Episode 103: A Theology of Worship

Rural Church Podcast 2.0

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Welcome to the Ruled Church Podcast. This is my beloved son, with whom

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I am well pleased. He is honored, and I get the glory. And by the way, it's even better, because you see that building in Perryville, Arkansas?

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You see that one in Pechote, Mexico? Do you see that one in Tuxla, Guterres, down there in Chiapas? That building has my son's name on it.

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The church is not a democracy. It's a monarchy. Christ is king. You can't be

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Christian without a local church. You can't do anything better than to bend your knee and bow your heart, turn from your sin and repentance, believe on the

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Lord Jesus Christ, and join up with a good Bible -believing church, and spend your life serving

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Jesus in a local, visible congregation. I can tell you this for sure, Gunnar. It's going to be the best podcast you've recorded all year.

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That's a joke. Don't worry, it's true. It's not out. I mean, it's out like this is late January by the time people's listening, but it is

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January 1st when we're recording this podcast. The best way to start the new year.

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The best way to start the new year is with the Rural Church Podcast. Yeah. I am your, well,

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I'm your host, I guess, now with Eddie taking a hiatus, Alan Nelson, one of the pastors of Providence Baptist Church in Perryville, Arkansas, and with me today, two guests.

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We're actually all together. Normally, I do this on Zoom. I have with me Gunnar Madewell from also

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Providence Baptist Church in Perryville, Arkansas, and Jeff Crago from By the

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Word Baptist Church in Azle, Texas. Hello, Jeff. Hey, I am glad to be here.

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Jeff, you haven't been on before. Gunnar has, so everybody already obviously knows him. Probably going to be emailing for autographs and stuff.

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But Jeff, tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do at By the Word Baptist.

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So my name is Jeff Crago, and I lead the music and the youth program at By the

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Word Baptist Church. I've been there for going on five years, a little over five years now, and I started leading the worship about a year into being a member.

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So I've been leading it for four years, and it has been a true journey, a blessing in my life and my family's life, and we really love serving the church and being able to be used by the

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Lord in that way. Amen, and I don't know if Gunnar, have you been on in the context of your position here?

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I mean, I know we've done evangelism, but have we talked about your position here?

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So Gunnar is, he leads musical worship.

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I should say that, that'll come up probably later. And then he also helps with our youth.

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So he and Jeff actually have pretty similar roles and duties in their respective churches.

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But what we want to do in this episode, I wanted to talk to these brothers about worship in the rural church.

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Maybe that's not a great title, but I think that sometimes worship in terms of music in smaller churches can be kind of hokey.

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Is that definition? I mean, is that, you agree with that? Yeah, I would agree with that. And maybe we don't take it as seriously as we should.

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So how I want to start out is, let's just talk about worship for a second. We're going to get into the nuts and bolts in just a little bit, but let's just talk about worship and let's talk about a theological foundation.

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So I'll read a little bit. This is from Beaky's Systematic Theology. He says, the worship of God revolves around him from beginning to end.

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Edmund Clowney said, God's glory draws our worship and God's will directs our worship.

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Now back to Beaky. The theological foundations of biblical worship are the doctrine of God's divine nature and the doctrine of creation, which set forth the categorical difference between the creator and his creatures.

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Since God is one and unique, far more majestic than all the created world, worship is the act of his creatures celebrating his unique glory according to his will.

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Jeremiah Burroughs said, when we come to worship God, we come to tender up that homage and service unto him that is due from us as creatures to the infinite creator.

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Worship belongs to God alone. Any thoughts, comments, anything you guys wanna make as we just lay a theological foundation for worship?

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I like that line there from Beaky. Worship is the act of his creatures celebrating his unique glory according to his will.

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Thoughts, comments? I think a part of, actually one of the actually main parts about being a

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Christian is worship. The way that we exercise our duty and our privilege as a

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Christian is to worship the Lord for what he has done. And I think there's a lot of biblical foundation and backing to what we're gonna talk about about worship.

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Now, we worship in a lot of different ways. For instance, I think worship is done in the church.

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You mentioned this a little bit. There's different kinds. Preaching, we worship in a few different ways in the church, but I think most often, even especially in the

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Psalms, we see worshiping the Lord specifically in singing. Yeah, I think, so I would wanna clarify, like some people would say the old trope, worship is a lifestyle.

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And that's true. So worship captures the entirety of the

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Christian life. So we would talk about personal devotion to God.

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We would talk about prayer, Bible reading, family worship.

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We have that phrase, family worship, family devotions, where we're celebrating the glory of God.

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All these things are directed by his will, and we'll talk about that more. So however, so God gets to decide and determine how he's worshiped.

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But specifically, what I wanna talk about in this episode is corporate worship.

