Bowed Down in the Presence of God

What have been your most memorable experiences of worship? Today, Sinclair Ferguson describes the delight that binds all these experiences together: a realization of being brought into the awesome presence of God.

We’ve been thinking about worship this week on the podcast. And here’s a question: What have been your most memorable experiences of worship? I imagine if this were a phone-in program, we could spend the rest of it listening to one another giving very different stories about our memories of worship that has brought us into the presence of God. For some of us, it might be the first time we were in a very large gathering and listening to people praising God together. For others of us, it might have been worship in a rural place in a faraway country with Christians who had very little, but hearts full of praise. And for some of us, it might be an occasion when we felt the density of worship in the singing, or the power of the Word of God in the preaching, or the presence of the Lord Jesus Christ in the celebration of the Lord’s Supper.

No doubt, each one of us has his or her own special memory. But the thing that binds them together, as we’ve been reflecting, is that on those occasions, we have become conscious of the presence of the Lord with us. He has promised always to be with us. But He has also promised to manifest Himself to us as we respond to Him in love and in worship. Remember how Jesus says in the Farewell Discourse that when we come to Him in obedience and trust and love through the Holy Spirit, the Father and the Son come to us and make their home with us. And when we are engaged in that kind of worship, I think we feel at last we have come home.

There’s a very interesting statement in the Westminster Confession of Faith when it speaks about the sacraments, but I think it applies to our worship in general. It says that the efficacy—the power, the influence, the impact—of the sacraments is not tied to the moment of administration. So, the significance of our baptism lasts the whole of our Christian life. The pleasure of being at the Lord’s Table endures even when we get up and leave. And the same is true of preaching, isn’t it? A sermon that lasts only as long as the church service has had very little power and efficacy in our lives. And the same is true of worship.

It’s like the taste of really good coffee at the end of a meal. It lingers, and we continue to taste it. That sense of awe, of reverence, of solemn joy, of pleasure, of the experience of the treasure of the presence of God lingers with us, transforms our lives, shapes our character, and puts dignity and reverence into our lives. Because it’s begun to dawn on us that little you and little me, we have been in the presence of the Creator of the cosmos, and He’s come to us as our loving heavenly Father to receive our worship.

When I was a teenager and into my very early twenties in my student years, I had the privilege of being in a church where at the end of the services, I think we always felt bowed down with this sense of awe. Sometimes the hymns were more uplifting. Sometimes, yes, the sermons were more or less applicable to my situation. Sometimes we had the Lord’s Supper. But this one thing was constant: God seemed to break through the veil between heaven and earth, between eternity and time, and bow us down in His presence. And you know, when you have tasted that, you can never be fully content until you taste it again.

Years later, I came across a statement by Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, the famous Welsh preacher of the twentieth century. He said, “I can forgive almost anything in a service so long as there is a sense of the presence of God.” I don’t suppose he was indifferent to how services are conducted or whether the sermon was a good exposition of Scripture. He meant that these are really means to this glorious end: that we meet with God. It’s like that famous Old Testament text: “What is the point of dwelling in Jerusalem if we never see the king’s face?” And that’s what worship is about: seeing the King’s face.