Robert L. Reymond from Holy Trinity Presbyterian Church has written an excellent short article on the importance of Reformed Worship.

We should worship God in a way that befits his revealed perfections, that is, with reverence and awe (Heb 12:28). William Temple’s definition of worship is one of the best I have ever read:

“To worship is to quicken the conscience by the holiness of God, to feed the mind with the truth of God, to purge the imagination by the beauty of God, to open the heart to the love of God, to devote the will to the purpose of God.“

Now this is hardly what goes on in the average church today. I would state categorically that, in my opinion, the intrusion into the contemporary church of the superficial, flippant worship styles that abound everywhere today, with their applause for the church’s “performers” and their sappy contemporary music, is not and should never have been regarded as simply a matter of “cultural preference.” Rather, as a wholesale infusion of the popular culture into the church it is a symptom of what A. W. Tozer describes in his book, The Knowledge of the Holy, as:

“the loss of the concept of [the] majesty [of God] from the popular religious mind. The Church has surrendered her once lofty concept of God and has substituted for it one so low, so ignoble, as to be unworthy of thinking, worshiping men….

The low view of God entertained almost universally among Christians [today] is the cause of a hundred lesser evils everywhere among us. A whole new philosophy of the Christian life has resulted from this one basic error in our religious thinking.

With our loss of the sense of majesty has come the further loss of religious awe and consciousness of the divine Presence. We have lost our spirit of worship and our ability…to meet God in adoring silence. Modern Christianity is simply not producing the kind of Christian who can appreciate or experience…life in the Spirit. The words, “Be still, and know that I am God,” mean next to nothing to the self-confident, bustling worshiper in this…century.“

Full article – A Reformed View of Worship (PDF)