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So I'll just read this. Psalm 87, two. The Lord loves the gates of Zion more than all the dwelling places of Jacob.

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Now, he's speaking there, at least in the immediate, about Jerusalem, but we know that extends beyond Jerusalem in Psalm 87.

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He's talking about, ultimately, the church. God loves the gates of Zion more than all the dwelling places of Jacob.

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Now, it's not that he doesn't love the dwelling places of Jacob. So I'm gonna put it to you this way. He loves individual worship.

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He loves personal devotion. He loves family worship. But there is something about God whereby he delights in, in a unique and special way, more than all these individual acts of worship, the corporate worship of his people.

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The Lord loves the gates of Zion more than all the dwelling places of Jacob. So there is a particular focus and emphasis in the scriptures on the corporate aspect of the worship of God.

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Yeah, so I think, too, when we think of just background, a lot of people, especially in rural areas, especially in the

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South, they believe that church is optional. And in this text,

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I believe it's not saying that God loves it in that way, it's nice, or that God just enjoys it, or if you just do it,

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God likes it. What we're talking about is God actually has a designation for the

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Christian to come together and worship as a congregation, specifically has ordered that to happen.

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You have to, and I'll say this, and I think it's okay amongst us, and if you're listening and you disagree with me, you can email

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Pastor Quatro. If you do not gather with God's people, I'm not saying you miss sometimes, if you regularly aren't gathering with God's people and not a part of a local church,

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I have a hard time saying that you are a Christian. Well, yeah, of course. I think it'd be a very small demographic that'd be listening to this podcast.

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I don't know the people. But yeah, that's good. I don't know the people listening, but... God's providence, that's true. There's a special focus in the economy of God and God's plan, a special focus on a people, not just individuals, though that's true and that's glorious.

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I think it like this. You guys got kids, and I love the individual time with my children.

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You know, I love doing that. Today, birthday breakfast with my oldest daughter. I love that. There's nothing about that that I would say negative, but there's something even more special when all my children are together and we're all together at the table and we're eating and we're laughing and it's the whole family.

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So I don't want to discount personal devotion and certainly would not want to discount family worship.

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These are necessary parts of the Christian life. So in a way, the way music supports worship in the local church, your personal devotion supports your worship in the local church.

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So we use, you know, worship, music in regards to local church is a part of the worship, right?

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And it helps prepare the heart for the preaching and the music should always coincide. But you should come to church already prepared by having a personal devotion.

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You should come to church with a heart already prepared for that corporate worship in that individual personal worship time that you have with the

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Lord. One of the verses that helped me about halfway through my ministry a few years ago was

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Psalm 122 verse one and it really opened up my eyes to the need and the importance and the significance of corporate worship.

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And it reads, I was glad when they say to me, when they said to me, let us go to the house of the

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Lord. And I just meditated on that, thought about that and it's like, okay, there is the individual aspect.

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I was glad when they said, so now I've got a group of people calling me, let us together, let us come together and go to the house of the

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Lord. And this is God's desire that His people would be gathered together to worship

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Him, to worship Christ and to exalt Christ, to isolate His people from the rest of the world for just a time where they can be free from the cares of the world, from the weight of the world, they can find rest and they can just, they're free, we are free to worship

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God in His house, with His people, with no judgment, with no chains, no bondage and just free to worship, whether that's in preaching, singing, prayer, giving, all of it is part of corporate worship.

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Yeah, that's right. I think that's good. So the pinnacle of the Christian life, the pinnacle of a

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Christian's worship is corporate worship. If God loves the gates of Zion more than all the dwelling place, all the tents, all the homes of Jacob, if He loves the dwelling place of Zion, or if He loves

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Zion more than all those, then so should we. So there's a priority and a love for personal

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Bible reading that we should be doing, personal prayer we shouldn't be doing, family worship we should be doing.

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But the pinnacle of a Christian's worship is in corporate worship. God's presence is in corporate worship in a special way.

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God is omnipresent, He's everywhere. But His presence is in corporate worship in a way, it's really a mystery and a glory, and it dwells with us.

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In that psalm he says, I was glad. There's a joy that comes to go meeting with the

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Lord's people. There's a gladness of heart because God has put that longing, that desire for His people to gather together.

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There's a joy for the psalmist says, I was glad when they said, let us go to the house of the

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Lord. It's something I've been longing for, I've been looking forward to, I've been preparing for, and I've been waiting for that call and I'm glad.

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And for us, I'm glad it's Sunday. I'm glad I get to wake up and not go to work. I'm glad I get to wake up and not mow my lawn.

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I'm glad I get to wake up and just go be with God's people. Now the next, so that's good.

