In Manuel Luz's breathtaking book, Honest Worship, he unpacks our culture's effect on the church's corporate worship in North America today. He defines honest worship as "worship that is not trained by the stylistic preference and varieties of our false selves, nor clouded by the cultural forces of narcissism or consumerism, but instead comes from our true selves before our holy God."

Manuel dives right into the fact that worship in our culture has too often become entirely devoted to stylistic preference, over solid theological truth. He also highlights common contemporary trends such as lightshows, dark sanctuaries, and emotionally-driven worship 'experiences' as a nod to our culture's hyper-individualism. "Instead of seeking communion with God, we often seek experiences of God," Luz comments. Manuel makes the interesting connection of our culture's need for an emotional experience with Israel's narrative of the Golden Calf, found in Exodus 32. Our hyper-individualistic culture has often driven worship to become more about the worshippers, rather than the One worthy of worship. Luz draws this conclusion by the majority of contemporary worship songs featuring "I" or "me" statements. While these statements are not inherently bad, these statements do reduce corporate worship to an individual focus, and also have the tendency to make "our worship conditional to God's ability to meet our needs."

These are just a few of the points from Honest Worship that I found particularly convicting and interesting. Our culture has seeped into the church more than we recognize, and probably more than we care to admit. But we serve a God who is not dictated by culture, and who is forever unchanging, everlasting in His love and that fact that He is worthy of our honest worship. As A. W. Tozer puts it, "Worship is no longer worship if it reflects the culture around us more than the Christ within us."

Special thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC of this book in return for my fair and honest review.

The author writes from his own experience, good and bad, with worship. He offers a warning to modern churches, worship needs to return to a focus on corporate unity and on worship of God. A practical book as well that offers ways to incorporate changes in our local churches.

Honest Worship
From False Self to True Praise
by Manuel Luz
InterVarsity Press
Christian , Religion & Spirituality
Pub Date 07 Aug 2018
I am reviewing a copy of Honest Worship through Intervarsity Press and Netgalley:


Pastor Manuel Luz’s son asked him why churches needed smoke machines after his som had attended a mega Church with a friend, Pastor Manuel Luz had responded that you needed the smoke machine to see the lasers!


What do you have when you take the smoke screen and lasers down? What happens when you strip Worship down to the basics? What exactly does it look like?


Find out what worship, Honest Worship is like when you get down to the heart of it?


I give Honest Worship five out of five stars!

Life-changing read; let’s all wear crash helmets!

Wow! This is about worship on SO many levels! Honest Worship is one of those books that you find yourself highlighting so many revelational thoughts and snippets of wisdom that you wonder if you should just stop and highlight the whole book. (I just looked back and I have 136 highlights.) So many things to ponder long after I put the book down! It’s not that we set out to limit our worship or worship with less than our whole self, but our whole culture has changed, and with it, our attitude toward the God, church, and worship. For many, church is self-centered consuming and experiencing, but not contributing or having a true communion with God. But even those of us who feel we have conquered our selfishness and serve others can deceive ourselves about our strengths and weaknesses.

Manuel Luz compares the attitude of many Christians toward worship to customers at a theme restaurant, who want to partake without any personal effort, mistaking experience and spectacle and the flair for an encounter with God or expecting God to respond to an event the staff has created. “We can’t manufacture holy transcendence, but we can manufacture spectacle, so we create spectacular services that titillate and tease, inspire and impress. And then we trust that God will show up.”

Luz inspires us to worship God with our lives 24/7/365. If you want to be challenged, allow the truths in Honest Worship to help you examine your attitude toward worship and worshipping God. With God’s Word and offering honest worship, we can enter the deep part of God’s spiritual river and have full access to God’s blessings pouring out from his temple. I can’t even express the soul-searching I did while reading this book and that I will continue to do. I intend to reread this book and try each worship practice exercise.

I’ll leave you with a couple of my favorite quotes:

“We learn to feel God smiling on us as we create, labor, and produce for his glory. We become a hallelujah, an unceasing outpouring of worship, every day of the week.”

