Do Protestants Really Worship God?

And I want to be clear about a few things as we start off. First, I’m not actually saying what they’re doing is bad, just so what they’re doing isn’t worship, it’s Bible studies, it’s teaching, it’s preaching. All of those are good things as long as they’re done orthodoxly, but they’re not worship. In the same way that if I have friends over and serve my neighbor, that’s really good, that’s really beautiful, but that’s not the same thing as what happens in worship in the Mass. The second thing I want to make really clear is that there’s not just one thing that is Protestant worship.

So you’ve got the liturgist, James White. This is not the more anti-Catholic reformed preacher, James White, this is another guy. James White, this is a little bit dated now, in his book, Protestant Worship, identifies nine major liturgical traditions within Protestantism. You got the reformed Lutheran, Anabaptist, Anglican, what he calls separated or Puritan, Quaker worship, Methodist. And then when he calls Frontier, so imagine the American frontier in the 19th century, and then Pentecostal. And a lot of what we think of today is worship, depending on where you’re from, might be from one of these particular traditions.

I remember giving a talk in Wisconsin and two of the guys I was talking with were former Protestants and their understanding of Protestantism was very much Lutheran because the people around them in Wisconsin were Lutheran. Whereas, where I live in Kansas, it’s much more likely to be Baptist or there’s a large number of reformed, and that’s going to impact what the theology is. It’s going to impact what the worship is and the styles of prayer and what a Sunday liturgy looks like. So if you have something like Hillsong where it looks like a rock concert, that’s a modern twist on kind of a Pentecostal thing that emphasizes the centrality of experience.

And I’m not actually going to talk about that kind today. I want to talk more about, this is more the reformed to tradition. A lot of Baptists, where it’s the centrality of preaching, where at the heart of this is the idea of someone who’s going to be reading scripture and then spending a long time talking about scripture. And it might be book-ended by some opening and closing prayers, but the focus really is on the preacher and the pulpit. And so before we get into why that’s not worship, it’s maybe important to say, okay, we got these nine different styles of Protestant worship, in that book, again, it’s a little outdated. If you were to do it today, I think you’d find more than nine different major styles.

Does it matter? Should we care about the form of worship or is it just, well, whatever’s good for you is good for me. And the answer to that is scripture seems to suggest it matters quite a bit. And I would look to a couple places. The first would be the two sons of Aaron mentioned in Leviticus 10, Nadab and Abihu, who try to offer their own form of worship. And in the words of Leviticus 10, they offer God unholy fire, such as he had not commanded them. Now notice, they’re not worshiping a false God. They’re giving false worship to the true God. They’re liturgically innovating. And what happens? Fire comes forth from the presence of the Lord and devours them and they die before the Lord. And Moses says to Aaron, their father, this is what the Lord has said, I will show myself wholly among those who are near me. And before all the people, I will be glorified. That the glory of God, the holiness of God, the majesty of God means we don’t just approach Him however we happen to want and call that worship.

And so that strikes me as a pretty clear signal, God does care how he’s worshiped. Now strangely, some people have the view that God cared in the Old Testament how he was worshiped and doesn’t care anymore. That now, because there’s no strict form of worship given in the New Testament, that therefore we’re open to do whatever, that the same God who cared a lot about how the sons of Aaron were worshiping him wrongly now is fine with us worshiping him however we want. And to this, I would just say Hebrews nine says, no, even the first covenant had regulations for worship in an earthly sanctuary. Think about that language, even. A lot of what Hebrews is doing is showing how things in the old covenant prefigure things in the new covenant, which in turn prefigure even greater things than the heavenly liturgy. And so we know the old covenant had earthly regulations for worship, for an earthly sanctuary.

We know the heavenly liturgy has regulations for worship, and there’s a beautiful liturgy in the heavenly liturgy. There’s a beautiful liturgy in the temple and in the old covenant. And we’re to believe that the same God who’s the author of the old covenant, which is a foreshadowing of the new covenant and the new covenant’s a foreshadowing of the heavenly liturgy, we’re to believe He cares about the old covenant and heavenly liturgy and doesn’t care about the new covenant in between. It doesn’t really make sense. The language of even the first covenant makes it clear that the author of Hebrews takes for granted that new covenant worship has regulations, that there’s an earthly sanctuary as with the old covenant, and that there’s a way of worshiping God and Spirit and truth that He really does care about.

