What is Reformed Theology?

And pastel and things like that. And it also makes you probably a little bit nauseous too and it's hard to sleep when you're feeling that way. And then also I know you can't look at it for a long period of time which will help me to stay under the massive amount of times I've been racking up.

In fact I was just sitting there thinking if I'm actually supposed to go 45 minutes to an hour I only have 5 minutes for this session. So if I add up everything that's come before. So we'll try to get us together here.

Reformed Theology and the Sovereignty of God in Salvation

Turn your Bibles please to Acts chapter 16. Acts chapter 16 our subject this afternoon is not what it may sound and that is a mere definition of Reformed Theology because as it was explained to me a number of months ago the concept was more what is Reformed Theology in contrast to other things and also what is Reformed Theology in contrast to being merely Calvinistic.

And so I would like to look a little bit at a couple of different subjects under that heading. But I always like to in discussing Reformed Theology speak of this particular incident beginning at Acts chapter 16 beginning at verse 11.

So putting out to sea from Troas we ran a straight course to Samothrace and on the same day and on the day following to Neapolis and from there to Philippi which is a leading city of the district of Macedonia a Roman colony and we were staying in this city for some days.

And on the Sabbath day we went outside the gate to a riverside where we were supposing that there would be a place of prayer and we sat down and began speaking to the women who had assembled. A woman named Lydia from the city of Thyatira a seller of purple fabrics a worshiper of God was listening and the Lord opened her heart to respond to the things spoken by Paul.

And when she and her household had been baptized she urged us saying if you have judged me to be faithful to the Lord come into my house and stay and she prevailed upon us. This story so well known to most of us of the conversion of Lydia I think really sums up in one short section of scripture the heart and soul of Reformed Theology and that is that one little phrase that she was a worshiper of God and she was listening as Paul is preaching and the scripture says and the Lord opened her heart to respond to the things spoken by Paul.

And the phraseology is very clear it is really and often in Acts it is a sub-clause added to Luke's rendition of what was going on. He's merely narrating the events and it is easy for him to simply say and the Lord opened her heart to respond to the things spoken by Paul.

There was nothing unusual about this there was nothing earth shattering about this as far as Luke's theology is concerned he understood the work of God in opening the heart to respond to things the necessity of the work of God in opening the hearts and minds of people to respond to the word of God.

He was the same one who just a few chapters earlier had done something similar if you just want to look briefly at Acts 13 48 when the Gentiles heard this they began rejoicing and glorifying the word of the Lord and here again this little clause and as many as had been appointed to eternal life believed.

And the mental gymnastics that have been expended upon that particular passage is pretty amazing but it is very straight forward as many as had been appointed to eternal life believed. There is an appointment to eternal life the result is faith.

It is not faith resulting in an appointment to eternal life. It was not that Lydia opened her heart to respond to the things spoken by Paul she didn't respond and therefore the Lord responds to her. It is a simple understanding of the Apostle Luke in writing these passages and in recording these truths that it is God who is the one who initiates it is God who must be the one who brings about the work of salvation.

And so this freedom of God the ultimate freedom of God is the antithesis to the most fundamental element of human religion and that is the ultimate freedom of man. Human religion whether it be religion that calls itself Christian or Buddhist or Hindu or Muslim or any of the other subsets and sub subsets and everything else.

When you look at human religion the thing that ties it all together fundamentally is the concepts built into with all the differences with all the major differences between world religions the one thing that ties them all together is that when you boil it all down the sacraments the religious duties the things that man does whatever form it might take fundamentally gives him a power.

It gives him an ability to control the power of God himself. God is not free in these systems outside of saying well he was free to set up a certain system as he wished to set up a system and in our religion he set up these types of things that were to do but in that religion they say he set up those things.

It doesn't matter what it is he may have been free in how he put together the system but once it gets down to the individual human being the individual human being has the ultimate power over God whether everything God has done to bring about salvation is going to be successful or not.

It is not a matter of God's freedom it is a matter of the creatures freedom and therefore what really separates the biblical message from all of man's religions is that the God of scripture is absolutely free.

He was free to create many of the pagan gods were not free to create. Many of the pagan gods if you studied their forms of theology were individuals who themselves came out of the creation and the form of the creation was forced upon them and what the God can do is forced upon him either by geographical location or various and sundry other things.

