One thing have I asked of the LORD,
that will I seek after:
that I may dwell in the house of the LORD
all the days of my life,
to gaze upon the beauty of the LORD
and to inquire in his temple.
(Psalm 27:4)
There are three aspects of corporate worship that David finds beneficial in his time of distress in this psalm. One of those is beauty. Worship should be the experience of God’s beauty in contrast to a world made ugly by selfish attitudes, violence, and pain. Every reasonable effort should be given to make any place God’s people gather for worship beautiful. We are embodied souls, so our physical environment shapes the way we think and feel. We gather in worship to gaze on the “fair beauty of the Lord” with spiritual eyes, but our physical senses will either be aided in that pursuit or distracted by our setting.1
In his book You Are What You Love, James K.A. Smith takes readers on a tour of the mall, showing how the architecture is designed to shape our experience and our desires. He says,
This temple – like countless others now emerging around the world – offers a rich, embodied visual mode of evangelism that attracts us. This is a gospel whose power is beauty, which speaks to our deepest desires. It compels us to come, not through dire moralisms, but rather with a winsome invitation to share in this envisioned good life.2
When settlers to a new area of the world were possessed by a Christian mind, they built the church even before they built their own homes. When churches have been clear-headed about their primary calling, they have built sanctuaries before they built any other structure. As human beings, we are people of place. Geographical places and physical spaces are important to us as people. They are especially important in our relationship with God, because he comes down to meet us in those spaces. Places where God peculiarly meets us are called “sacred” not because they are inherently sacred, but because they are the location where a formative encounter with God occurs. A place where we worship weekly is called a sanctuary, literally a “marked out place” where special meetings with the Lord are scheduled every week. You can seldom anticipate other places where the Spirit may meet you and do a formative work in your life—maybe on the beach or in a classroom or just walking down the street. But when you enter a worship service, unless you steadfastly resist the Spirit, you can bank on the Lord meeting you in a formative way. And as you make it a weekly priority, it is guaranteed to be like compound interest growing you into the likeness of Christ.
God told his people in Exodus 20 to create a simple altar out of plain stones they pick up off the ground. Later the tabernacle and temple will become more elaborate in order to draw the worshiper’s attention heavenward and represent God’s coming down. For now, he wants them to mark out a sacred space with unhewn stones to worship him. Though the altar they built was temporary, the principles God was teaching for worship remain true.
- C. S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1958), 90–98.
- James K.A. Smith, You Are What You Love (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos, 2016), 43.