Notice that language of worshiping and spirit and truth, the truth there matters it. It is not liturgical relativism. So in other words, you can’t just say, this is what makes me feel close to God. This is how I like to worship. Because in all of those things, who’s the center of worship? It’s no longer God, it’s now you and your preferences. So that would be the first thing I think we need to make clear. Whatever the right way to worship God is, there is such a thing as a right way to worship God. Now, with that in mind, why do I say that so much Protestant worship isn’t worship? And again, I’m not taking the low hanging fruit. I’m not saying the rock concerts are just rock concerts. I’m actually saying you’ve got the people who are trying to preach Jesus Christ for an hour. That’s great. That’s not worship.

I’ll give you an example, some concrete examples. O.S. Hawkins, who’s a well-known Baptist, has a whole series of books. And in one of them he talks about how it’s been his privilege as a pastor to be what he calls God’s under-shepherd, four different churches, including most recently at the time that he wrote this, one of, if not, the most influential 20th century pulpits in the western world. That’s his language. That pulpit, he says, like most pulpits in Baptist life, stands in the middle of the building on center stage, so to speak. Notice this is not an accidental thing. Is the center of your church a pulpit where a man is preaching or an altar where Christ is being offered to the Father? And O.S. Hawkins is saying it’s a pulpit where you can preach and this is intentional. He says, “It is there to make a statement that central to Baptist worship is the preaching of the Book of God to the people of God.”

Proclamation, the preaching of the gospel should be central to Christian worship. The sermon is the central dynamic in the worship experience. It is the fulcrum upon which the entire service of worship hinges. Everything that comes before it should point to it, and everything that comes after it should issue out of it. So notice, in the Catholic model, the Eucharist is described as the source and summit of the Christian life. The Eucharistic sacrifice, everything is leading to it, everything is flowing from it. O.S. Hawkins says, “Yeah, for us as Baptists, it’s me preaching.” That’s the difference. And the issue here again, is not that preaching is bad, is that preaching isn’t worship. We’re going to make a threefold distinction between what the Bible calls teaching, what it calls prayer, and what it calls worship. And so a lot of what Protestants get right is teaching and prayer. What they’re missing is worshiping God.

So let’s unpack what each of those three things are biblically. First, teaching. Now, what the Bible calls teaching includes things like preaching, it includes Bible studies, it includes a kind of broad category of things. In general, when we go and we talk about God, that’s in the realm of teaching. Now, many Protestants would say, like Hawkins did a second ago, that this is the center of Protestant worship. And so Barry Leash says in his book, People in the Presence of God: Models and Directions for Worship, that to this day Protestant worship is indebted to synagogue’s emphasis on prayer, scripture reading, teaching, lay involvement, and elder rule. Now this is, in fairness, an interesting argument, that a lot of what we see on a Sunday in a more traditional Protestant church is going to sound a lot like what you might have seen in a first century synagogue.

So for instance, in Acts 13, St. Paul and his companions go in on the Sabbath to the synagogue and we’re told after the reading of the law and the prophets, so those are the first two of the three sections of the Old Testament, the rulers of the synagogue sent to them saying, “Brethren, if you have any word of exhortation for the people, say it.” And so, of course, Paul stands up and starts to preach. So you’ve got the proclamation of scripture and you’ve got preaching, all well and good. Jesus does the same thing. We see Him going into Nazareth and we’re told as was His custom, every Sabbath, He would go into the synagogue. And there He’s given the scroll of Isaiah. He finds the part about the spirit of the Lord being upon Him, and He announces that it’s been proclaimed. So once again, you’ve got the proclamation of scripture and then you’ve got preaching. All of this is well and good. I’m not quibbling with any of this. What I’m saying is none of this is worship.

In fact, in John six, after Jesus gives the bread of life discourse, we’re even told this, He said in the synagogue as he taught at Capernaum. This is a subtle detail. This is very easy to miss. But of all of the mentions of Jesus or the apostles in the synagogue, they’re never described as going in there to worship God. They’re never described as going in there to pray. They’re going in there to teach. They’re going in there to encounter people, to proclaim the good news, but those are different things. So to understand that we have to look at the second concept of the three.

