The Regulative Principle of Worship

Puritan Reformed Church Phoenix

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Every philosophy has to have an answer to the question, what is the good? What's meant by that is sort of this discussion of what's the highest good?

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What's the thing that gives definition to the distinctions between good and evil? Christianity provides the only coherent answer in any philosophy, and that answer is

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God is the good. He's the highest good. Now, in addition to that, when we think about the possession of what's good, we want to possess

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God. Now, God glorifies himself in creation and glorifies himself by causing people to understand and to know him.

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Now, that is them possessing his glory, possessing him. And so when you know

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God, you possess God. Now, there's a mode of life that is the good life, and that life is the life that's laid out in the word of God, and it's the life that encourages us to grow in the knowledge of God.

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Now, the good life that exists for believers, the life that we ought to pursue to grow in possessing what's good is a life that's defined for us in the law of God.

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And so what I want to present to you is something called the regulative principle. The regulative principle is a way of looking at life that views the word of God as wisdom and as the fullness of wisdom that God has given to man.

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You see, most people walk around, even if they claim to be Christians, and they go, you know, I kind of want to do whatever

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I like, and God says to not do some stuff that seems kind of bad, so I'm going to not do that stuff.

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But I'm going to do whatever I want, unless God says not to. This life, walking around, know that God has forbidden it, is called the normative principle.

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So the normative principle says, I'm free to do whatever I want, unless it's forbidden. Then, okay, not allowed to do it.

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The regulative principle says, God's law is more useful and complete than that.

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It's an instruction manual that teaches us how to pursue the good life. And so when we look at the positive commandments of God, we view those as the things that show us what's worth doing, and the forbiddings, the things that God says, don't do this, are things that help us to fully understand what's worth pursuing, and helps us to avoid misconstruals or misconstructions of what our duties are.

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So, the regulative principle of life is the idea that God's law is sufficient to show us the good life, and that we should spend every moment pursuing good works as God's defined them.

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Any moment you're not doing good work, you're wasting the time, you're not redeeming your time. You're being idle, you're being frivolous, you're wasting.

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And the thing is, you might go, well, I mean, what? Do I have to constantly be at soup kitchens, remember? Well, shockingly enough, soup kitchens are not the only thing that God commands.

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And in fact, by the way, our entire system of charity is largely built around just giving people stuff.

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The Bible teaches us to disciple people, and to help them in the context of training them to live well.

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Imagine for a minute that we lived in a world where people sought to diligently apply

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God's commandments, and not just to avoid really bad negative stuff. The usefulness of those people, the utility of action, the way in which time would be used well.

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That's the life that the Bible lays out as the good life. The Westminster Confession of Faith in chapter 16 of good works says the following.

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Good works are only such as God has commanded in his holy word. Notice that. Good works are only the things that God has commanded in his holy word.

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And not such as without the warrant thereof are devised by men out of blind zeal or upon any pretense of good intention.

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So a blind zeal isn't good, right? If you're just zealously chasing down nonsense, not a good work.

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And if you are just saying, well, I have good intentions, doesn't matter. Well, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

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We've had all sorts of people pursuing proletariat utopia, resulting in the millions of people being killed.

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We've had people chasing down women's liberation, resulting in tens of millions of babies being slaughtered.

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We've had all sorts of problems created by people having some sort of a good goal in mind, or at least what they think is a good goal.

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And as a result, bringing about levels of wickedness hereto unthought of. Now, this principle of the regulative principle of life is something that also the scriptures emphasize in terms of worship.

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As humans, we tend to emphasize our actions towards other humans. But God cares more about our relationship to him than our relationships to other men.

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Now, we can say if we love God and then we hate our neighbor, that actually shows other people that we actually hate

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God too. But we can only love our neighbor if we first love God. We can't know what's good for our neighbor unless we know what's good for us, because we share the same human nature.

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And so God's law shows us what's good for ourselves and shows us how to seek the good of our neighbor. And so if you wanna understand what's good for you, you need to understand what kinds of actions you should take to get to know

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God. And the actions that we take to get to know God are called elements of worship.

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And so I want you to understand from the Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 21, it says, the acceptable way of worshiping the true

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God is instituted by himself and so limited by his own revealed will that he may not be worshiped according to the imaginations and devices of men or the suggestions of Satan under any visible representation or any other way not prescribed in Holy Scripture.

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Not prescribed in Holy Scripture. What is that? Well, a prescription is when somebody tells you to do this.

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Right, you go to a doctor and the doctor gives you a prescription. He says, do this. That's a prescription.

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It's a positive command to do a thing. A proscription is when something's forbidden. So God gives proscriptions.

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He says, don't do this. But he also gives prescriptions, do this. And the only things that are acceptable for the worship of God is the stuff he prescribes.

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The whole of life worth living is a life filled of the prescriptions that God has given, the things he tells us to do.

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And especially in worship, we must be careful to only worship God in the way that he's appointed, not in the ways we invent, not in the ways that appeal to our own flesh or make human beings feel good, not in the ways that demons have suggested, only the ways that he has revealed in his holy word.