The Necessity, Content, and Structure of Covenant Renewal Worship

“The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me . . . To comfort all who mourn; to grant to those who mourn in Zion—to give them a beautiful headdress instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, the garment of praise instead of a faint spirit; that they may be called oaks of righteousness, the planting of the LORD, that he may be glorified. They shall build up the ancient ruins; they shall raise up the former devastations; they shall repair the ruined cities, the devastations of many generations.” Isaiah 61:1–4

Isaiah 61 is a foundational text for Risen King Church: Jesus has comforted his people — Christians, the saints — and clothed them with garments of praise. He has made them into oaks of righteousness that God may be glorified. And he has sent his people to build up the ancient ruins. Consider the ruined city of Jerusalem in the days of Ezra and Nehemiah. The work to rebuild it had to begin in certain places and not in others. Ezra and Nehemiah did not begin with inns or wine-stores or fabric shops when they set out to rebuild the ruins of Jerusalem. No, they went to the fountainhead, the spring that lies upstream of everything else: worship. Ezra’s task was to rebuild the temple and later, to lead God’s people in repentance so that they could carry out right worship, pleasing in the sight of God. Our day is no different. We look out and see the ruins of Christendom. The streams of life are bare trickles now. Our land is thirsty for water from the River of Life, drawn by Jesus’s own hand. The issue is that the spring is stopped up: we need a reformation in worship. Our task is to rebuild worship (that same word in the Greek New Testament can also be translated “service”) to the living God, both in our families and in our corporate gatherings. Indeed, that conviction is what our nation, the Christian household, and the church were first built upon. Look carefully at this opening letter from the Particular Baptists (that is, Calvinistic Baptists) who wrote the Second London Baptist Confession of Faith of 1689, which RKC has adopted as her elder affirmation of faith. This excerpt is taken from the end of the letter, which the Confession writers wrote to explain why they were publishing this Confession of Faith. 

“And verily there is one spring and cause of the decay of religion in our day which we cannot but touch upon and earnestly urge a redress of, and that is the neglect of the worship of God in families by those to whom the charge and conduct of them is committed. May not the gross ignorance and instability of many, with the profaneness of others, be justly charged upon their parents and masters, who have not trained them up in the way wherein they ought to walk when they were young, but have neglected those frequent and solemn commands which the Lord hath laid upon them, so to catechise and instruct them that their tender years might be seasoned with the knowledge of the truth of God as revealed in the Scriptures; and also by their own omission of prayer and other duties of religion of their families, together with the ill example of their loose conversation, having, inured them first to a neglect and the contempt of all piety and religion? We know this will not excuse the blindness and wickedness of any, but certainly it will fall heavy upon those that have been thus the occasion thereof; they indeed die in their sins, but will not their blood be required of those under whose care they were, who yet permitted them to go on without warning — yea, led them into the paths of destruction? And will not the diligence of Christians with respect to the discharge of these duties in ages past rise up in judgment against and condemn many of those who would be esteemed such now?”¹

The older English may be difficult to track, but this is the gist: It is the decline or absence of true, God-pleasing, God-glorifying worship, both in the home and in the church that lies at the root of our cultural and political decay. And I am not just pointing the finger at other churches out there, as if they are to blame and we have it figured out. No, our conviction is that we all have repenting to do. And true repentance necessarily yields reform. Our goal, therefore, is two-fold. 

First, we aim to mine the Scriptures as well as the practices of the historic church to shape and define how we worship.

And second, we aim to build up families, starting with their worship of God, so that they are well-equipped to make worshipping disciples within their own households first—teaching their children to obey all that Christ commanded. 

What does that look like on the ground in the life of Risen King Church?