Prayer, and here, I’ll just point out that it’s not just that the New Testament doesn’t talk about the synagogue as a place of prayer. It’s that first century synagogues didn’t understand themselves to be places of prayer. Though there’s a pretty famous synagogue inscription that we’ve found where it describes how they built the synagogue for reading the law and studying the commandments and as a hostel with chambers and water installations to provide for the needs of itinerants from abroad. So if you’re familiar with the layout of a lot of Catholic churches, and there’s some Protestant churches that are set up this way as well. You’ve got the sanctuary and then you have a fellowship hall. You’ve got some place where people gather together, you give talks or you have Bible studies or you have coffee and donuts, or you have whatever else. So it’s a place for Christian fellowship, a place for gathering and study and all of those things, but it’s a place that’s distinct from the place for prayer and worship.

And that’s how this synagogue understands itself, as something like a fellowship hall. This is a place where travelers can stay. It’s a place where you can read the Torah and you can talk about it. And that’s not just my take. Rabbi Reuven Hammer, in his book, Entering Jewish Prayer talks about this. He points out, he’s looking at this in scripture. He says, there is no mention of prayer. And he admits, this is an argument from silence that’s never going to be absolute. Nevertheless, he said, the evidence is overwhelming that synagogues in the time prior to the destruction of the second temple, so the second temple’s destroyed in 70. So during the lifetime of Jesus and before, synagogues at this time were primarily places for the dissemination of knowledge of the Torah on a popular level and that whatever prayer took place there was either connected to study or secondary to it.

But then he says, after the year 70, the situation changes drastically. So in the year 70, the Romans destroyed the temple. As we’re going to see, the temple is the privileged place for both prayer and the exclusive place for worship. And when that’s destroyed in 70, the synagogue picks up a lot of the slack, we’ll say, that prayer and worship move into the synagogue. But at the time of Jesus, what you have going on in the synagogue isn’t prayer and isn’t worship. And that’s really a vitally important point, because if your notion of worship and prayer is modeled off of the synagogue and the synagogue isn’t doing prayer and worship, you’re missing something really crucial. James McKinnon has a series of articles that kind of deal with this, and he makes this really striking point. He says in the New Testament, the synagogue appears as a proper venue for judicial and penal activities, but not for prayer. And he gives a lot of biblical examples, because the synagogue’s mentioned a lot, prayer’s mentioned a lot. There’s only going to be one time where they’re both mentioned together and it’s really striking.

So Jesus warns his disciples, they’ll deliver you up to councils and flog you in their synagogue. So notice, the synagogue there is like a gathering place. Paul talks about his preconversion activities. “Lord, they themselves know that in every synagogue I imprisoned and beat those who believed in me.” So again, it doesn’t sound like a church, right? That doesn’t sound like a temple. This sounds much more like a common space where people gather together. As for prayer, listen to the words of Jesus. “When you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites, for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at street corners so they may be seen by men.”

So notice, the only time Jesus talks about praying in the synagogue is He’s telling Christians not to pray in the synagogue. Now notice, He doesn’t say don’t go in the synagogue. He goes in the synagogue all the time, but He’s not telling them to pray in the synagogue or the street corners. Now notice even in that framing, He’s treating the synagogue as something like a street corner, not a place of prayer, but a gathering place, a place to be seen in public. He’s not saying synagogues are inherently bad places. He’s saying, hypocrites go out there to pray, not because it’s the house of prayer, because it’s the likely place they’re going to be seen by their peers and seen as really spiritual, holy people.

So where should we pray? Jesus gives the model in Mark one. He goes off to a lonely place by Himself in the morning and there He prayed. He gives the example as we saw in Matthew six of going to the upper room. We’ll get back to that. Acts 21, Paul and his companions, before they leave, they kneel down on the beach and they pray and they bid one another farewell. So you pray wherever. Prayer is not tied to a particular location. There’s sometimes this myth that until the death of Jesus, people had to go to the temple to pray and that Jesus’ death changes all of that. That is a myth. Remember, the Pharisees were praying on the street corners and in the synagogues. You clearly did not have to go to Jerusalem to pray, but prayer was something done all over the place. It wasn’t something that you had to go to the synagogue anymore than you had to go to the temple. So let’s turn back to that passage as I promised in Matthew six.

That Jesus says when you pray, “You must not be like the hypocrites for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners that they may be seen by men.” And that’s the critical part. The reason they’re going into the synagogue is that they may be seen by men, not because this is a place of prayer. It’s like the street corner. No one is going to say the street corner is the privileged place for prayer. So why are the Pharisees praying on the street corner, because they want to be seen by others. Then He says, “Truly, truly, I tell you, they have their reward. But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret.” So that’s the contrast between public places and secret places, not actually between the synagogue as a place of prayer or not.

