Should We Raise Our Hands in Worship?
00:00:00.000 | [Music]
00:00:04.000 | Well, should we raise our hands during musical worship or should we keep them safely in our pockets?
00:00:09.500 | It's the question from a listener named Jeff.
00:00:12.000 | Pastor John, when you are singing at your local church, do you raise your hands?
00:00:15.500 | Is this something we should do when singing at church on Sunday?
00:00:19.000 | When I read verses like 1 Chronicles 16, verses 23 to 31, and Psalm 95, verses 1 and 2,
00:00:25.000 | it makes me wonder why not everyone lifts their hands when we sing together as a church.
00:00:29.500 | If only 5% of the congregation in my local church is raising their hands during the worship time,
00:00:35.000 | but all are singing out loudly with a joyful noise, is this something we should teach on
00:00:40.500 | in order to encourage the raising up of holy hands, or should I just be thankful that we're all singing together?
00:00:46.000 | As the worship leader at my local church, I want to be maximalist in my thinking
00:00:50.000 | and always find ways to encourage myself and our congregation to be more fully devoted and fully delighted in Jesus
00:00:56.500 | as we sing songs which are soaked in rich gospel lyrics.
00:01:00.500 | Pastor John, what would you say to Jeff?
00:01:02.000 | I can remember in the late 70s when I was a college teacher, a specific chapel service
00:01:10.000 | in which I was sitting beside a fellow faculty member who, during a prayer, simply laid his hands, palms up, on his lap,
00:01:20.000 | and the almost disgust that I felt seeing him do that.
00:01:28.000 | And I don't remember what was going on in my soul at that time,
00:01:34.000 | but what I feel now is nothing but shame and remorse at such an arrogant and judgmental attitude.
00:01:45.000 | And then about five years later, I had encouraged Bethlehem, so I moved from faculties to pastoring,
00:01:53.000 | and about two years into my pastoring, this happened.
00:01:57.000 | I had encouraged Bethlehem to start up all-night prayer meeting once or twice a year
00:02:02.000 | in order to go hard after God together to maximize His blessing in the life of our church.
00:02:08.500 | And it was about 2 a.m., and there were about 20 or 30 of us still praying in the fireside room,
00:02:15.500 | which doesn't exist anymore. It was torn down in one of the building projects.
00:02:19.500 | And I remember that Bruce Liefblad, who was worship leader at the time, was leading us
00:02:25.000 | in a simple 1980s song like, "Hallelujah, Hallelujah," just simple things like that.
00:02:32.500 | And we were singing one of those. I don't remember which one.
00:02:35.500 | And suddenly, I found my hands lifted in the air, and it was as though I was watching myself rather than doing it.
00:02:46.500 | I had never in 36 years of my life lifted my hands in song until that moment.
00:02:56.500 | And to this day, I cannot explain what happened, except that it bore fruit in what felt and feels to me now
00:03:07.500 | like a release from a very significant bondage.
00:03:12.500 | My approach toward lifting up of hands in worship since that time has been to simply try to create an atmosphere
00:03:21.500 | in which people feel free from the heart to lift their hands or not.
00:03:26.500 | And the reason I say or not is because coerced or constrained demonstrations of heart worship are self-contradictory.
00:03:37.500 | Either it comes from the heart and is valuable as an expression of the heart, or it is a performance and has no worship value at all.
00:03:49.500 | I wouldn't, as a worship leader, ever say, "Come on, people, get your hands up. We just sang a song. Our hands are lifted up."
00:03:57.500 | I wouldn't scold people like that at all.
00:03:59.500 | It creates an unbelievably hypocritical crisis for them because they're going to do what you say when they don't feel like it,
00:04:07.500 | and it will ruin authentic worship.
00:04:11.500 | Depending on the kind of service and who was present and what the nature of the music was,
00:04:16.500 | I would guess that over time at Bethlehem, in any given service, you might have 10 to 30 percent of the people lifting their hands in worship.