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The next theological foundation is, in that definition from Beaky, but it's to worship

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God according to His will. In other words, we have to worship the way that God says.

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So what does that look like? I have some things written down here, but what does that look like to worship

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God as He has said He would be worshiped? So for any church,

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I believe that wants, that seeks to be healthy in their worship. This is what they first have to do.

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And I think it's elementary. This is what we do though. How do I worship God when we come together?

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So we've already set the foundation. It's good and it's right to come together. How do we do it? This is the first thing you must do.

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You open God's Word. That's the only place that you go as the rule and authority for how you are to worship in the house of the

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Lord. So we'll just talk just briefly, but the regular principle of worship versus the normative principle of worship.

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And if you don't know those terms, it's okay. But essentially, the regular principle says that the worship of God should be regulated by God's Word.

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Whatever God says that we should do in worship, that's what we should do and nothing else.

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The normative principle would say, well, as long as God's Word is not against it, then we can do it.

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And so we hold to the regular principle. But all I mean by the regular principle is that the

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Word of God, what Gunnar just said, is the Word of God regulates our Scripture, or sorry, the Scriptures regulate our worship.

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Some people have said, well, this is stifling the Holy Spirit. But actually,

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I would say, and I appreciate what people are looking, I appreciate what people are trying to say with that.

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But what my pushback would say, the Holy Spirit knows how

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He wants to be worshiped. Yeah, He's gonna be most glorified.

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That's right. In the way that we worship. I'll give you an analogy. If you say to your wife, what do you want for your birthday? Do you want a car for your birthday?

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Gunnar, he can afford that kind of stuff. But you want a car for your birthday? Or do you want a truck?

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This is really, really silly. She says, I want a truck. And you say, yeah, but you know what? I just feel like you want a car.

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So you get her a car. You're like, no, get her what she says, what she has communicated to you.

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And that's a silly analogy. But when we say the regular principle of worship, we simply mean

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God knows how He wants to be worshiped. So, and you could use that same analogy.

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Sometimes, some years I'll say, well, I don't care about my wife's list.

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I'm gonna just try to surprise her. And guess what usually happens? She is discouraged and she usually is like, that's not what

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I wanted. It's always safe to go. Now, it breaks down a little bit, but it's always the safest way to get my wife a gift if she just tells me what she wants and I stick to that.

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I don't have to try to surprise her. The same way I think with the Holy Spirit and with God's Word and worship. We're not trying to invent new ways.

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We're not trying to invent different ways. We're the safest and God gets the most glory if we stick to His Word and do it how

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He's told us to do it. Yeah, I think one encouragement I'd say is everything that you're doing in worship, you should think about where has

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God explicitly commanded me to do this? It draws from the sufficiency of Scripture.

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Amen. You can't find a verse? Don't do it. Yeah, that's good.

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So, let's walk through for a minute the elements that should be included in the public worship, in the corporate worship.

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What should be included? What is necessary to be included? Christ must be the central theme.

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Okay, that's good. The gospel and the work of Christ. So really, and a lot of people, so different church traditions structure their services differently, revolving around the gospel, but it's right.

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We should sing the gospel. We should preach the gospel. We should pray in accordance with the gospel.

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The ordinances display public attestation to the gospel or even really the ordinances in many ways are the gospel in drama form.

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You know, we said, well, we should do a drama. Well, I would argue that we shouldn't do a drama because it's not commanded in Scripture.

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And number two, I'd say we already have a drama. Baptism and the Lord's Supper are public displays of the work of Christ.

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I would say one thing that I think for easy, easy, not even just music, just let's just intro to worship.

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How are churches to be ordered? Easy verse in 1st Timothy 4, verse 13, until I come, devote yourselves to the public reading of Scripture, to exhortation, to teaching.

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Easy, devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture that should be incorporated in worship. Most services that I grew up in the vast majority of services.

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I grew up in little attention to the public reading of Scripture, except to the sermon. Now, sometimes now a lot of services.

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I was in the pastor when we got to that part of the service, he would read the text and that is of course good and encouraged.

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But what we do, and I'll ask you Jeff just a second too, but what we do at Providence is our call to worship is

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Scripture reading. By the time this comes out, I don't know if I've talked to you about this guy or not, but by the time this comes out, we'll have started reading through Romans.

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So we're going to read through Romans right now. Now, we just finished Malachi and then after Malachi, we did some

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Christmas readings. And before Malachi, what had we done? Was it

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Psalm 119 or was it through Matthew? But anyway, we're just reading through books.

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Very simple and just divide the... We did John too. Oh, that's what it was. We did John. Sorry. I should know.

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So we just read through books and we start our service with the public reading of Scripture.

