Worship Life

ever desperately cried out, “Restore to me the joy of your salvation” (Psalm 51:12)?

There are lots of tools, resources, gimmicks, and ideas out there on what remedies the heart of worship gone cold. But if we were to boil it down, if we were to focus on one thing, we might simply ask, “What has the power to inflame a worshiper’s heart again?”

“Their Hearts Burned Within Them”

This language of hearts “on fire” isn’t just Christianese. It’s biblical. Luke 24 recounts one of the most beautiful moments in Jesus’s ministry — the road to Emmaus, where two despondent disciples are transformed by an encounter with Jesus.

The scene opens with these two men on the road shortly after the crucifixion, lamenting the death of Jesus and their loss of hope. Jesus appears and walks alongside them, but they don’t recognize him. Then Jesus begins a kind of Bible study, right there on the road: “Beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself” (Luke 24:27). Jesus was teaching them how to read and interpret the Bible. And his main point? “It’s all about me.”

Later on, when Jesus was gone, the two disciples talk about what they learned and how it affected them. “They said to each other, ‘Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the Scriptures?’” (Luke 24:32). What set their hearts ablaze — in the language of Augustine, what captivated their affections — was an interpretation of Scripture that put Jesus and his finished work front and center.

Putting Jesus at the Center

If worship is going to set our hearts on fire, it needs to do the same thing. It needs to put Jesus front and center, through the Scriptures. This understanding of Christ-centeredness as the key to unlocking vibrant, passionate worship is old, and perhaps no one has said it better than the Protestant Reformer, Thomas Cranmer.

When Cranmer unveiled the 1549 Book of Common Prayer — a collection of the first worship services that the English-speaking world had ever heard — he wrote a short manifesto on worship in its preface. In it he claimed that the purpose of worship centered on Christ and filled with the Scriptures was to cause worshipers to “be the more inflamed with the love of [God’s] true religion.”

Cranmer believed that worship’s goal was to set hearts on fire. And so Cranmer designed worship services that made much of Jesus.