Pace Hartfield is the Worship Pastor at Fellowship Church

This is a great article by Pace Hartfield



The "Altar-ed" Life
I am studying Old Testament worship this morning and I had a thought. Have we eliminated the idea of the altar and sacrifice in the Church? Within the context of the old covenant the very thought of worshiping God involved sacrifice. Worship was costly. Worship required sacrifice to stay in relationship with a Holy God and although we now have a more superior way of worship in the new covenant, I sometimes wonder if we have missed it.
Every step of the way to relationship with God in the Old Testament required thought of sacrifice. Even if it were a small sacrifice, one had to bring it to God. You walked with your sacrifice. You would smell and hear sacrifice. The entire worship experience involved sacrifice. It involved the altar. Without the altar there was no place for the blood to be shed. The altar was the place where the divine transaction took place. It's where man's sins where covered temporarily by the innocent blood of the sacrifice and on that altar relationship with God was "altar-ed."
Today we have a totally different mindset as we go to worship God. Instead of walking into the Church with sacrifice on our minds, we walk into Church thinking about ourselves. We come into a worship experience with a consumerist mindset. We rate our experience with God based on whether or not we liked the music or the message. And the ironic thing about all of this is that the worship experience shouldn't be about us. Ours worship is for God's consumption, not ours. He is the consumer, not us. And as for rating the service- if anybody should be doing the rating it's Him.
Now I realize that because of Christ's work on the cross one sacrifice has been made for all and that the sacrifice of blood is no longer required. Christ blood doesn't cover our sin, it washes our sins away. Praise God! But let's not miss it here. Our worship should still be costly. Romans 12 tells us that our very lives are to be presented to God as "living sacrifices."
When we remove the cost of worship we remove the altar in worship. When we remove the altar in worship we remove the ability to be "altar-ed."
So what does the altar look like in a New Testament Church service