There is no real freedom of God in those pagan types of religions at all. The Christian message is that God is absolutely free in the fact that he created it all that he was not lacking anything. That is why the Trinity is so vitally important to our understanding because without that I really don't see how a Unitarian can really deal with the biblical teaching of the perfection of God because from their perspective since you don't have a doctrine of the Trinity you have many questions about how God could have been fulfilled in eternity past before creation but he creates freely because he desires to do so.

He desires to bring glory and honor to himself solely through what he designs and what he does and he does not put himself in a position of being dependent upon his creatures. That obviously separates Christianity from a large portion of the world's religions but even as we go farther than that we then look at what he does in Jesus Christ, the uniqueness of that work, the fact that it is a solely in Christ work and I'm emphasizing there the fact that there's many today who would like to put us under tremendous pressure to compromise that fundamental portion of the gospel.

The media and our society around us are putting tremendous pressure upon us to close our mouths about the uniqueness of the Christian message. Whether we want to acknowledge it or not there is a tremendous amount of pressure being placed upon us through the media, through our culture, through the religiosity that has come after 9 -1 -1 to mute the proclamation that salvation is found only in Jesus Christ and found only in the gospel of Jesus Christ.

We saw it in the prayer meetings that took place after 9 -1 -1 where you have Muslims and Jews and Hindus and Buddhists and quote-unquote Christians and you have Christians praying to God the Father of Abraham and Mohammed and all the rest of this stuff.

We all just have our little takes. We've got our little view, you've got your little view, you've got 20 of the truth, we think we have 25 of the truth and so on and so forth. Don't ignore, as subtle as it may be, the pressure that is put upon you.

You may not even take in the pressure in a cognitive sense. You may not be sitting there going, wow, I think they're putting pressure upon me to really compromise my faith and to be ashamed of saying that Jesus Christ is the only way.

They may not make it that clear but we still need to recognize that that is coming against us and we need to actually emphasize that therefore in our proclamation that Jesus Christ is the only way and that God freely chose to enter into his own creation in Jesus Christ.

So God is free in all of these things and of course when it comes down to the individual, the salvation of the individual person, God is free in that situation as well. There was nothing about Lydia. Some people might say, oh well see she was a worshiper of God.

Well why was she a worshiper of God? That very term is used primarily of Gentiles who had come to hear the message of the Old Testament and they would be people that Luke would take special notice of who would attend synagogue services and even though they could not participate because they had not entered into the Jewish community per se, still they were those who heard the message and they were drawn to this teaching about one God, not many gods and to the fact that this God tells us how we are to behave and what his law says matches so perfectly what our consciences say to us as well.

And some people might say, well she was a worshiper of God and therefore God opened her heart because she first did something. But in reality she was in a situation where she could not respond to the things spoken by Paul.

She was in a situation where she could not understand spiritual things until this tremendous miracle of regeneration takes place. This miracle that the Old Testament describes as the removal of a heart of stone and the giving of a heart of flesh.

And that freedom in salvation, to use that technical term, that monergism, that fact that it is God and God alone that brings about salvation over against all the religions of men that are synergistic, where it's a cooperative effort, where God tries and tries and tries.

But without man's effort, without man's cooperation, God fails. In fact for those who call themselves Christians the teaching in essence is that God the Father decrees the salvation. Christ dies to obtain it.

The Spirit comes and desperately tries to apply it. But even though the triune God himself seeks to bring about this end result, without the almighty will of the creature, the triune God fails in so many instances, unless of course someone goes so far as to embrace universalism and says that all will be saved, even the devil himself.

And there are those who have begun to embrace that. Obviously there have been people who have embraced that for a long time, but it seems to be a growing movement as well. And so this ultimate freedom of God becomes the foundation, I think, of what Reformed Theology is.

Consistency Between Reformed Soteriology and the Whole of Christian Life

But as I said, I was really asked not so much to discuss individual facets of Reformed Theology, whether it be the sovereignty of God or the deadness of man in sin or the nature of the atonement or how it is that saving grace is all powerful and so on and so forth, but really to expand upon that theme and to in essence discuss what it means to truly embrace this theology.

Now there might be some who might say, yeah, well, that would be a good thing for you to sit down and listen to somebody else talk to because as a Reformed Baptist you aren't truly Reformed. And I've had many people express that kind of perspective to me that, well, unless you embrace other particular beliefs you're not truly Reformed yourself.

Well, I've discussed that a few times in the past, even done debates on those subjects, and I think can express a counterposition fairly clearly. But the issue is not so much that as it is, is it possible to be inconsistently Reformed?