“And we are also able to glorify God through the acts and arts and objects of our imaginations. If you’ve ever written a song to God, painted a painting to glorify God, taught a children’s Bible lesson, designed or built a church building, or done anything inventive or creative for the sake of the kingdom, you’ve used your imagination to glorify God.”

“When we gather on Sunday morning, we’re ushered into the presence and power of God. And we have a choice. We can go the first thousand cubits and wade into worship up to our ankles. Or we can choose to go another thousand cubits and experience worship up to our knees. Or we can take those extra steps to where we’re experiencing worship up to our waists. Or we can go the full mile in our worship experience, traveling the entire four thousand cubits into the scary, untamed water, the torrent too deep and too fast to cross.”

One last, where Luz quotes Annie Dillard, “Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? […] It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews.”

Highly recommended as a life-changing read!

Why do we worship? What is the meaning of worshiping God i Spirit and in Truth? How do we do away with any pretense in the house of God? How do we worship? In this impassioned plea for honesty and integration of heart, mind, soul, and strength, we are challenged to lay down our masks and artificial ways and take up the cross of sacrifice and service. We are challenged to let go of self and see God for Who He is, so that we can see ourselves for who we truly are, from God's perspective. Worship is not just about music and songs. It's about truth. It's not just about us. It's about God. It's not just about feelings. It's about honesty from us to God, and of God toward us. Beginning with an observation about smoke, techniques, and drama in a modern worship setting, author and worship pastor Manuel Luz reflects on his journey from "false self to true praise." With state of the art audio-visual systems, it is easy to let the externals wow our fleshly senses to the point of ignoring our spiritual needs. All this is because of the influence of the culture over us. As we let the externals dictate the way we worship, we become tempted with sensational techniques and expensive technological tools to feed the fleshly desires rather than authentic worship. As the late AW Tozer has said it so aptly that:

"Worship is no longer worship when it reflects the culture around us more than the Christ within us."


So true. For if we let the cultural norms dictate the way we sing and worship, we are essentially giving room for the world to enter God's sanctuaries of worship. Luz gives us several notable warnings. He cautions us from adopting worship from a "first person singular" which is a symptom of blatant narcissism in the Church. In our iPhone, selfie, and Me-Too cultural trends, we have turned everything into ourselves, on how we can feed the insatiable appetites of I-Me-Self-dom. Not only has the society become more individualistic, we are also changed into people who care more for ourselves more than our communities. In doing so, we turn the worship of God into some self-driven mechanism for personal spiritual experience. In other words, we use God for our own benefits. I like the way it was said that if we treat worship in a narcissistic manner, God is the director, the worship teams the performers, and the congregation as the audience. This contrasts with the God-honouring model of worship team as director, the congregation as performers, and God the audience. The tackling of the narcissistic self is an important one because it is the single biggest barrier hindering honest worship. Thankfully, Luz shows us the way in what worshiping from the true self looks like. Sharing his experience with some prisoners who were released into real worship, he contrasts the false pretense that many of us in the free society adopt both knowingly and unknowingly. One is the lost but now am found. The other is the lost but refuses to be found.

Gently prodding us along with both biblical injunctions and personal stories, this book lays the groundwork for what honest worship is, what it looks like, and how we can go about growing from activity to authenticity. Using the greatest commandment as a guide, we learn about honest worship through our hearts, mind, soul, and strength. Through the mind, we worship with understanding and discernment of His Truth. Through our hearts, we engage our emotions and experience God's passion. Through our souls, we let the Spirit of God guide us in all truth and worship. Through our strength, we participate with all of our talents, skills, and abilities. Like the late Dallas Willard taught, worship is like a series of concentric circles with the inner circle of the heart and soul that springs out toward the mind, the habit, and the body. Worship is the integration of all toward one goal: Honouring God for who God is with the whole of who we are. Luz's chapter on "Soul Worship" is excellent chapter to describe the way these function as one whole. There is the worship in community where Luz likens worship to a sharing of gifts and serving goodness among ourselves, telling God's story together. Worship also requires a rhythm that we plan into our week. The Jewish Sabbath is a call to worship. There are also everyday opportunities to worship. What is beneficial is the "worship practice" at the end of each chapter. We get practical tips and exercises on:

Worship styles
Cultivating other-centric work
Memorizing Scripture as we prepare our minds for worship
Being honest with our sins and making concrete plans to deal with them
Silence and Solitude
Learning to worship by integrating our heart, mind, body, and soul
Keeping Sabbath
Prayer
Imagination and Worship
Lectio Divina
Experiencing God, and many others
....