00:04:27.500 | And we never tried to cultivate an atmosphere where it was expected that you're supposed to do this if you're spiritual.
00:04:35.500 | Although Psalm 63, 4 says, "I will bless you as long as I live in your name. I will lift up my hands."
00:04:43.500 | And Psalm 141, verse 2 says, "Let my prayer be counted as incense before you and the lifting up of my hands as the evening sacrifice."
00:04:54.500 | And Paul says in 1 Timothy 2, 8, "I desire then that in every place men should pray, lifting holy hands without anger or quarreling."
00:05:04.500 | Now, I doubt that Paul meant in that 1 Timothy 2, 8 passage that it's contrary to God's will for men to pray without lifting their hands.
00:05:17.500 | Rather, I think probably what he means is it's contrary to God's will that they pray without holy hands being lifted if they lift their hands.
00:05:26.500 | In other words, I don't think it's a mandate that every time a man prays, his hands must be in the air,
00:05:31.500 | that if his hands are in the air in his prayer, they better be holy hands.
00:05:36.500 | And let me mention one other cultural factor and a closing word of personal things.
00:05:43.500 | I was talking to a church leader outside America once who tried to explain to me that lifting the hands in worship in his city was a badge of bad theology.
00:05:53.500 | It was associated with certain churches that taught wrong things and that he felt it would be a compromise in faithful churches if the people raised their hands.
00:06:04.500 | They'd be waving the flag of false teaching.
00:06:08.500 | That's the kind of thing you really need to be sensitive to when you're an outsider and you walk into a cultural situation you don't know anything about.
00:06:16.500 | However, I suggested to him that there's probably a better way to distinguish ourselves from false teaching than by letting the false teachers co-opt a beautiful biblical practice as their own while the true church goes without it.
00:06:36.500 | I don't think that's a good idea.
00:06:38.500 | Perhaps one word to those who are finding the lifting of hands in worship to be artificial for themselves rather than real.
00:06:47.500 | Let's just all agree that whether we are very formal or more charismatic, we are all equally vulnerable to hypocrisy and artificiality and judgmentalism.
00:07:01.500 | Hymns can be sung with just as much inauthenticity as worship songs.
00:07:06.500 | Organs can be played with just as much hypocrisy as guitars.
00:07:10.500 | Hands can be kept down for motives just as defective as they can be lifted up.
00:07:17.500 | As a hand raiser, I would just say to those who don't do it, for me, it is both a natural expression of inner admiration for God and an intensifier of inner exaltation as it finds expression in the body.
00:07:40.500 | And I hope that those who don't find it to be so have their own experiences of released admiration and inner exaltation and intensification.
00:07:53.500 | And I believe that is possible.
00:07:55.500 | And I will assume that is the case when I am worshiping with you, if you're one of those.
00:08:02.500 | Really good thoughts, Pastor John.
00:08:04.500 | Thank you.
00:08:05.500 | And carefully put here, because if the Bible says that we should do it every time, right?
00:08:10.500 | Well, maybe, maybe not.
00:08:12.500 | What about holy kisses as a practice, well described in the New Testament and mostly neglected by American churches?
00:08:18.500 | That was in episode 742, the holy kiss, relevant today or not?
00:08:23.500 | Episode 742, check it out.
00:08:25.500 | In our online archive at our online home, you can explore all 1250 of our past episodes, scan a list of our most popular ones, read full transcripts,
00:08:33.500 | even send us a question of your own and even find episode 742.
00:08:38.500 | Go to DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn and to get new episodes delivered to you three times per week, subscribe to the Ask Pastor John podcast and your favorite podcast app.
00:08:48.500 | Was holiness the fight against sin or is holiness the fight for joy in God?
00:08:55.500 | It's another great question from a perceptive listener.
00:08:58.500 | That's next time on Wednesday when we return.
00:09:00.500 | I'm your host Tony Reinke.
00:09:01.500 | We'll see you then.
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