And I don't mean the old discussion of, well, I'm a three-pointer, well, I'm a four-pointer, well, I'm a one-and-a-half pointer and all the rest of that kind of stuff. I'm not referring to that. But is it possible to be a person who says, you know, I've come to understand the freedom of God and salvation.

I've come to understand the deadness of man and sin, the fact that election must be unconditional. If it's conditioned then God is not truly free and that He isn't then stuck in essence responding to the creature.

And I understand the intention of Christ at the cross and the grace of God in regeneration and the perseverance of the saints. I've come to understand all these things. And yet be inconsistent in seeing what those beliefs mean for all of life.

And I think obviously on one level of answering that question, not only is it possible, but I would submit that if in reality one of the processes of sanctification is the application of God's truth to all of our lives, then I would say it's not only possible, but we're all in that boat.

That is which one of us can claim to be thoroughly and perfectly applying and understanding God's truth in every area of our life. I certainly don't make that claim. There's always inconsistencies. Whenever a Reformed person, whenever a Christian in general, for example, engages in the sin of worry, we are demonstrating that we really don't trust that God is the one who holds the future and that all things do work for the good of those who love God, for those who are called according to His purpose.

Isn't that the case? And so obviously it's possible for that kind of person to exist because we're all in that boat. But I think even beyond just the statement that, well, we all fail in our application of these truths to our lives, there are those who I think embrace a Reformed soteriology who then stop there for various and sundry reasons, maybe because that in itself was such a major distance to move, that there is a tendency because of traditions, maybe it's because of family situations, church situations, whatever it might be, to in essence come to a screeching halt at the end of that and say, well, I believe all these things.

I don't want to follow through and look at what all of this means and apply it to the rest of my Christian life. And in a church this might express itself by, well, you know, some of the elders embrace this theology and understand this theology, but, you know, we really try to avoid discussing it from the pulpit, and we really don't want to impact the way that our church worships.

You know, there's a lot of folks here who've been here for a long time that just don't like them, their things, and so we don't want to, you know, ruffle any feathers in essence. And besides that, this new program we've adopted with the praise band and the shorts and the folks in, and so we just don't want to apply those things in that way.

And I understand that there are all sorts of certain issues in regards to how a church functions. You don't wear shorts and, oh, okay, I just, you know, I didn't want to make a really big mistake here right in the middle of things, you know, and have things flying out of the audience at me.

That kind of a situation is very, very prevalent. We have all sorts of, you know, contact throughout the United States with people, and it's always interested me when someone will say to me, well, you know, the pastor of the church understands these things, but, you know, it's just not something that you'll really hear discussed in the church.

And I'll be honest with you, I sort of sit back and I go, I don't understand that. Not that I'm saying, well, if the pastor comes to understand the doctrines of grace, you have to run around going, are you in the doctrines?

It almost sounds cultic, you know, are you in the doctrines? Let me give you an Arthur W. Pink book. You know, that kind of thing. You know, the maniacal Calvinist running around the back of the church causing problems.

That's not what I'm talking about. But I don't understand, honestly, how in the exposition of Scripture, how could you preach through Acts and come to this passage and not bring out the fact that here we have a clear statement of the sovereignty of God opening the heart of an individual to respond to the things spoken by Paul.

Why does that passage say that? What does it mean? If we're preaching the whole counsel of God, and if we believe that our first and fundamental requirement is that when we preach through the Scriptures, we preach on everything, that we don't do the pick-and-choose method, that we do not have the freedom to sit there and look out upon the congregation and go, okay, the ones who sit over here, these are topics that are taboo for them, and these who sit over here, these are topics that are taboo for them, and sort of collate all these things together, and you're left with a Swiss cheese New Testament, and you sort of skip over the parts that would cause you some rough times, and especially if you've got a building project going on, oh, good grief, we have to be really careful during that time, because I preach just one clunker sermon, and we're going to be off of our track for raising the needed money.

We understand the everyday pressures that are there, but obviously I don't think that we have that kind of freedom to be able to do that kind of thing. We need to allow all of God's truth to be spoken.

And so, when I think of what it means, what Reformed theology means, I'll be perfectly honest with you. I look at the church that I'm a part of, and we are not a perfect church. We are a small body of believers.

We are in a tough part of Phoenix, and Phoenix is a tough religious area. Phoenix is an area where everybody is from someplace else. Nobody knows their neighbors. There's no sense of community, because the people came from someplace else, and there's always at least a six-foot-high fence, probably more like an eight-foot-high fence between everybody's yards, and a lot of folks ended up going someplace else anyways pretty soon, and so there's no sense of community at all.

