Glorifying God in Worship

Recently I have been thinking much (not only with regard to worship) about knowledge. Knowing of a person requires the Knower, and the Known. Jonathan Edwards has helped me to see more clearly the relationship of subject and object, and how we glorify God in worship:

God is glorified not only by His glory's being seen, but by its being rejoiced in. When those that see it delight in it, God is more glorified than if they only see it. His glory is then received by the whole soul, both by the understanding and by the heart. God made the world that He might communicate, and the creature receive, His glory; and that it might [be] received both by the mind and heart. He that testifies his idea of God's glory [doesn't] glorify God so much as he that testifies also his approbation of it and his delight in it [Jonathan Edwards, The "Miscellanies," ed. by Thomas Schafer, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 13, ed. Thomas Schafer (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994), 495]

It is the last line (which I have bolded) that has been immensely helpful to me. It is the difference between stating the worth of Jesus Christ as an idea, and as that which has taken control of our hearts. The latter always implies (if it does not explicitly state) the subject, me. "You are altogether lovely to me" speaks not only the objective beauty of Christ, but of its power to fill and transform the subject, me. There are two ways to hear the same phrase. One is parochial, confining beauty to what I can see: "You are lovely to me . . . and I am the judge who decides what is lovely." The other is God-entranced: "You are lovely to me . . . because You have awakened my heart to behold and love Your beauty, of which I see but a ray."

What I love to see is worship that makes this explicit: that the transformation that enables me to see and love the beauty of God is God-wrought. Then God is doubly mangified: 1) as beautiful to the eyes of my heart (and not merely my mind), and 2) as the One who causes dead people to live and blind people to see the glory of God in Christ.

So I think it is important:

1. To explicitly teach parishioners what we are doing in worship, lest many think that our glimpse of God are our own doing, or that His beauty is defined by our appraisal of it.
2. To diligently seek music that expresses not merely our idea of God's glory, but the delight of heart that He has created in that glory.
3. To write lyrics that are so God-honoring as to escape the ambiguity of whose worth and judgment we are praising.