1. The Psalter should be woven into the warp and woof of worship.
"If we drift from the psalms, the warchants of the Prince of Peace, we shall drift into an easy and lax piety. The inner warfare will be deemphasized, and the warfare for the world will disappear...The fact of the matter is that the present generation of American Christians will either learn to sing psalms, or it will die...God wrote the psalms, and they are the most appropriate form of and school of praise. Dare we offer Him anything else?"
2. Worship is sacrificial.
"In the broadest sense, sacrifice is not a negative, but a positive thing. When God sacrifices us, He transforms us into new creatures. He takes us apart and puts us back together again as newer, better, more glorious, more transfigured, more powerful servants. It is only because of sin that this act of God's is painful to us...Worship is to be a transforming, transfiguring event in our lives, a time when God sacrifices us, and fits us for His presence and his Kingdom."
3. Worship is covenant renewal.
"Human beings were created in covenant with God, and we are always covenant-beings...one implication of [this] is that doing worship self-consciously as a covenant renewal is good for us. We were made to be patterned covenantally, and so the best form of worship is the one that conforms to the covenant pattern."
Here is Jordan's description of a covenant renewal worship service:
1. God calls us.
2. God glorifies us.
3. God instructs us.
4. God feeds us.
5. God commissions us.
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