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Why? Because God says that we should stay, pay careful attention to the public reading of Scripture.

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So most services, and even maybe some people listening to this, you need to incorporate more

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Scripture. It needs to be more than just, I'm reading it before the sermon. Yeah, the Scriptures have to be in light of...

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So we talk about tools for worship. I don't want to look at Scripture just like a tool, but it is the main...

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I mean, that's where we draw all of our worship from. That's where everything comes from. That's where our understanding of salvation, our understanding of who

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God is, who we are, all of worship is drawn out of Scripture. So if you have a worship service that's not saturated in Scripture, what are you doing?

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Yeah, yeah. It doesn't make sense. And there's room for grace. And liberty in one sense.

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Well, yeah, sure. For example, when we say liberty, what we mean is not everybody has to read through Romans. Yeah. And not everybody, you don't have to necessarily have an

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Old Testament reading, a New Testament reading, or yeah, a long... I do think... So for us,

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I think longer, I like longer passages, but also something we try to do is we try to remember the reader.

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So, well, this is getting into a new shift in the gear.

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But we only think that qualified men should be reading the

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Scripture. Yeah, haven't got to that yet. No, we haven't really got to that. But that's because 1

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Timothy 2, 12 says that women are not to be teachers. Well, some podcast listeners might...

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Do you think they'll disagree? They have some difference of opinion on that? Maybe. There are some people who would...

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They would say they're conservative, but they would allow a lady to read Scripture. But I would say the issue is when we have our public reading of Scripture, it is a public authoritative call to worship.

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Our church is affirming this. That's right. And so I don't necessarily think some churches would say, look, that's what the elders...

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Only the elders need to do that. I can appreciate that. We just don't do that.

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We think that it's okay for qualified men to call the assembly to worship in the public reading of Scripture.

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And we can talk about that more. Goodness, this is going to turn into two episodes. I told you. Let's do it.

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But, so here's the elements I've written down, and you guys push back, ask questions.

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Scripture reading, prayer, singing, preaching, giving, the ordinances, and teaching.

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These should be... These are a part. If I miss anything, anything you want me to clarify. I would say

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I agree with all those. However, I would say that there are some pastors that I've talked to that believe that giving or tithes are not a part of the regular principle.

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Yeah, I have heard that too. That they're good to do, but they're actually not a part of the worship.

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I think it's a part of your worship. I think so too. And something that really helped me to...

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Let's see. I don't want to go around too many rabbit holes, but... No, I understand that.

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People want to do their giving secret or whatever. But one of the things, and I'm holding the book right now, how then should we worship by Sam Waldron?

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And I was going to flip to it real quick, but I can't find it. But Sam Waldron makes a good argument on...

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Here it is, 173. He makes a good argument on the including tithes and offering in the regular principle of worship.

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Being incorporated in the worship, public worship. Yeah. So he says, I believe that the taking of an offering as a part of worship is mandated by Scripture.

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On the other hand, in my view, silently placing an unacknowledged offering box or basket at the rear of the place of worship does not provide an adequate visible implementation of this required part of worship.

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And so he uses Acts 242. They were continually devoting themselves to the apostles' teaching and to fellowship and to the breaking of bread and prayer.

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So he says, we have here a concise description of the corporate worship of the early church. We've studied this pivotal text on worship in a previous chapter.

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Let me here give you a literal translation of the text, and this may help you see that. They were continually devoting themselves to the apostles' teaching, to the fellowship, to the breaking of the bread and prayers.

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The point to notice is that each of the four things mentioned in this verse are introduced and specified with a definite article, the.

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So for instance, it's not just prayer in general that is mentioned, but the prayers, the corporate prayers of the church.

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This also is not just general eating together that is the reference, but the breaking of bread, a reference to the

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Lord's Supper. Mom, I'm going to skip some. This brings me to my main point in turning you to this passage.

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The fellowship of Acts 242 is a reference to the giving of the church.

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She's making an argument there that part of the regular worship practice of the church is to give, publicly give.

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So I'm not wanting to split hairs about that, but I would make the argument that we should have public giving as an aspect of our worship.

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That thing would be the only thing that I would say is some people have difference of opinion, but all those other things.

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That's the only thing that people have difference of opinion? Yeah, I mean, you got to reach good.

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I believe most people here is I think would say reading the Bible is good.

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Okay, we'll do it in worship. Maybe if they don't even have a biblical foundation, they do it because they realize it's a good thing.

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They preach, pray, they would, a lot of them would do tithes, but they agree that all those other things are essential and part of worship.

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Yeah, I mean, I would make an argument that the tithe was before the law. So Abraham, of course, gave tithes.