And when I was a hospital chaplain, which by the way was the toughest job I ever had in a large hospital there in Phoenix, one of the things that always amazed me was I would come into a person's room, and they'll put down what they were as far as their religion, and I'd get this printout whenever I'd come in that would tell me, you know, this person's a Baptist, this person's Roman Catholic, this person's Lutheran, this person's Mormon, whatever.

And I'd come in and try to strike up a conversation, which is not easy for me to do, and eventually I'd ask, so, you know, do you have a church home here in Phoenix? Because I'd want to try to find out, does the pastor know you're here?

Do you have folks that are coming to visit you? Because, you know, if they do, I don't need to be investing my time there. I need to find the folks that aren't having anybody visiting them in essence.

And over and over and over again, I'd hear the same story. Well, you know, I went to First Baptist in Raleigh, Durham, and we moved out here, and, you know, I just haven't found any place yet. Well, how long ago did you move out here?

Twenty-seven years ago. You know, it's like, been looking for twenty-seven years, huh? I see. So many folks move out there who had actually been involved in churches back east, back in the Midwest, or south, or wherever.

Someplace that they weren't anymore. And once they got to Arizona, it was like, well, nobody knows me, and I don't know anybody else. Therefore, I'm not going to worry about it. I'm not going to be involved in the church any longer in any way, shape, or form.

So, it's a tough area, and we're a small church. A lot of our folks travel from a long, long ways to get to where we are. We're not located really well at all. But when you're small and your buildings pay for you, put up with that.

And when I look at our church, I look and ask myself the question, what do I think we're doing right, and is it because we're Reformed? And in essence, the answer to both questions, the answer to the second question about anything we're doing right is because, yes, we are Reformed.

For example, when you look at our worship service, and you look at the people who want to attend that worship service, the people who are there have to want to hear the Word. In other words, we don't have a bunch of programs that sort of draw people in for other reasons.

We're very straightforward about saying, look, we exist to worship God in the proclamation of His Word as we see it in Scripture. And that's really all we're about. And if you're looking for 14 million programs and all sorts of extracurricular activities and so on and so forth, we just don't have them.

And I, you know, I came to Phoenix Reformed from a big church. I went from a church that had 20 ,000 members to a church that had 50 members. And that's a bit of a culture shock, especially when you grew up in that very large church singing in a 250 voice choir with a full orchestra, running sound there, running television camera live on the air.

Thank you very much for your service. Thank you very much. You know, which was a thankless job. You know, when you ran, I ran sound in that place. And when you did it right, nobody said a word to you.

When you did it wrong, everybody knew where to look. It was a thankless job, believe you me. It's a culture shock. And there was always something going on there all the way through high school. I was down at that church every night but once per week because there was always something to be involved in if you wanted to be involved in it.

To go to Phoenix Reformed and you have Sunday morning and Sunday night and Wednesday night and once in a while we have a hymn sing and we have a picnic twice a year. And that's about it. It was quite a culture shock.

But when I first walked in there and there was a sense of reverence. And when I listened to the service, I recognized, well, we have our singing. We only have a couple of pianists. Please visit sometime.

We could really use you. We only have, you know, basically the pastor's son is the only one who can really play proficiently. And hence we do a lot of a cappella. And some of us are not gifted for starting a cappella hymns, including myself.

In fact, I started us, I had to preach a few weeks ago. I started us off on the wrong song once. That was really lots of fun. Well, wait, stop. Here, let me think about this one for another second. You know, figure out what the tune was.

That was very embarrassing. I wasn't used to that either. And I wouldn't mind if we had both a piano and organ going. If the Lord would just bring us some pianists and some organists, we could definitely utilize them.

But that's not the point. Everything in the service led to, built up to the proclamation of the Word. And that is the major, that's what we're there to be involved in. Because we believe that unlike many churches in the land where, and this seems to be the case amongst many conservative churches, many people have the idea, let's be honest, I'm going to come in and I'm going to be passive.

I'm going to sit there in the pew and I'm not really going to do anything. I may stand up a few times. I may mumble through a few hymns a few times and bow my head a few times. But basically I'm a bump on a pew is how many people feel.

And we have the very strong commitment to the fact that when you enter into the proclamation of the Word of God, when you come to the service, that it's something that you should prepare for, that it's something that involves work, and that we are actively involved in worshiping God when we come into His presence with a desire to hear from His Word and be changed thereby.

