It concerns us to be right, not only in the object of our worship, but in the manner of it and it is this which Christ here instructs us in.
Matthew Henry, Commentary on John 4:24
I was raised in a fairly eclectic Church environment. The earliest memories I have of Church are in a fairly large Church in Omaha, NE. After that, we attended a mixed bag of denominations, ranging through E-Free, Methodist, Church of Christ, Pseudo-Pentecostal, General Baptist, Bapticostal, and Lutheran. Through that gamut of theological stances and viewpoints, I never really had a concrete definition in my mind of what worship really is, and what the intention of it is.
When I was a kid, I was bored at the more liturgical, traditional modes of worship. When I was in basic training, I used Sunday morning as a weekly naptime. When I was a young Christian I loved all the modern songs that worked their way into worship. When I became more theologically inclined, I started furrowing my brow at the songs I heard incorporated into Lord’s Day worship. All of this before I became a Calvinist, let alone confessionally Reformed.
I once attended a Church that would replace a few words of a secular song and sing it Sunday morning, with the electric guitar and trap set and everything. Not that you could hear yourself sing, but it never sat right with me to be singing worldly songs to the Lord of Glory. My pastor even once said, “Jesus did not die for music.” “Well, no” I replied to myself, “but shouldn’t worship be reverent? I think, even then, I had the underpinnings of what true worship was supposed to look like.
I was right, though. Worship is supposed to be reverent, and the reason why the worship seemed ill-fitting in the house of God is that one of the intentions of my old church was to get people in the doors with a flashy service (by their own admission.) They weren’t solely preoccupied with refracting the glory of God in holy adoration. When we have our eyes fixed on something other than the true object of our worship (God,) and instead try to fill pews with popular music and dazzling lights, we lose the true essence of why we are gathered together in the first place.
Worship is not about us, it is about God.