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And then we have tithing as part of the law of part of the Mosaic Covenant. And I know we can make the arguments about where you're giving more than 10%, but I would make an argument that the tithe is a biblical, at the very least, a biblical precedent, but I would argue it's more of a biblical command.

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That's the bottom, that's the floor of the Christians giving is 10%. And that should manifest itself.

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I'm making the argument in our regular weekly corporate gathering. We give in part.

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Visibly, visibly. Yeah, now, I would make this if you're not, so I think that element should be,

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I think it should be a public element. I know about secret giving and all that. I know those arguments. And we've had members before that wanted to give secretly.

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Online. And they did, yeah, they used our online tithing or whatever. But anyway, we're kind of getting sidetracked.

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But I do think that tithes and offerings is warranted to be in the corporate worship.

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And I think Paul alludes to that in 1 Corinthians, or 2 Corinthians 9, when he says, for I know your readiness.

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Like there is a sense of the church being ready to do this when he comes. So it's not, it's not something's hidden, or it's something that they're all kind of planning individually.

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I have heard of your readiness to be able to provide this need, or this giving when

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I get there. And so have it ready when I get there. Yeah, Walt Waldron quotes from 2 Corinthians 9 too, and he just makes a comment.

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Not only is giving an act of gospel commitment, it is also an act of gospel gratitude.

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So again, we talked about earlier, the gospel is preeminent, and Christ is preeminent in our worship.

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And so even giving is not giving so God will accept me. It's a giving out of what

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God has given us, trust, gratitude, honor, all these things.

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And the advancement of the gospel. You're giving to the advancement of the gospel to be a go -out in the mission field.

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The pastor gets it all. Or, you know, but it is a giving in a sense of what

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God has done for me. I want to give back in order that the ability for the gospel to continue to go out and to continue to be preached will be supported.

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That's right. Yeah, we should. You know, I know you just made a comment about the pastor gets it all, which is certainly, you know, that was rude.

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You shouldn't have said that. But actually there is biblical mandate that churches should take care of her shepherds.

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Yes. You know, so that's... Tie the podcast now. Yeah, no, no, no, that's good.

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No, we can move on from that. So would you have something else to add? No, I was just trying to kind of just, I'm just trying to think in terms of the rural church, you know, kind of how, because I've been in mega churches,

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I guess. I've been in very, what are they called? Parachurches?

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No, just the big, you know, the big churches with thousands of people. Right. And then I've been in churches with small, like 10 people.

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How much do you tithe every week? So I have something else I'd mention here.

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And again, it's kind of, we're talking about the regular principle, what we want to do, what God says that we are to do.

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And so I think that not only is the public reading of Scripture important, but also teaching.

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And so we have a specific part. So some people would push back on this, but we have a specific part of our service dedicated to teaching.

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Now it's like, what, five minutes? But we read from the 1689 Second London Baptist Confession, and we read from our catechism.

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Talk a little bit about that, Gunnar. So what we do is after we have started worship, after we've had

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Scripture reading, we break. After we've done a little bit of singing, we break.

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And that signifies that, okay, now it's time to be taught by the confession.

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The reason why we do that is not because we believe that the confession is higher than the

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Scripture. But what we believe is the confession does a good job of articulating what the

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Scripture says, how we are to do these things, and it's easy for the congregation to understand. We read from that because, one, we want to better understand the

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Bible. I'm not saying that you have to have a confession to understand what the Bible says, but it's a good tool.

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Secondly, I believe it's important to understand if your church has a confession to know what it says.

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Yeah, I would argue that all churches should have a statement of faith or a confession. And the reason

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I would argue that is because you go to a church, you say, what do you believe here? They say the

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Bible. Well, that's what they're going to say at the Mormon Tabernacle. That's what they're going to say at the Jehovah's Witness.

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That may be what they say at a Roman Catholic, we believe the Bible. That may be, you know, you go to the

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Methodist. They may say that if they even use the word Bible anymore, if it's not a bad word for the Methodist. But you understand what

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I'm saying? Yeah. If everybody says we believe the Bible, then what differentiates you?

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So what you do with a confession is it's not above the Bible, but it is in its articulation.

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You're not afraid to put out here in public, this is what we believe the Bible teaches. I think the best confession is, it's not to be arrogant, if we thought there was a better confession, we would use it.

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But we think that the 1689 Second London Baptist Confession of Faith is the best confession, but it's certainly not the only faithful confession.

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Right. I'm not saying that at all. I know guys that use a New Hampshire faithful confession.

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I know guys that use the First London. The Philadelphia. Philadelphia and the 1689 are the same, except the

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Philadelphia adds to one about singing of hymns and the laying on of hands. So it's pretty similar.