So notice that in all of this, the synagogue does not appear as a place of worship or its prayer.

Sorry, Jack. Had a cough. I’m hoping you can cut that out and then we’ll just cut to the next slide.

So that leads to the third of the three things, which is worship. So if you’ve got teaching and you’ve got prayer, what’s worship and where does it happen? Before we even get into how do we define it, where does it take place? Because this is going to be our first clue that it’s something different than teaching and something different than prayer. In John four, we see this, I think most clearly. Jesus is at Shechem on the mountain, which is Mount Gerizim, which is the holy mountain for Samaritans. And He encounters a Samaritan woman there at the well and she tells Him, “Our father’s worshiped on this mountain, and you say that in Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship.” So notice, you can pray anywhere, but you can worship in one place. If you’re a Samaritan, that one place is Mount Gerizim. If you’re a Jew, that one place is a temple in Jerusalem.

Jesus doesn’t disagree with this characterization. He tells her instead, this is going to change. He says, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father.” So he acknowledges that there’s one place of worship in Judaism and in Samaritan religion. So this is something clearly different than prayer or teaching, which could happen all over. So what is worship? Well, the word in English, that comes from worthy-ship, which is to give God His worth, and that’s a pretty good way of understanding it. We’ll get into kind of the contours. We’ll put it like this threefold distinction. You got teaching and preaching, that’s talking about God. We see that in the synagogue. Of course, that can happen anywhere, it can happen in the marketplace, it can happen wherever you find a crowd of people. But you’re probably going to try to go into public to do that, to meet as many people as possible, to tell them the good news.

That’s contrasted from prayer, which there’s something intimate, you’re talking to God. So there the emphasis isn’t, get in front of as many people as possible, but find a place where you can go to pray. The upper room, we find people going into the temple to pray. Think about the sinner who goes into the temple and beats his breast. You’ve got Jesus going to a lonely place. Basically, anywhere private. So if the teaching and preaching is anywhere public, the prayer is anywhere private. Not that you’re forbidden from praying in public, but you’re forbidden from praying in public if your reason for doing it is to be seen by others. But then worship, which isn’t just talking to God but is actually offering to God, giving God what He’s owed, that was done in the temple.

Now, that’s going to lead to the question both what is worship and where do we Christians worship? How do we Christians worship? So let’s unpack that. First, worship was inseparable from the concept of sacrifice. Everett Ferguson, Protestant scholar, in his book, The Early Church at Work and Worship, points us out. That sacrifice was the universal language of worship in the ancient world, that when we’re talking about worship, we almost always mean sacrifice because sacrifice is our way of honoring God. Saint Augustine points us out in Book 10 of City of God, he says, “Putting aside for the present the other religious services with which God is worshiped, certainly no man would dare to say that sacrifice is due to any but God.” In other words, yeah, sure, we can talk about other things as forms of worship, but the way of worship, par excellence, is sacrifice.

That’s what you couldn’t do except on Mount Gerizim or in the temple in Jerusalem. You couldn’t offer animal sacrifices. You couldn’t sacrifice a Passover lamb, for instance. Even today, Samaritans go to Mount Gerizim to do the Passover sacrifice. So sacrifice, that’s worship, that’s to God alone. And so Augustine goes on, he says, “Many parts, indeed, of divine worship are unduly used in showing honor to men.” In other words, if worship is about giving God what’s owed to Him, that honor of God, there are ways where we can have flattery that looks like it’s imitating divine honor, where we’re talking about some man as if he’s God. But even when we fall into this, no one is crazy enough, he says basically. Whoever thought of sacrificing saved to one whom he knew, supposed, or feigned to be a God. So there’s a way of using adulating, flattering language where, oh, I adore this person.

Well, you’re using the language of worship, the language of divine honor and applying it to a person, an adorable baby. You’re technically saying that that baby is worthy of divine worship. But even when you have that kind of language of flattery, you’re not actually worshiping the baby. Augustine’s going to say you shouldn’t do that. There’s something undue about that pernicious kind of flattery. But even in those cases, you’re not crazy enough to say, I’m going to have a liturgy where I offer sacrifice to the baby. That’s the kind of thing that’s so obviously at the center of worship, that idea of sacrificing to God, that this is only done to someone you regard as God. And he points out this is how it’s always been. It’s not just this is true in Judaism or Christianity or paganism, this is true as far back as we find humans be.

