Orderly & Focused Worship

7/17/25 Bible Thought (1 Corinthians 11)

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The believer’s ultimate aim is always to be the glory of God (1 Cor. 10:31). If this is true in our everyday lives, then certainly it ought to be true concerning our gatherings for worship.

In 1 Corinthians 11, the apostle Paul shifts gears from his previous concerns on idolatry to what proper worship looks like. Here, he’s moving from what not to do, to what to do. Don’t worship idols but do worship God.

However, there is some particularity to how God ought to be worshipped. Scholars Ciampa and Rosner comment, “Worship that is not praiseworthy does not glorify God.”^[1]

But what does this look like?

Paul begins this section with concerns for proper attire in worship and he’s following up on traditions that he already shared with the Corinthians (1 Cor. 11:2). This section can be quite puzzling, and to be honest I certainly don’t have all the answers.

One of our great difficulties as modern Bible readers is that we only have half of the conversation. If you’ve ever heard someone speaking on the phone, you hear everything they say, but you can’t really hear what the person on the other line is saying.

Now, because of context, different remarks, or a knowledge of who they are talking to, you can pretty frequently deduce what’s going on with only half the conversation. This is a practice that Bible scholars engage with regularly called mirror reading when diving into difficult passages in God’s Word. Certainly, 1 Corinthians 11 fits the bill here.

Opinions abound concerning head coverings and their significance.

Some hold to the belief that women should still wear head coverings today. Others believe that it was a cultural mandate based upon the day and time that Paul was writing.

Yet even the original meaning of this passage in a Roman cultural context is highly debated by scholars.

Some scholars conclude women would typically wear head coverings, while others deny this. Other scholars conclude that the head coverings were used for gender distinction which should be kept the same in the church gathering. ^[2]

Even more, some put forth the idea that a woman without a head covering would almost be putting herself out there for sexual availability.^[3] This would certainly be dishonoring to her husband and would be both distracting and utterly inappropriate in worship.

We do know that sexual immorality was an incredibly commonplace thing in Corinthian culture that had also invaded the church, so perhaps there’s a link here.

I honestly don’t have a clearcut answer on all of the cultural background today.

It seems that what we can take away is that worship should be focused on God. As such, we should aim to root out distractions—whatever that might look like. Firstly, we could look at what we wear. Is it appropriate for the setting, does it cause us to stand out unnecessarily versus what is normally expected in our day and age? Are we looking to be seen and acknowledged by others or are we simply aiming to look nice?

Likewise, anything that might be dishonoring to God should be rooted out.

A woman dishonoring her husband would dishonor Christ, which would dishonor God following the structure of Paul’s thought in verse 3. Now, certainly if this is true for a man’s wife, the man’s own actions could even more directly dishonor Christ.

We should take our worship gatherings seriously.

It can be easy to fall into routines and to do what we’ve always done. Instead, we should strongly consider how we come, how we act, and how we dress and what our motives are behind it all and the glory of God ought to always be our chief aim.

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^[1] Roy E. Ciampa and Brian S. Rosner, The First Letter to the Corinthians, The Pillar New Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI; Cambridge, U.K.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2010), 505.

^[2] Derek R. Brown and E. Tod Twist, 1 Corinthians, ed. John D. Barry and Douglas Mangum, Lexham Research Commentaries (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2013), 1 Co 11:5–6.

^[3] Roy E. Ciampa and Brian S. Rosner, The First Letter to the Corinthians, The Pillar New Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI; Cambridge, U.K.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2010), 517–518.