Kneeling During Worship

Greetings Theo-bloggers and ect.

Today was a most interesting day at my church service. The first Sunday in May is our anniversary and usually this is one of the times throughout the year that we partake of the Lord's Table. We worshiped, had a reading of the Scripture, partook of the communion, and then had a church meal afterward. (There is no sermon whenever we we celebrate the Lord's Supper.) This was all done in normal fashion today with one exception: the worship was slightly altered. The last song was a praise and worship chorus entitled "We worship and adore You" wherein is contained a line "Bowing down before you". Before the initiation of the song our pastor spoke briefly of the use of kneeling and prostration in Old Testament worship. For myself, I have never been part of any church where the congregation knelt during worship. I know that such practice is permissible in Eastern Orthodox circles with the exception of Sundays and service from Pascha to Pentecost. Also, it was common for Roman Catholics to have kneeling during certain times, particularly during the reception of "Eucharist". For that reason the issue of kneeling during the Reformation was somewhat touchy. Some considered the kneeling during communion to be veneration of the bread and wine which could suggest a form of Roman Catholic transubstantiation. However, in the services lead by John Calvin, Kneeling for the Lord's Supper and prayer was common and Calvin himself advocated the raising of hands during worship. While this was true of Calvin it is not necessarily true of Reformed and Presbyterian circles today. So I thought it to be most interesting when we knelt during the last song of our worship and during a time of prayer. I have both knelt and prostrated before, but not in corporate worship. I enjoyed worship this day and thought it to be a very proper worship position. The primary Hebrew word for Worship שׁחה (shâchâh) actually means to bow or be prostrate, and in the Hebrew culture the knees were symbols of strength; therefore, to kneel is to submit one's self to a stronger party. Of coarse, the important part of worship is the posture of the mind: the inner man must fall before the Lord. Yet, let us not over look the fact that there is perfect validity in external manifestations of inward attitudes. John Gill comments on Psalm 95:6, "O Come, let us worship and bow down: let us kneel before the LORD our Maker." by saying that it is natural that the Lord who made man both body and soul should be worshiped with both our body and our soul. One can not say that all worship must be done from a kneeling or prostrate position, but I hope we do it at my church more often in the future.