Augustine puts it like this, how ancient a part of God’s worship sacrifice is that those two brothers, Cain and Abel, sufficiently show. Cain and Abel both go to offer God worship through what, through sacrifice. And the difference between them is that one offers God the best in sacrifice and the other doesn’t. That is, Abel offers God the first leans, the firstborn animal. Cain offers the grain from the ground, the leftovers. But both of them realize that if we’re going to worship God, we need to be offering sacrifice. So that’s really a critical part of the conception of worship. We could say that worship is a little broader than sacrifice. Augustine makes that point, but this is at the heart of it. So if you want to make sense of worship, it’s giving God what’s due to Him. And the primary way we do that is through sacrifice.

So what then does Christian worship look like? Well, there’s a few answers to that question. First, St. Paul says in Romans 12, “I appeal to you, therefore brethren, by the mercies of God to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, wholly and acceptable to God.”, which is your spiritual worship. Notice, Christian worship is still sacrificial worship. We’re offering our bodies as a living sacrifice. So if your body really is a temple of the Lord, what do you do in a temple? You offer sacrifice. So all of those times where you offer something up, you offer up a suffering, you allow yourself to be inconvenienced for the sake of God and all of those things when you’re doing it out of love of God and out of love of neighbor, you are showing God what He is due through this sacrifice you’re making, that is worship.

Hebrews 13 similarly says through Him, Jesus, “Then let us continually offer up a sacrifice of praise to God when we acknowledge God.” So you can pray to God and ask for a lot of things, but we often forget to actually worship Him, acknowledging the goodness and grandeur and majesty of God. And in a sacrifice of praise, we are taking the time and effort to acknowledge God. You are God and this is what you mean to me, and this is who you are. And in that, we are giving in a small way, we are giving God His due. And so Hebrews 13 describes the sacrifice of praise as the fruit of lips that acknowledge His name, that treating God as God. This then leads in the next verse to another way to offer sacrifice. “Do not neglect to do good and to share what you have for such sacrifices are pleasing to God, that good works done out of love of God are sacrifices.”

This is one of the ways you make your body a living sacrifice. You allow it to be used in the service of God, to honor God, that you recognize in your neighbor, and the least of these, in those ways by loving God and loving neighbor. Both in what you say and in what you do, you are offering sacrifice. Now, so far, there are a lot of good Protestant theologians who would say yes to all of that, because all of that is just straight from the Bible. So John Piper, for instance, in an essay called What is Worship? Or an article, it was like a Q&A called, What Is Worship? He acknowledges all this and he says it really well. He says, “We worship God authentically when we know Him truly and treasure Him duly.” Then the word worship prefers to that valuing, that inner valuing becoming visible in the world in two basic ways in the New Testament. I’m going to pause here, that inner value when he’s talking about is that worship involves the heart. Going through the motions of doing the thing is vain worship.

Jesus warns about worshiping in vain where you general like, ah, I know I’m supposed to do this thing for God. I’m supposed to be here at mass. I’m supposed to be here doing this thing. But if your heart is not right before God, if you’re just going through the motions and you’re not actually acknowledging this is God before whom I stand, before whom I kneel, then you’re missing something that there is something at the core, which it’s an attitude of the heart. But it’s not just an attitude of the heart, it’s an attitude of the heart that has to be expressed through your mouth and through your body, through your actions. And so how do we make that visible in the world? Two ways. One, he says acts of the mouth, acts of praise and repentance and worship services or small group gatherings. Two, acts of love with the body and the hands and the feet. Acts of love that show the supreme value of God, but what we’re willing to sacrifice for the good of others.

Now, he’s just really unpacking Hebrews 13 there, those two aspects. But what’s he missing there? Those are still these really kind of individualized acts of sacrifice because I can do all of those things totally by myself. I don’t need another person. I certainly don’t need another Christian. I might need another person who needs help. So I can say I love God and I can go and serve my neighbor and I don’t need a brother Christian. So there’s not really a clear sense of corporate worship in that. So here’s where we need to turn to the part that many Protestants miss, which is that we are promised that there will be Christian sacrifices collectively. Malachi one verse 11 says, “From the rise of the sun to its setting, my name is great among the nations and in every place incense is offered to my name in a pure offering.” An offering is a sacrifice. “For my name is great among the nations.” That’s the Gentiles.

