What is Vertical Worship?

One of the most important distinctives of New City Church is Unashamed Vertical Worship. What does that mean? 

First of all, it is a recognition that our hearts were made to worship. In fact, we can’t help ourselves. We are natural-born worshippers. We are little worship factories that produce little worship packages whether we like it or not. 

The root of the word “worship” is “worth”. And all day, every day, we give our attention, energy, and time to the things we consider “worthy”. But that is our greatest problem. We too easily assign worth to worthless things or at least less worthy of God. Every sin problem is really a worship problem. All sin is essentially misdirected worship. 

It’s no surprise that the first two commandments are about the direction of our worship. When God says, “You shall not have other gods before me.”, and “You shall not make idols.”, he is acknowledging our propensity to turn our worship from vertical to horizontal. Our Creator commands his creators to refrain from giving their worship to other creators or creations. Thank God for his grace, because we all break those two commands in some form every day. When we don’t intentionally worship God, our hearts go looking for other things to worship. 

Vertical worship is the remedy for horizontal idol worshipers like you and me. When we gather weekly in church for worship, it is an opportunity to correct the direction of our worship. We don’t need songs, prayers, and preaching that make much of us. We need an experience that compels us to “lift up our eyes” (Isaiah 40:26), “lift up our heads” (Psalm 24:7-10), and “lift up our hands” (Psalm 134:2) in vertical worship as we call attention to the worthiness of our great God. 

At New City Church, we will be very intentional about the songs we sing, the order in which we sing them, and who is the object of our attention as we sing them. Our desire will be to move from a call to worship God to actually ascribing worship to God from our hearts to his. We want our worship services to actually be services in which we worship. 

These are the kinds of worshippers God is seeking. Jesus said,” True worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship him.” (John 4:23) Vertical worship requires both truth and spirit. 

Worshipping in truth involves right thinking about God. 

This is what Jesus meant when he said, “You shall worship the Lord with all your mind.” (Matthew 22:37) You can’t worship what you do not know. Before we can worship in truth, we must be taught the truth about God. Worship without truth is not vertical. It can produce an emotional rush, but it cultivates shallow, self-focused people who have no capacity for processing deep doctrinal truths about God. Worship in truth prevents shallow emotionalism.

Worshipping in spirit involves right feelings about God. 

This is what Jesus meant when he said,” You shall worship the Lord with all your heart.” (Matthew 22:37) A vertical worship service should never leave you unmoved. Vertical worship activates our emotions, including affection, adoration, and heartfelt ascriptions of honor and worth to God. Without spirit in worship, our “worship services” will be characterized by ritual boredom and filled with artificial admirers of Jesus, like the people who write Hallmark greeting cards to “someone you love” for a living. (They have never met them and probably wouldn’t like them if they did.) Worship in spirit prevents lifeless orthodoxy.

• True worship engages both head and heart. 

• True worship evokes deep thought and real emotions. 

• True worship flows from people who love sound doctrine and are deeply passionate about it.

We need a church experience that is filled with truth about the person and work of Jesus, flowing from his self-disclosure, forever recorded on the pages of scripture. When we encounter the God of Truth, our only response will be a vertical ascription of adoration in worship, declaring with the angels, “Worthy are you, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will they existed and were created.” Revelation 4:11