Now that is a concept that I think most of you would recognize is very much a part of Reformed thinking because the fact that we believe that God has sovereignly given us His Word and He has laid down parameters as to how He is to be worshipped and that He is worshipped when His truth is proclaimed.

That wasn't something that I heard before I came into Reformed circles in the context that is used there. And so there is a, you'll notice if we look at the society around us, what's going on in, what's the big movement even amongst, even in PCA churches today?

The big movement is the church growth movement. Well, what's that all involved? Well, in essence, when you boil it all down, it's more music, less preaching. It's sort of preaching light, L-I-T-E. More music, less preaching.

The preaching must be the fat part, and I'm not sure what the music part is as far as the diet goes. But even in a seminary that will remain unnamed, a friend of mine took a church growth class, and in the very first class, this is a Southern Baptist situation, in the very first class was told that by their research, they had to come to the conclusion that the single best way to increase church attendance and church membership was to get rid of old style hymns, replace them with contemporary praise choruses, and to limit the sermon to 20 minutes.

That's how you grow a church, is you limit your sermon to 20 minutes and you use praise choruses. That's how the whole class started. And I don't have anything against praise choruses, per se, other than the fact that very few of them have much in the way of meaningful theology involved in them, as the sermons in song called hymns that we sing do, in fact.

But that's the inevitable result, I think, of the diminishment of a recognition that when we gather for church, what we're doing is not seeking to put our names on some chart and watch growth numbers.

We are there to worship God. And so I think that you could have someone who would say, oh, I embrace the five points, but if on the other hand, there is this willingness to go, well, but we need to minimize the proclamation of the Word.

There's a disjunction there. Something's missing. The connection has been lost between these two particular perspectives, because we know the means by which God calls His people unto Himself, and it's not by any methodologies we invent.

It's by the proclamation of His truth, by the gospel. That will always be the power of God and the salvation. It's never going to change. But we also recognize that evangelism is not merely the narrow spectrum definition that is so often used in non-reformed circles, which means handing of four spiritual laws to a person you think is a pagan.

That's not evangelism. That's one little element of, well, you mean you don't share with people? No. You proclaim the gospel to everyone, but that means everyone. You need to define it biblically. In Romans 1 .15, Paul talks about evangelizing the church at Rome.

Well, it's already a church. So there is a need to proclaim the gospel, and not just the rudimentary elements of the gospel, but the fullness of the gospel to Christians. That is evangelism, and that is a duty incumbent upon us as well.

We are to watch our teaching. We are to proclaim the whole truth. All these things come together, and I think I would also point out that when we believe in a sovereign God, then we recognize that a sovereign God has the right to tell us what is pleasing worship to Him, not the other way around.

So much of American Christianity is, hey, look, you know, worship is what we feel worship to be. We want worship to meet certain felt needs within ourselves. I remember when I first came to Phoenix Reformed, it was on a Sunday night, and the pastor's wife, who has an incredible memory, remembers what I was wearing and where I sat, which just scares me after 11, 12 years that you'd remember exactly those things.

But anyone who visits, she remembers names and stuff like that. I can't even remember your name. Silly Brit. There you go. I remember what it was. I struggle with stuff like that. It's very helpful to have someone like that who can remember these things.

But the very first night, one of the things that first attracted me was I discovered very quickly that like many Reformed Baptist churches, and I don't know what your tradition is, but many in the Old Testament and the New Testament.

And so it was Old Testament, and Pastor Fry gets up to speak, and he was in Amos. I had never heard a sermon out of Amos, let alone a verse-by-verse sermon out of Amos. If I had ever heard a sermon out of Amos and forgotten it, it was a, let's grab a phrase here, plug it into the current fundraising thing, and go from there.

But the idea of actually trying to exegete Amos and turn it into sermon material, I just sat there, and I was like, ah, you've got to be kidding. This was just not something that I was taught to do. And even though at that time I had just graduated from seminary, the idea of preaching through Amos was just, oh, that's cool.

The thing that made it even better was I came back the next Sunday night, and the pastor got up and said, we're going to be in Psalm 2. I said, Psalm? We didn't finish Amos off last week. What's going on?

And the pastor, after we turned to it, said, now some of you know we've been working our way through Amos, and we've come to a section of the book of Amos. To be perfectly honest with you, I have the foggiest idea of what's going on.