So God’s promising that there will come a day when the nations, the Gentiles, the people who aren’t just of the ethnic and religious stock of Israel, will be offering true worship to Him. And the early Christians were quick to highlight these kind of passages, but we’ll get into that because the other way is explicitly the Eucharist. First Corinthians 10, St. Paul says, “The cup of blessing, which we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ?” Now, how could it be that what appears to be bread and what appears to be wine could actually be a participation in Jesus Christ’s body and blood? He’s going to explain that Before he does that, he’s going to say another shocking thing that because there’s one loaf, “We who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one loaf.”

Now, remember, St. Paul’s not in Corinth when he is writing, he’s not saying literally that there’s a loaf of bread that all Christians receive from and it makes us one body. What’s the one loaf? The one loaf is Jesus. The one bread is Jesus Christ Himself. And that when receiving Jesus in the Eucharist, we actually become one people as Christians and he’s going to defend this very provocative kind of claim, this claim that many people today would deny and he is going to defend it in a really shocking way.

First, he’s going to compare it to the sacrificial practice of Israel. He said, “Consider the practice of Israel, are not those who eat the sacrifices partners in the altar?” And then if that wasn’t shocking enough, okay, you’ve got Israel … Okay, one way to understand the Eucharist is to remember in Israel you’ve got food sacrifices and then you’d be united with the sacrifices by eating them. So you’ve got the Passover lamb. Passover lamb, preparation day, you kill the lamb in the temple in Jerusalem. That’s not enough. You then become a partner in the sacrifice by eating the lamb. That’s Passover. This prefigures the two actions, preparation day, Good Friday, Jesus, the Lamb of God, is killed. Then at the last supper, in every mass since, we eat the lamb. “Christ, our paschal lamb has been sacrificed.”, St. Paul says in First Corinthians 15.

He’s going to continue this theme for several chapters that we eat the Passover lamb. It’s not enough to sacrifice the lamb, to become a partner in the sacrifice, you must then eat the lamb. You smeared the blood on the doorpost in that case, and then you ate the lamb. Okay, fair enough. He’s going to make it more shocking. He’s then going to compare it to pagan, demonic sacrifices. And he says, imply, “With pagan sacrifice, they offer to demons and not to God. I do not want you to be partners with demons. You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons. You cannot partake of the table of the Lord and the table of demons.” Now, what is going on here? The language there is sacrificial language, quite explicitly, right? He’s talking about the sacrifices pagans make to demons. The table of demons is an altar. The cup is the sacrificial cup.

Now, if that’s true, and Paul is making like a comparison, a parallel, this only works if the table of the Lord is an altar. It only works if the cup of the Lord is a sacrificial cup. So Paul’s entire analogy here between what the pagans are doing, what the Jews are doing, and what the Christians are doing. If the Eucharist only works, if the way we offer corporate communal Christian worship is the Eucharist, that’s what’s going on here. And this is how the early Christians understood this. Matthew five, verse 23, 24. Jesus says something that really ties in well to this right. It’s during the sermon on the mount. He says, “If you are offering your gift at the altar and there, remember your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go. First be reconciled to your brother and then come and offer your gift.”

Well notice that’s presupposing that Christians still have an altar at which gifts are offered. The strange thing is that much of Protestantism, you have things like altar calls and no altars, no place where actual sacrifice is offered to God, where people come together and say, here are the gifts, here are the offerings that we’re bringing before God. But this is what happens at the mass in the offertory. That’s what we’re doing. We’re gathering the money, representing the gifts we have. In the old days, it would’ve been you’d bring in actual food and things. Now, we reduce that to the cash value of those things and we bring those things and we place them at the altar. And so this is why, in the early liturgy, the sign of peace was actually right there because of Matthew five.

Okay, the Didache, first century Christian document, picks up on this theme and it says this. It says, “On the Lord’s day of the Lord”, I know it’s redundant, but it’s Sunday. “Come together, break bread and hold Eucharist after confessing your transgression so your offering may be pure.” And then it appeals to two passages. One of them, “The Lord has said in every place and time, offer me a pure sacrifice for I am a great king. And my name is wonderful among the heathen.” What is that? That’s Malachi 1:11. And the other is that your sacrifice may not be defiled by doing this reconciliation. That’s an illusion to Matthew five. So the Didache is already pointing to both Old and New Testament evidence, this is how Christian worship works. You make peace with one another, and then you have the Eucharist.