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But the point is... What about the BFM? Well, the BFM, the problem with the

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Baptist Faith and Message is not problematic necessarily in and of itself.

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The problem is in order to make it work, you need to be reading it through a lens of a better confession.

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So if you read it through the lens of a 1689, it's okay. But see, that's the problem.

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It's weak. It's too broad. Yes, too broad by design. In terms of worship, you don't want to be vague in your theology.

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Very good. You don't want to be vague in your doctrine. That's the point of the confession is that we're specific in our theology and specific in our doctrine so that not only do we as a church know what we believe, but if an outsider comes in or if a visitor comes in or whatever the case may be, we're very specific about what we believe and what we're doing in this worship service together.

33:07

And unapologetic. And unapologetically, right. And so we've had people through the proclamation or the declaration of the catechism and the confession realize, hey,

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I don't agree with this, and they've parted ways with the church, okay? We've also had people from outside the church who've come in and say, wow,

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I agree with this, and they've joined membership with the church. And that's what brought me to our church in the first place was because the seriousness of doctrine and theology and having that uniformity in the church under a confession.

33:39

So do you guys read the confession during worship? We don't read our... We read our catechism. During worship.

33:45

We read the catechism, yeah. Okay. From the 1689. Though the Baptist catechism? Yes, the Baptist. Which is, yeah.

33:50

So the point... I'm just trying to make in the element of worship. That text that you read earlier, 1

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Timothy 4, 13. It doesn't only say pay attention to a public reading of scripture, but also the exhortation, the teaching.

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And some people say, well, you teach when you preach. And that's true, but I also think it's warranted and even commanded to teach at other points in the service.

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So I'll make another argument too. If you believe that worship is authoritative, and we do, and we've failed in this before, then the leadership of the worship must be by qualified men.

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That includes the confession and catechism reading? And again, we...

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Not all men, but I think you should make that clear. Yeah, qualified men. Not all men, but they have to be qualified.

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Qualified men. So we... And also, like, we wouldn't... Now, we would allow a guest to lead if necessary.

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You know, like, for example, we allow guest preachers, and we allow a guest worship leader or whatever.

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We had the man come, and he was a faithful brother, and he played piano for us.

35:04

Oh, yeah, that's right. Colin Lundstrom. Yep. And so... But the point... Let me get back to the confession for a second.

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The point I'm trying to say is we read from the confession and catechism in our service because we believe it is an element of teaching.

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And I would actually encourage people listening, like, whatever your... You say, well, we're not 1689. That's fine.

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We'll do another podcast to convince you of that. This one's not that. You can be... You can have other faithful confessions.

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I'm not arguing about that. But whatever your faithful confession is, I just hate the mentality, and this was me for years with Southern Baptist.

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It's... No one knows what's in it. Yeah. You know the confession that your church even has. Like, oh, well, we believe the

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Baptist faith and message. Okay, what's in that? Like, for example, J .D. Greer, the time that we're reading this,

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J .D. Greer... Or podcasting, you know, J .D. Greer's church, and they do this every year, canceled their services the last

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Sunday of the year. That's what they do every year. But the Baptist faith and message, it doesn't have the best statement, but actually has a decent statement on the

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Lord's day. And I just wonder, does Southern Baptist even know that's in there? 99 % of them seem like they don't.

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Why? Because they don't even know that exists. So whatever your confession is, if it is the Baptist faith and message, whatever it is, consider having an element of your service where you read a portion of that.

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So right now, we're going through the 1689. This is our third read -through. So we've been doing that.

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2025 will be our third year. So we're on third. We've been doing it for three years. Takes us about a year to get through it because we put it in little bitty chunks, and we read it.

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We have someone read it, and we encourage people to look at the verses. And then for catechism, we read the question.

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Somebody up front, the man reads the question, and then we all say the answer together. Yeah, we just taught through it during the summer, the three months over summer.

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We taught through the entire confession. Sky -high view, obviously. But it's good for the church to know what we believe.

37:01

But I do have a question, though. And this is from my personal experience. Why do you think it is that, or why does it seem like rural churches or quote -unquote smaller churches, a hundred people or less or so, not that it's not in some larger churches.

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But why do you think smaller churches or rural churches seem to have an emphasis on these things as opposed to you go visit larger churches, it's more instead of maybe three songs, they'll have six songs in the preaching or, you know, they won't have a catechism.

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They won't have a confession. Whereas it seems like from my experience, these things are more important in a smaller church setting.

37:38

You know, I think one thing, and I told you guys I was going to use this word, I think that we see the professionalization of worship.

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And we're really, and now I do think that we should have, like, I don't think that we should expect our service going to last, you know, four hours or something.

37:58

Right. But we have this idea. Now this actually, I would say this, it's funny. Rural churches are a lot more liturgical than they would admit.

