A Compelling Testimony: Maintaining a Disciplined Walk, Christlike Character, and Godly Relationships as God's Servant

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A Compe l l i ng Tes t imony

find the correct or fashionably relevant system, all will be well and God will come down. This doesn’t imply that we have no responsibility to make intelligent and sensitive choices or to be creative. But whatever these choices eventually are, they are incapable all by themselves of establishing the superiority of one system over another.

~ Harold Best. Music through the Eyes of Faith . San Franscisco: Harper Collins, 1993. p. 146.

2. The whole people of God were gathered for worship, Deut. 16.11 – And you shall rejoice before the Lord your God, you and your son and your daughter, your male servant and your female servant, the Levite who is within your towns, the sojourner, the fatherless, and the widow who are among you, at the place that the Lord your God will choose, to make his name dwell there.

3. Corporate worship can be understood against the backdrop of the history of the Church and the saints.

a. “Liturgical Theology”: It is an attempt to provide a theological interpretation of traditional forms of liturgy, not merely a devotional or historical inter pretation. More specialized than the theology of worship in general (which includes nonliturgical worship), it also follows a different method. It begins not from the Bible, tracing the development (good and bad) of biblical principles in historical practice, but from historical practice, examining how, and how far, this can be understood in terms of biblical principles. Such, at least, would be a reformed approach to liturgical theology. Writers of a tradi tionalist standpoint, on the other hand, tend to see the principles of liturgical practice as self-evident and self-justifying, while those of a liberal standpoint tend to interpret and test liturgical practice by the principles of reason and sociology, rather than by those of the Bible (S. B. Ferguson, New Dictionary of Theology [electronic ed.]. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2000, p. 392).