Corporate worship forms

Bob Kauflin is on vacation, but his blog doesn't cease to be brilliant while he's away. Yesterday he posted this quote from Harold Best's book, Music Through the Eyes of Faith:

The Scriptures include or allude to just about every approach to worship there is: organized, spontaneous, public, private, simple, complex, ornate, or plain. Yet there is no comment anywhere about any one way being preferred over another. Rather, it is the spiritual condition of the worshiper that determines whether or not God is at work. This fact alone countermands the tendency to assume that if we could just 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.

I have alot to say on this matter, but I'll save that for a future post. For now, I'll just ask this question: If this is true (and I think it is), then why in most churches in America do we spend 95% of the time talking about forms and stylistic preferences instead of "the spiritual condition of the worshiper"?

Legalism seen from an eternal perspective

I just saw this post on Justin Taylor's blog about the recent resolution passed at the Southern Baptist Convention. I wholeheartedly agree with Justin's thoughts, but what stood out to me more was part of a John Piper sermon that he quoted. Speaking of an amendment to his church's constitution in which he seeks to abolish the requirement that all members be teetotalers, Piper (a teetotaler himself) says:

I want to hate what God hates and love what God loves. And this I know beyond the shadow of a doubt: God hates legalism as much as he hates alcoholism. If any of you still wonders why I go on supporting this amendment, after hearing all the tragic stories about lives ruined through alcohol, the reason is that when I go home at night and close my eyes and let eternity rise in my mind I see ten million more people in hell because of legalism than because of alcoholism. And I think that is a literal understatement. Satan is so sly. "He disguises himself as an angel of light," the apostle says in 2 Corinthians 11:14. He keeps his deadliest diseases most sanitary. He clothes his captains in religious garments and houses his weapons in temples.

The pastor of my home church always says (something along the lines of) that the bad thing about legalism is not that it makes Christianity too hard, but that it makes it too easy. In other words, legalists easily follow their rules and think they have earned God's favor, when an essential truth of Christianity is that no one can (see Romans 3).

I love it when someone brings this kind of biblical clarity to bear on these issues.