St. Justin Martyr, writing in about 150, in his dialogue with Trypho, he was Jewish. He points to this, he points to Malachi one and says, “This shows how God anticipated all the sacrifices which we offer through this name in which Jesus the Christ, enjoined us to offer. I eat in the Eucharist, the bread and the cup, and which are presented by Christians in all places throughout the world.” That Malachi one 11 shows that these sacrifices are well pleasing to Him. So notice the Christian conception, this is not some medieval idea, this is not some modern idea. This is not something that Aquinas comes up with. This is not something the Council of Trent invents. That early Christians, this is prior to the word trinity being used for the Godhead, have this very crystal clear conception that the Christian liturgy is a sacrificial offering to God in the Eucharist.

Last example, Sr. Anais, in one of the fragments we have from him, points aside and says, looks at a couple passages, looks at Malachi and looks at Jesus’ conversation with the Samaritan woman. And he says, “Therefore, the oblation of the Eucharist, the sacrifice of the Eucharist is not a carnal one, but a spiritual one.” And in this respect it’s pure and he explains what he means. “For we make an oblation to God of the bread and the cup of blessing, giving Him thanks and that He’s commanded the earth to bring forth these fruits for our nourishment. And then when we’ve perfected the oblation, we invoke the Holy Spirit that He may exhibit this sacrifice, but the bread, the body of Christ, and the cup, the blood of Christ in order that the receivers of these antetypes may obtain remission of sins and life eternal.” Now, a type corresponds with antetypes. He’s saying the bread and line are types, they’re foreshadowing and they’re then fulfilled when they become the body and blood of Jesus.

These are things that are foreshadowing just like the old temple is a type of the antetype, the heavenly temple. The snake that’s lifted up is a type of Jesus on the cross. He’s the antetype. So here, the bread and wine are the types that become the antetype, they become the body and blood of Jesus. And we, when we receive them, receive the forgiveness of sins in eternal life. That’s what he says. This is quite clear, this is what Christian sacrifice looks like. That when you go to mass, you take these small sacrifices of your life, you take all these ways that you’ve tried to offer your body as a living sacrifice. You take all these ways that you’ve allowed yourself to be inconvenienced for the sake of our Lord, and you unite them with the perfect offering Jesus has. And in this way, we are all brought together in this perfect act of sacrifice.

So that’s what I mean when I say that a lot of Protestant worship isn’t worship. I mean this, a lot of it is preaching and teaching, which is great. It’s good. Some of it is prayer, great and good, but what’s missing is the notion of worship, which is sacrificial, which is an offering to God, and that so much of that has been omitted. So you can go to a “worship service”, that’s just people praying and talking about Jesus. Again, good things. But at no point there are they actually worshiping Him, or at least that’s a risk, that you can have a worship service in which the pulpit is the center. And what you’ve done is you’ve replaced worship, the altar, with preaching, the pulpit.

Instead, the preaching and the pulpit and everything else should be preparation for worship. It should lead us into worship. The model here is the road to Emmaus. On the road to Emmaus … I’ve done an entire episode on this, I’m not going to belabor this point, but Jesus walks with the two disciples and talks with them. You have the preaching, you have all those things that are good, but it doesn’t stop there. They then get to Emmaus and He is known to them in the breaking of the bread, we’re told, that He takes, blesses, breaks, and gives the bread, that He has done something in which their eyes are opened and they recognize it’s Jesus and then He disappeared from their sight. That’s what’s so often missing, the actual climax of all this, the source and the summit. It would be like watching a movie and cutting out the actual high point, the apex, and the resolution of the movie. It’s like, yeah, that other part isn’t bad, but you’re missing the point if you think that’s where it ends.

And so unfortunately, a lot of Protestant worship has become that. So that’s what I would say. Again, not that it’s bad, it’s just missing the heart. It’s just missing the actual worship part. And this is why we need the Eucharist. And if you’re interested in that subject, I, again, point you to my new book, The Eucharist is Really Jesus, because it explores that in greater depth than I was able to hear. For Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. Thanks so much. Please like, comment, share. Really interested in your comments. I always try to check them out. God bless you.