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So I could tell you right now, in most rural Baptist churches, I can tell you exactly how it's going to go.

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You're probably going to have, you're probably going to either have a welcome or immediately first song, and then you're going to have the announcements, and then you're going to have another song or two, and then you'll have the offering, and then you'll have the preaching, and then you'll have the invitation, and then you will dismiss.

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And all of that is typically, if it goes over this, it's a problem. It's typically an hour.

38:42

Yeah. You fit all that in an hour. And so I don't want to give the rural church a pass, but with the bigger churches, you have people actually, there's actually, you guys know there's actually, churches put people on staff specifically to coordinate these elements, that everything would be done in 60 minutes or 75 minutes.

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Usually an hour and 15 minutes, probably an hour, hour 15, maybe an hour and a half, I doubt it. So I think that's one of the professionalization of worship, which we should hate.

39:18

Yeah. We should hate. We should not hate excellence. Of course not. And we should not hate order.

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God is a God of order, not confusion. Yeah. We love order. We love excellence. We love doing things well, but we should hate making the worship of God into some sort of machine.

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And God imbues his people with skill and talent too. So we ought to put those on display for his glory at the right time, just like at the building of the temple and so on and so forth.

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You see God giving people the ability to do certain tasks, to do certain things.

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And so in the right setting, under the right helm of corporate worship, there is no drawing attention to oneself.

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There's no professionalizing of it and no commercializing of it either. I think a lot of commercialization has made its way into Christianity, into the church as well, that detracts from the true worship that's going on.

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But doing things well is not equivalent to doing things professionally.

40:23

Yeah. Yeah. I want to get to that and that may be where we end up in the next episode.

40:29

I know we're not going to come back, but we'll just do one long and break it up. But let me say this and move on to one last thing.

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We haven't even gotten to singing. I know. I'm just one last thing before we get to singing. And that is preaching as an act of worship.

40:46

So let's talk about that for just a second. Is preaching... So some people differentiate in their minds worship and preaching, but we're making an argument that preaching is a necessary element of worship.

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So in Romans 1 15, Paul talks about how he's eager to preach the gospel to those who are in Rome.

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He's eager to preach the gospel to the church in Rome. So some people would say preaching is what you do outside the church and teaching is what you do inside the church.

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But I would make the argument that you preach inside and outside the church. And I would also make the argument that teaching is part of preaching, but not all preaching has teaching, but not all teaching is preaching.

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Did I say that right and make sense? Yes. And I told you guys recently, or I told you recently

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Gunnar, that there was somebody, I think it was Richard Owen Roberts quotes it, but I'm not sure if it's his or not.

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But he says, if you have to ask the difference between teaching and preaching, you've never heard preaching.

41:53

That's right. And because preaching and Martin Lord Jones says, logic on fire. Preaching is the passionate persuasion of the hearts and minds to turn to God and submit yourselves to all that God is for us in Christ.

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So there is evangelistic element in preaching for sure. Yeah, but the gospel is not true.

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It's not Christian preaching without the gospel, but Christian preaching is not only for those outside the church.

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You preach outside, you preach inside. Then I think when

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Paul comes to the Corinthians, he makes it clear. I suffer to know nothing among you except Christ and him crucified.

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He doesn't want to be known for anything, but for the preaching of the word that Jesus Christ was brought forth through the proclamation of God's word, a command for all of us as Christians, not in the capacity of pastor, elder, but we are to preach the gospel.

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And it is the highest form of worship. I would say, I would argue that above music, above prayer, above giving, it is the highest form of worship that God's word would be declared among God's people to make known the glories of Christ, which they, which they eagerly await.

43:13

That is the highest form of worship that you ought to have. And that is what builds the church up in order that they would go out and continue the work of the ministry.

43:21

Colossians 128, him we proclaim and the word there for proclaim is preach. So him we preach, warning everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom that we may present everyone mature in Christ.

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So who's he talking about there? The church, the church. So we preach Christ. We proclaim Christ. So we may present everyone mature in Christ.

43:45

So we preach second. And then of course the, the, the one that everyone thinks about second

43:50

Timothy four, preach the word. Now there you said, well, maybe he's not talking about in the church, but I would argue he is because he says a time will come when they'll turn away.

44:01

And so the idea is if they're going to turn away, he's not talking about unbelievers, unbelievers. Yeah. He's not about the church.

44:07

Yeah. So I'm just saying preaching the word preaching. When I just talk about teaching, the word preaching is necessary in our gathering.

44:17

And like you said, it's the pinnacle because from, it's not that singing is not important. It is. I mean, absolutely. But it is, it's preaching is because preaching we're hearing gunner.