First, let me point us again to our Confession, which summarizes how the elders understand the Scriptures on every issue regarding faith and practice, including this one. Here is what it says in Chapter 22 on “Religious Worship and the Sabbath Day”: “The light of nature demonstrates that there is a God who has lordship and sovereignty over all. He is just and good and does good to everyone. Therefore, he should be feared, loved, praised, called on, trusted in, and served—with all the heart and all the soul and all the strength. But the acceptable way to worship the true God is instituted by him, and it is delimited by his own revealed will. Thus, he may not be worshipped according to human imagination or inventions or the suggestions of Satan, nor through any visible representations, nor in any other way that is not prescribed in the Holy Scriptures.”²

Historically, the church has called this doctrine the “regulative principle”. That is, Christians are not free to do whatever they like and call it worship. There is such a thing as “right” worship, and we derive that right worship from what the Bible teaches us. So what do we find there? There is much to say, but here, I will draw out two aspects of worship.

1. Content.

2. Structure.

Content: What is the content of worship? Everything that we do in service or worship to God has to be done through the one Mediator, Jesus Christ. When we worship, we understand that we are entering into the very presence of the living God. With our faces turned toward him, we are taking up the weapons of war for the right hand and the left that make the powers of darkness tremble. Why? Because in the book of Revelation, it is the prayers of the saints that are poured out upon the earth as fire to burn up wickedness. It is the songs of worship resounding from the mouths of the saints that ushers in the judgment of God on the wicked and the victory of Christ. Our worship is the victory shout of the risen King Jesus over every rule and authority in heaven and on earth and under the earth. It is the blood of the Lamb and the word of our testimony that conquers the great accuser, the mighty dragon in Revelation 12. Therefore, the content of our worship is summarized in Word and Sacrament: Prayers and supplications made to God for the saints (1 Tim 2:1) and for rulers (1 Tim 2:2), singing psalms, hymns and spiritual songs (Col 3:16; Eph 5:19), reading God’s word and preaching and hearing it (1 Tim 4:2, 13), feasting around the Lord’s Table in Communion (1 Cor 11:26), and baptism (Matt 28:19). That is the normal content of the Lord’s Day (Sunday) service, and we might add special times of humble fasting or thanksgiving (Joel 2:12; Psalm 107). 

That is the content of worship. Now before I move on to the structure of worship, let me say a couple words about psalms and families. In Colossians 3:16 and in Ephesians 5:19, Paul commands Christians to be filled with the Spirit and to let the word of Christ dwell in us richly by singing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs. I will not make the full case for this right now, but it is quite clear in the original language that all three of these terms (psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs) are referring to the Book of Psalms in the Bible. “Hymns” is a type of psalm that appears in the titles of a number of them. The same is true for “spiritual songs”—these are the “Songs of Ascent” (Psalms 120-134) along with a number of other psalms. So in Colossians 3 and Ephesians 5, Paul is specifically commanding the church to sing psalms. That is why we are committed to singing psalms in every service, and our goal is to learn all 150 psalms within five years. In fact, this is one of the places where the church has been lax in her worship, and it has left her impoverished. So let us sing the Psalms!

Second, a word about families. The worship of God is an end in itself. We do not need to say, “We worship God so that…” with some other goal in mind. But we can say, and we do believe, that corporate worship and family worship work together. One can bolster the other. Corporate worship can help equip and encourage men to lead family worship. Family worship can help prepare our hearts for corporate worship. That is why we invite the entire family to join us in worship, not just the adults, and it is why we do not provide nursery or kid’s church. God has called our entire congregation to come before him in worship, including our children, and including the kind volunteers who would otherwise be engaged with the children in a nursery room. This is a training platform. The grace of God has appeared, says Titus 2, bringing salvation and training us to be Christians in all of life. The worship service shapes us. It will shape our children, too, as they observe their parents and other believers singing heartily, kneeling in confession humbly, praying earnestly, listening to the word preached and read intently, responding joyfully, raising their glasses gratefully, and going out zealously to do the work that King Jesus has set before them to do. In that way, corporate worship and family worship work together. 

