The glory due His name…

I lead music from time to time in our church.  In preparation for one such evening, I endeavored to lead my church body in a string of worship songs directly related to scripture that spoke about worship.  I used 1 Chronicles 16:29 along with some appropriate hymns.  Below is basically what I went through with them; I hope it challenges your idea of worship.  And if you want to use this for your own ministry, have at it!

“Ascribe to the Lord the glory due His name;
Bring an offering, and come before Him;
Worship the Lord in holy array;”
1 Chronicles 16:29

After David was made King of Israel, one of his first actions was to retrieve the ark from Kiriath-jearim and place it in the new capital city of Jerusalem.  This set the tone that the new government under David would be centralized around God and not man.

After setting up the ark in it’s new tent, they offered burnt and peace offerings and David (as he was known to do) broke out in a song of praise to God.  It is in this song we find the verse in question, whose parts we will observe in reverse order:

“Worship the Lord in holy array”
An alternate translation of “holy array” is “the splendor of holiness”.  While it is easy to read over quickly, we need to notice that we are the ones in holy array.  This is talking about being clean when we come before God to worship Him (Micah 6:6-8).  To reflect this truth, we sang “Take Time to Be Holy”.

“Bring an offering, and come before Him”
Many people come to a worship service to get something.  To get encouragement, to get good fellowship, to get some good music, etc…  The point of worship is to honor God!  We should be bringing something for Him.  This should first and foremost be our hearts and our lives, but it is also shown in gifts and offerings.  With this in mind we sang “We Give Thee but Thine Own” (our hymnal actually only has the first two verses of what is shown on cyberhymnal).

“Ascribe to the Lord the glory due His name”
Think about that statement for a second.  How in the world can we ascribe to God the glory He is due?  We can’t even understand the glory that God is owed for crying out loud!  Nevertheless, we are charged to do our best to meditate on the immensity of our Lord, and the more we do that, the more naturally we will, like David, break out into song.  We then closed with “Holy God, We Praise Thy Name” (our hymnal only shows the 1st, 2nd, and 4th verse of what is on cyberhymnal)