And I'm still working on it, and it's going to take me a while to figure it out. And I was just like, breath of fresh air, just blowing by my little pew there, because I was in a situation where, in essence, to be perfectly honest with you, the pastor of the church I was at would no more have admitted in front of everybody that he had encountered a passage of Scripture he just didn't understand than the man on the moon.

I mean, he would have felt that that was just abject surrender, as if, I guess, his power was dependent upon everybody thinking he knew all things, was omniscient or something. And in case any of you were thinking, sorry, pastor, if any of you, any of the pastors in here I need to apologize to, in case any of you are thinking that your pastors are omniscient, they're not.

I just thought you might want to know that just sort of off the top of your head. I'm sorry. Did I crush something there? I'm sorry. He's devastated. Yes, it's a shame. Sadly, though, there are some pastors who think that their perceived power is based upon the people thinking that.

And it was so wonderful to experience that refreshing admission that it's going to take me a while to figure this out. This is tough. This is hard. This is tough sledding. And I really appreciated that, but he went back to it.

He kept hammering on it. And then there are times you may say, you know what, there are two different ways we can go here. And I'll be honest with you, I'm not sure which one is exactly it. It wasn't some major issue.

It was just what's Amos talking about here? What's the proper application? So on and so forth. That was a major part of what brought me to that fellowship was that kind of an attitude. But the fundamental thing is that when we look at how we define the church and how it is to be worshiping and how it is to function, what its priorities are to be, I don't think that you can say I hold to the absolute freedom and sovereignty and holiness of God over here.

And yet I'm going to reach over here and I'm going to grab all the isms and all the stuff over here that the world is throwing in my direction, all the, uh, the stuff we get in the mail. I don't know if you, if you get as much of it, given that you do get some of it, but man, the stuff that comes to churches in the mail, it's incredible.

If you've never seen it, I mean, you can shell out dollars, big bucks, and people come in and they'll survey your area for you. And they'll do house to house stuff for you. And they'll, they'll tell you exactly what color pews you should have and what color choir robes you should have and what music you should sing and what your pastor should look like as if there was something you could do about that.

And, you know, I mean, well, the perfect pastor for your area is 27 and a half years old. He has black hair, he's six foot four and bronzed, you know? Oh, great. Wonderful. That doesn't help us out much, does it?

You know, those of us don't have any hair, you know, uh, they'll, they'll tell you exactly how long your sermon should be and the whole nine yards. And it only costs you, you know, 15 ,000 bucks to do it, but they'll come and do that for you.

Uh, the, the programs and the, the gimmicks that people come up with to try to somehow grow the church. I don't see how you can take those two things and put them together. One of them is going to override the other in essence.

And so when, when someone says to me, oh, well, yeah, my pastor says he believes all five points and then says, well, do you ever hear this in the pulpit? I don't mean every day. I don't mean every Sunday, but is, is there a, is there ever a willingness to address these things?

Oh no, no, no, no. We couldn't allow it to happen. I have to honestly stop and go, then do you really believe those things? It's one thing to intellectually say, oh yeah, I can see that there is a theological basis for believing certain elements of this, but I don't think that's really belief.

Faith in scripture is a passionate thing. It's a whole being thing. To say you believe something means you not only acknowledge its truthfulness, but you embrace it as your own. And I, I couldn't imagine how I could even open my mouth for more than just a few minutes without something slipping out that would immediately turn on that little red light.

Someone goes, oh, wait a minute, that sounded close to the word election, you know, or something like that. I don't know how I could do it. And so, yes, I think that there are inconsistencies in that way.

And hence, our worship, the way in which we worship, the attitude of worship, the definition of the purpose of the church has to constantly be redefined, not changed, but redefined and proclaimed in light of God's sovereignty for one reason.

And that is, as people come in, they're coming in either from traditions that don't have a biblical definition of what it is the church is doing, don't have a biblical definition of the fact that God is the one who builds the church.

It's not us who builds it, it's God who builds it. He's the one who's been faithful to it. And so it's his work, not our work. We have the wonderful privilege of serving him in his church, but we dare not ever get to the point where we think, well, this is my baby, and I'm going to determine how it's done.

But not only that, we live in a society that is constantly chipping away at this freedom of God, and it's constantly puffing up our willingness to say, me, me, me, minister to me. When I ran sound at that particular large church—I've already gone 45 minutes, I can't believe this—when I ran sound at that particularly large church, we'd have these groups that would come in and sing.