Finally, before we move to structure, allow me to answer one more question: Why does RKC use hymnals? I have three answers:

1. Having a church hymnal is a resource that unifies us as a congregation while also binding together corporate and family worship so that they serve one another.

2. We hope to grow in our musical literacy over time, and these hymnals, with the sheet music they provide, will help us to grow in offering excellent worship to our God. 

3. These hymnals are integrated with the Sing Your Part app. The Sing Your Part app is a wonderful tool that does a few different things. 

• First, all of the psalms and hymns from our hymnal are available to anyone with an app membership (which all members of RKC will receive). Each of those songs has the melody played by a piano along with the sheet music so that you can learn the song.
• Second, the app has a feature that allows you to isolate your part. So, if you are a Tenor, you can listen to the Tenor part by itself to learn your part on a given song. Now, don’t be intimidated by that! Singing parts is an aspiration for us, not an expectation. We hope to grow in our skill as a congregation over time. 
• Third, we will upload the songs for each week’s Sunday service to the app so that when you open it, you will see each of the songs that we plan to sing that coming Sunday. That way, you can begin to learn them with your family ahead of time. 

Structure: We have covered the content of our worship, now what about the structure? Every church has a structure or liturgy for their services. They cannot help but have one. It would be a very rare church, and not a very healthy one, that made up the service as it went along. First Corinthians 14:40 says that we should do everything in the corporate service decently and in order. It serves the church body and pleases God when we think carefully and biblically about a structure or liturgy of worship that fits with the gospel. So what order do we use? We find in the Bible, both in Old Testament worship and in the principles for worship in the New Testament, a form of worship called Covenant Renewal Worship. Here is what we mean by covenant renewal.

We do not mean that our covenant relationship with God is somehow in danger of expiring and needs to be renewed. God has joined believers to himself through Christ, and the blood of Jesus irrevocably ratifies God’s covenant with his people forever. Instead, in covenant renewal, we are fleshing out the realities of our covenant relationship with God through Christ. We are offering ourselves to him as living sacrifices. We are coming to him to receive all the blessings and grace that he has promised to us and that Christ has purchased for us. This is the marketday for our souls where we gather up the spiritual resources that we need for the week, and it is also our feast day, where we celebrate that we have been adopted into the family of God through the Communion meal. Covenant renewal means that we are living out our covenant relationship with God week by week. And here is what it looks like. We summarize it in five C’s: Call, Confession, Consecration, Communion, Commission.

God Calls us to worship him, and we gather before him with prayers and songs of praise. Then, we acknowledge that no sinner can come before God but through sacrifice: without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins. But thanks be to God, Jesus has already made the once-for-all sacrifice for our sins, and he has promised that if we Confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. This is a fitting way to begin the service. We come into God’s presence, and we dare not do it presumptuously. We come to him through the sacrifice of Jesus, and we rely on that promise from 1 John 1:9. Therefore, we humble ourselves and confess our sins to him. But we do not remain in our guilt. No, we take hold of the promise. We can know without a doubt, based on God’s own word, that he has forgiven us. Therefore, we stand and hear the assurance of God’s pardon. 

In that state of forgiveness, we are ready to hear God’s word and to offer our whole selves to him as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to him. That is what we call Consecration—we consecrate ourselves (or set ourselves apart for God’s instruction and for his service). Then, having received God’s word and having offered up our lives to him, God invites us to sit down with him for a covenant meal. This is the high point of the service. All of history is leading toward one glorious moment, namely, the Marriage Supper of the Lamb, where all of us will sit and feast with our Creator and with the rest of the saints in perfect and joyful fellowship. The Communion meal is a foretaste of that great Day. Therefore, Communion is not the time for introspection or confession (we have already done that!). This is the time for celebration, where we raise our glasses in glad triumph for the King is risen and reigning. Finally, having been filled up with such grace, God Commissions us and sends us out to do his work. That is the Covenant Renewal structure of our services, and we absolutely love it.