Focus on Worship: February 2005 Archives
"We pray and worship in such a way as to make room in our prayer and worship for the living presence of Jesus as our Mediator in whom Offerer and Offering are one and the same, but in whom we are gathered up, with whom we are inseparably united, so that with Him we pray and worship as we could not otherwise do.
"At the end of the day when I kneel down and say my evening prayer, I know that no prayer of my own that I can offer to the heavenly Father is worthy of Him or of power to avail with Him, but all my prayer is made in the name of Jesus Christ alone as I rest in His vicarious prayer. It is then with utter peace and joy that I take into my mouth the Lord's Prayer which I am invited to pray through Jesus Christ, with Him and in Him, to God the Father, for in that prayer my poor, faltering, sinful prayer is not allowed to fall to the ground but is gathered up and presented to the Father in holy and eternally prevailing form. At the same time, I recall that the Father has promised to send the Spirit of His Son, mediated through the name and vicarious humanity of Jesus, into our hearts, crying, Abba, Father; and I am assured that as I pray in the name of God's beloved Son I am caught up with all my own infirmities within the inarticulate intercession of the eternal Spirit of the Father and of the Son from whose love nothing in heaven or earth, nothing in this world or in the world to come, can ever separate us" (T.F. Torrance, The Mediation of Christ, pp. 88-89).
This is part three of Torrance's thoughts on the Gospel and worship. You may wish to review part two in order to follow his flow of thought into this section.
"We do not come before God, then, worshipping Him and praying to Him in our own name, or in our own significance, but in the name and significance of Jesus Christ alone, for worship and prayer are not ways in which we express ourselves but ways in which we hold up before the Father His beloved Son, take refuge in His atoning sacrifice, and make that our only plea. 'Nothing in my hands I bring; Simply to Thy Cross I c ling.' In worship and prayer Jesus Christ acts in our place and on our behalf in both a representative and a substitutionary way so that what He does in our stead is nevertheless effected as our very own, issuing freely and spontaneously out of ourselves. Through His incarnational and atoning union Jesus Christ has united Himself with us in such a reconciling and sanctifying way that He interpenetrates and gathers up all our faltering, unclean worship and prayer into Himself, assimilates them to His own self-oblation to God, so that when He presents Himself as the worship and prayer of all creation, our worship and prayer are presented there also. When the Father accepts us in Jesus Christ His beloved Son, who then can distinguish our worship and prayer from Jesus' worship and prayer, for they are one and the same, wholly His and wholly ours in Him?
"Thus in all our worship and prayer, private and public, informal or formal, we come before God in such a way as to let Jesus Christ take our place, replacing our offering with His own self-offering, for He is the vicarious worhip and prayer with which we respond to the love of the Father" (T.F. Torrance, The Mediation of Christ, p.88).
This section from Torrance's The Mediation of Christ is NOT an easy read, but it is well worth the effort of mind and heart to work through his words. You may wish to reread Part One of The Gospel and Worship (February 18th post) before reading Part Two below. Have fun!
“In that perspective we must think…of Christian prayer as grounded in and governed by the fact that through His Incarnation Jesus Christ has stepped into that relationship as the Mediator, who not only brings God and man and man and God near to each other in propitiation but who in doing so stands in our place where we cry in prayer to God and makes Himself our prayer, a prayer not in word or even in an act only but a prayer which He is in His own personal Being. Just as in Jesus Christ God addresses His word to us in such a way that He Himself is wrapped up in His word in the form of personal being, so in Jesus Christ God has provided us with prayer that is identical with the personal self-offering and self-oblation of Jesus Christ to the Father on our behalf. It is as such that Jesus Christ stands in our place where we pray to the Father, so that from deep within our humanity, where He has united Himself to us, and from out of it, assimilated to His own self-consecration to God He prays: ‘Our Father who art in heaven. Hallowed be Thy Name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven…’ That is to say, where we are unable to pray to the Father as we ought or in any way worthy of Him for all our prayers are unclean, Jesus Christ puts His prayer, prayed with us to the Father, into our unclean mouth that we may pray through Him and with Him and in Him to the Father, and be received by the Father in Him: ‘Thou art my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased’” (T.F. Torrance, The Mediation of Christ, pp. 87-88).
“Jesus Christ embodied in Himself in a vicarious form the response of human beings to God, so that all their worship and prayer to God henceforth became grounded and centered in Him. In short, Jesus Christ in His own self-oblation to the Father is our worship and prayer in an acutely personalized form, so that it is only through Him and with Him and in Him that we may draw near to God with the hands of our faith filled with no other offering but that which He has made on our behalf and in our place once and for all” (Thomas F. Torrance, The Mediation of Christ, p. 87).
We sang this song in chapel yesterday. It seemed to me that a profound awe fell over the student body and faculty/staff as we sang it. It's entitled "The Look." The original lyrics are by John Newton with new and alternate lyrics by Bob Kauflin.
Verse 1
I saw one hanging on a tree
In agony and blood
Who fixed His loving eyes on me
As near His cross I stood
And never till my dying breath
Will I forget that look
It seemed to charge me with His death
Though not a word He spoke.
VERSE 2
My conscience felt and owned the guilt
And plunged me in despair
I saw my sins His blood had spilt
And helped to nail Him there.
But with a second look he said,
“I freely all forgive
This blood is for your ransom paid
I died that you might live.”
CHORUS
Forever etched upon my mind
Is the look of Him who died
The Lamb I crucified
And now my life will sing the praise
Of pure atoning grace
That looked on me and
Gladly took my place.
VERSE 3
Thus while His death my sin displays
For all the world to view
Such is the mystery of grace
It seals my pardon too
With pleasing grief and mournful joy
My spirit now is filled
That I should such a life destroy
Yet live by Him I killed.
CHORUS
Forever etched upon my mind
Is the look of Him who died
The Lamb I crucified
And now my life will sing the praise
Of pure atoning grace
That looked on me and
Gladly took my place.
Original lyrics by John Newton. New and alternate lyrics by Bob Kauflin. Music by Bob Kauflin.
© 2001 PDI Praise (BMI). Sovereign Grace Music, a division of Sovereign Grace Ministries.
"Our receiving of the Spirit is objectively grounded in and derives from Christ who as the incarnate Son was anointed by the Spirit in his humanity and endowed with the Spirit without measure, not for his own sake (for he was eternally one in being with the Spirit in God) but for our sakes, and who then mediates the Spirit to us through himself. As one of us and one with us he sanctified himself in the Spirit that we might be sanctified in him and thus be sanctified in the truth. Our receiving of the Spirit, therefore, is not independent of or different from the vicarious receiving of the Spirit by Christ himself but is a sharing in it. Since he received the Spirit in the humanity he took from us, we on our part receive the Spirit through union with him and through him with the Father" (T.F. Torrance, The Christian Doctrine of God, p. 148).