My Thoughts
First, I like the honesty that the author maintains throughout the book. One of the best education we can ever have are learning from personal mistakes and setbacks. In what seems like criticisms of others, some readers may be surprised that the author was self-reflective and self-revealing about his own weaknesses. He is right that often the worship scene is filled with smoke that hides us from God and from one another. We let all kinds of things get in the way of authentic worship and one of them is the lack of desire to move out of our comfort zones. Like the Israel of old that clamours for their old lives of enslavement under the Egyptians, modern folks cling on to their comfort zones of worship styles they prefer rather than what authentic worship is. By addressing the barriers we install all around us, we prove to be our own biggest barriers. With Luz leading by example, readers will be more open to accept what he shares in this book.

Second, I am glad to see the integration of worship practices and spirituality. Though he leaves the actual "worship practice" to the end of each chapter, there are hints of the integration of both practice and spirituality throughout the book. This integration theme is consistent throughout the book. Person wise, there is the integration of heart, mind, soul, and strength in our practice of the biblical commandment. Style wise, there is a blending of all kinds of music. From liturgical to contemporary, traditional to modern, meditative to charismatic, there is nothing to keep us from using any of them. He even suggests we go periodically to different churches to experience worship in an alternative environment.

Third, worship is not just about music. It is about the whole of life. It is about our expression of love for God through worship in Church, worship in rhythm, and worship in everyday life. Honest worship means being honest in every way. From the call to worship to the benediction, from Sunday to the Jewish Sabbath, we are urged to move beyond conventional ways of understanding worship toward an inclusive worshipful person, honouring God with our lives as vessels of worship all the time. We are called to be honest not only during worship time but for all of time. This is probably the best reminder we all need.

Manuel Luz is the creative arts pastor of Oak Hills Church in Folsom, California, and has been an active advocate for worship and the arts for more than twenty-five years. He is also the author of Imagine That, a working musician and songwriter, and the co-inventer of the musical instrument the WalkaBout. He blogs regularly in "Adventures in Faith and Art."

Rating:

conrade
This book has been provided courtesy of InterVarsity Press and NetGalley without requiring a positive review. All opinions offered above are mine unless otherwise stated or implied.

Honest Worship provokes us to stay true to the heart of worship. It is a read for every follower of Christ, not only worship leaders and teams, relating topics about worshiping God with the entirety of our lives. And as the author explains, this goes far beyond a weekly worship service.

This book is an asset to Christ’s Body today, where worship has often become confined to a worship time once per week, littered with distractions and a focus on outward things rather than the heart connected with Jesus and obeying His commandments.

Reminding us of what worship truly is, Honest Worship brings us to the crux of the matter: Worship is not about a feeling or experience, nor a time and place for us to have it our way or be entertained at church. Luz states,

“Instead of seeking communion with God, we often seek experiences of God... When we do, we’re in danger of revering the experience more than the Person.”

I love the points the book makes concerning this. How often do we look for feelings related to experiences with God, or to results through miracles and blessings and healings, rather than engaging with God for only Himself?

Furthermore, Honest Worship emphasizes that worship is much more. Worship is displayed in living out what Christ calls us to every day—following Him while denying ourselves for His sake. Each chapter has potential to realign us, reminding us to love God with all of ourselves—in all we think, say and do. As one example concerning loving others as God loves, the author beautifully states: “...clearly a life of worship—loving God with our whole self—is a life concerned with the needs and struggles of our neighbor.”

As you read, expect the truths within to reveal things in need of God’s transformation. Each chapter helps propel us to seek realignment with God’s heart and purposes in different areas, that we may do our part in displaying His love on earth as His people.