44:28

See what you think about this. We're hearing the voice of God. Would you agree with that or not? Yeah, I would.

44:36

So this is what I don't want people to maybe misunderstand when

44:42

I think you say that. And when we say, when we preach, you hear

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God speaking. We are not saying that the preacher or the person, let's say the pastor is the pastor is not

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Christ. The preacher is not God. Everything that comes out of that man's mouth is not inspired and authoritative.

45:06

But what we're saying is when a pastor or somebody that preaches the word of God that does it faithfully to the text faithfully to scripture or saying is you are hearing the very words of Christ.

45:22

What's happening is because of the preaching God is using it to conform you to the image of his son.

45:31

The pastor, the preacher cannot do that. If a preacher says something, he has the, he has no ability to change you.

45:40

He has no ability to conform you into the image of his son. That's why because of preaching,

45:47

God uses it to grow us. God uses it to convict. God uses it to encourage and exhort.

45:53

That's because it's Christ's words, not the preacher's words. So in a lot of modern translations, including the

46:00

ESV, it gets this verse wrong. The LSB does a good job. So this is Romans 10 14.

46:06

How then will they call on him whom they have not believed? How will they believe in him whom they have not heard?

46:12

And how will they hear without a preacher? We've heard that verse so many times in our life that we were and it's actually first time.

46:19

I was really talking with somebody about this was your pastor Randall Easter and who you hear at the front of the podcast.

46:26

He's the very first voice you hear and Pastor Randall made the point and LSB's right.

46:32

If you listen to it, how will they believe in him whom they have not heard? Yeah, not heard of him, right?

46:39

So we don't just hear of Christ through preaching. It says how will they believe in him whom they have not heard and how will they hear with out a preacher?

46:51

Yeah, so there is and I think Gunnar's right. We don't want we want to be careful here. We want to be cautious here.

46:57

We're not saying everything a preacher says is inspired by the word of God, but we are saying as a preacher gives faithful.

47:04

That's a key adjective there as a preacher gives faithful exposition to the word of God in a mysterious and beautiful sense.

47:13

It is the voice of Christ that comes through to the hearts of God's people to explain to them and tell them what it is that he desires of them in one sense.

47:28

And this is traditional, but I think it's designed by God. The reason why we give more time to the preaching and it takes up in I think many churches.

47:40

There are some churches that don't and it just happened. There's a somebody. I don't know if you listen to this podcast, but there's somebody who on their

47:50

Christmas service had 12 minutes of talking points and saying the rest of the service is because they're not giving special and essential attention to the preaching of the word of God.

48:03

But what I was getting at the reason why the preaching of the word of God takes up more time is because essentially we don't want to spend most of our time talking to God as in praying which is good.

48:15

We have to do that. I think it's essential singing. We sing to one another and unto the Lord, but what we need most of all is to hear from Christ.

48:24

Yeah, and Chris that's a Christian desire. That's a desire that's sewn into the heart of all Christians is that they would sit under the preaching the preaching of the word of God.

48:32

So I think that that's where we're going to leave that episode right there and without even getting to the singing and so you'll have to tune in next week and we will we'll talk about the singing aspect of the worship and why and how it should be done with excellence.

48:49

You got guys that got anything else you want to say about this theological foundation. We've done in this in this podcast.

48:54

I would say this just one thing if that is happening in your church and you're feel like maybe

49:02

I'm not getting fed as I should if you feel like we're not giving more attention to the preaching of the word of God.

49:08

This is what I would say you need to go to your pastor your first need to pray you need to pray to approach your pastor.

49:15

If this is something that's been on your heart and you need to go to your pastor lovingly and gentleness and humbleness.

49:22

You need to bring him the word of God and you need to say look pastor. I love you.

49:27

I can we can you give more attention to the word of God because I need it and you need it.

49:34

Well, and I would say to sometimes and I say from a pastor's perspective sometimes pastors feel constrained and they feel like if I preach over 30 minutes,

49:42

I'm going to get slammed. So my encouragement then would be pray about it.

49:48

Be patient have the long -term don't go from 30 minutes to 40 minutes in one

49:54

Sunday go from 30 minutes to 32 minutes 34 minutes, you know, and and this over time just keep shepherding your people and then and that may come down to cutting something out the song out.

50:09

We've done it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean whatever whatever gives you opportunity to put the word of God at the front center of everything that you do and giving most the majority of the time to the preached word is is important.

50:21

So there it is laying down a foundation of worship catch us next week and we'll be talking about the specifically the elements of singing.

50:33

Okay, if you really believe the church is the building of churches the house the church is what

50:50

God's doing. This this is his work. If we really believe what Ephesians says we are the poem us the masterpiece of God.