator, could I just make a little observation here? A re­cent issue of Look magazine gave an excel­lent summary of Adventism, but there was one little point that has a bearing on our discussion. Permit me to read it: 'While the casual observer might gain the impres­sion that Adventists tend to be a bit eager in their money raising, activities of this sort are actually part of a program outlined by the Church. Such eagerness is engen­dered at an early age. Recently, on a Los Angeles television station, a seven-year-old panelist revealed that his father was an Ad­ventist minister. Asked what distinguished his church, he replied, "Ours is noisier than the others." What he meant was not that the Adventists whoop it up with old-time spiritual fervor (they don't), but that there is sometimes considerable commotion in Adventist meetings. This is because even the tiniest babies are expected to be in church on Saturday morning, though they will not become members until they are in their early teens. Hence, in churches without special "cry" rooms, there is often an overtone of infant sobs and parental talk, and considerable travel to the rest rooms. Adventists develop the churchgoing habit early.'