Spurgeon contra Will-Worship

[The following post was originally published to this blog on October 20, 2022.]

The elders of Grace Heritage Church in Auburn, Alabama have expressed their philosophy of ministry as follows:

Worship is the corporate expression of the delight, awe, and thankfulness that come from knowing our infinitely glorious and sovereign God and Savior. Because the distance between God and His creatures is so great, the only acceptable way of approaching God in worship must be revealed to us by God Himself. Therefore, He may not be worshiped in ways invented by us. This principle protects us from idolatrous worship and focuses our energies on those activities through which God has called us to draw near.

This is a clear and beautiful expression of the teaching in Reformed theology known as "the regulative principle of worship."

In focusing on the necessity for God-revealed worship, previous generations of Reformed theologians would often criticize what they called "will-worship." The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia defines "will-worship" as follows:

worship originating in the human will as opposed to the divine, arbitrary religious acts, [acts of will-worship are] worthless despite their difficulty of performance.

In the second October 18 entry within his Morning and Evening Devotion, Charles Spurgeon wrote against "will-worship." His text was 1 Samuel 15:22, "Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice." Spurgeon pointed out:

Saul had been commanded to slay utterly all the Amalekites and their cattle. Instead of doing so, he preserved the king, and suffered his people to take the best of the oxen and of the sheep. When called to account for this, he declared that he did it with a view of offering sacrifice to God; but Samuel met him at once with the assurance that sacrifices were no excuse for an act of direct rebellion. The sentence before us is worthy to be printed in letters of gold, and to be hung up before the eyes of the present idolatrous generation, who are very fond of the fineries of will-worship, but utterly neglect the laws of God. Be it ever in your remembrance, that to keep strictly in the path of your Saviour's command is better than any outward form of religion; and to hearken to his precept with an attentive ear is better than to bring the fat of rams, or any other precious thing to lay upon his altar... All the pretensions you make of attachment to your Master, and all the devout actions which you may perform, are no recompense for disobedience. "To obey," even in the slightest and smallest thing, "is better than sacrifice," however pompous. Talk not of Gregorian chants, sumptuous robes, incense, and banners... all your formalities shall profit you nothing. It is a blessed thing to be teachable as a little child, but it is a much more blessed thing when one has been taught the lesson, to carry it out to the letter. How many adorn their temples and decorate their priests, but refuse to obey the word of the Lord! My soul, come not thou into their secret.

This is a good reminder. Whether we look at this text or at 2 Samuel 6, when David and the people of Israel transported the Ark of the Covenant on a cart (which is not how God commanded it to be transported), and the LORD struck Uzzah dead for touching the Ark in order to steady it, we see that good intentions are not enough. We must carefully follow God's instructions for how He is to be worshiped, and we endanger ourselves when we worship Him in a different way. We will all fall short of worshiping God as He truly deserves–we all need a Savior–but this is no excuse for disregarding His Word, which is necessary, clear, sufficient, and authoritative.