May God be gracious to us and bless us
and make his face to shine upon us, Selah
that your way may be known on earth,
your saving power among all nations.
Let the peoples praise you, O God;
let all the peoples praise you! (Psalm 67:1–3)
Over the past two weeks, we have looked at two ways corporate worship trains our bodies to worship God. But we also said that there is a connection between our minds and our bodies. Corporate worship not only trains our bodies to respond to God the way they should, it also creates gospel minds in us.
When we regularly gather together and listen to the teaching of the Bible, deep "grooves" are cut into our minds so that we never forget the gospel. The gospel is etched into our minds so that in every experience we face, we face it with the gospel as our guide. When we meet together in corporate worship, we are retelling the drama of the gospel.
God cut deep gospel grooves in the minds of Old Testament believers too through the sacrificial drama preceding this benediction. After the sin offering, the burnt offering, and the fellowship offerings were made, the priest would lift his hands and bless the people (Lev. 9:22,23). This is the blessing we read in Psalm 67:1-3. Notice this blessing was commanded by God and given to the Aaronic priesthood as their exclusive prerogative. Therefore, far from being incidental to the liturgy, the pronouncement of the benediction by the lifting of hands was as essential as the offering itself. Why? Because it was only upon Aaron’s lifting his hands the people knew their sacrifices had been accepted by God and their sins atoned for.
We repeat the gospel every week in our worship services as well. God calls, and we respond. We recognize we are in the presence of holiness, so we confess our sins. God assures us of his pardoning grace, and we rise and give thanks and offer our gifts. We turn to one another and pronounce the peace of Christ. We boldly make our requests known to God through intercessory prayer. He seats us as students and teaches us his word. We say thank you to God and affirm our desire to obey him in response to his grace. And finally, he sends us forth with a benediction.
John Calvin thought of the church and its corporate worship service as "a gymnasium, a training ground, a school, and a community of preparation and practice…enrolled in God's sanctifying, transformative paideia." In his book, You Are What You Love, James K.A. Smith says that "the scripture seep into us in a unique way in the intentional, communal rituals of worship." He goes on to relate how Thomas Cranmer's Book of Common Prayer shaped those who used it. Cranmer intentionally "drenched" the prayers in biblical minds so as to form the people's minds around God's Word. One writer reflects on the impact it had: "Cranmer's sombrely magnificent prose, read week by week, entered and possessed their minds, and became the fabric of their prayer, the utterance of their most solemn and their most vulnerable moments."1
As fallen people, we are born into sin, and therefore, our minds are inclined toward evil and idolatry. Therefore, in order to persevere in the Christian life and be obedient to what God has called us to, we need our minds to be consistently shaped and formed by God's Word. Corporate worship does that for us by retelling the gospel in every part of its liturgy. As we commit ourselves to corporate worship and other means of grace, we should not be surprised if we gradually start to see that we naturally make decisions based on a biblical mind rather than a fallen, sinful one. I don't mean to say that we can attain perfection in this regard, but we can see significant transformation by the grace of God through the work of his Word and Spirit.
- James K. A. Smith, You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2016), 65, 84.