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Continuing the sermon series that we've been in for the last—no, this would be week number three of four—that we've called Worship by the Book, Worship by the Book. And our aim in this series has been to kind of think through a biblical and doctrinal take on the subject of our corporate worship together, just to give you a bit of a reminder of where we've been so far.
We started in week one with thinking about, really, the content of our worship. We took ourselves on a little journey through the Bible and saw this idea of what is often called the regulative principle of worship.
This idea that when we come to worship, we only do those things that God has explicitly commanded us to do in his word, because God gets to regulate how he is worshipped. Last week, we talked about the idea of the, what we call, dialogical principle.
This idea that worship is not just something we come, do, and just, you know, can we do.
It?
We go away, we'll come back next week and do it all over again. Actually, if we understand what God is doing in this time that we call corporate worship, actually, it's a dialogue. And it's not just a dialogue for the sake of dialogue.
It is a means that the Spirit of God uses to shape and to fashion us more and more into the likeness of Christ as we hear his word in the gospel and we respond to that word which we hear. Well, that brings us to now start talking about, okay, what does this look like in practice?
I can appreciate that the last couple of weeks have maybe felt at points more on the theoretical side. Well, now we start to get to, as they say, the fun stuff, so to speak. So, if you have your Bibles, and I hope you do, take them and turn with me to John and chapter number four.
John chapter four. John chapter four. If you know your Bibles, you know this section of Scripture well. It's the passage which we often call the account with the woman at the well, the Samaritan.
Woman.
And I won't give you all of the background to this passage. There's a lot going on here, but we are going to pick up the conversation in verse 19. Up to this point, Jesus has been dealing with this woman.
He's exposed some things that are happening in this woman's heart and life, but the woman isn't quite yielding to the conversation just yet. And so we pick up the story in John chapter four and verse 19.
If you grabbed one of the red hardbacks that we give away, that's page 944. John chapter four and verses 19 through to 24. If you're able to do so, can I invite you to stand with me out of reverence for God's word as we read this portion of Scripture.
John chapter 14 beginning in verse 19. Brothers and sisters, these are God's words. Sir, the woman replied, I see that you are a prophet. Our ancestors worshipped on this mountain. This mountain, by the way, being Mount Gerizim.
But you do say that the place to worship is in Jerusalem. Jesus told her, believe me, woman, that an hour is coming when you will worship the Father either on this mountain or in Jerusalem. You Samaritans worship what you do not know.
We worship what we do know because salvation is from the Jews. But an hour is coming and is now here when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth. Yes, the Father wants such people to worship him.
God is spirit. And those who worship him worship in spirit and in truth. Pray that God will bless that reading of his word and grant us understanding.
Let's pray.
Ask for the Lord's help and then we will get to work in this passage.
Let's pray together.
Heavenly Father, we thank you so much for your word. We thank you for the fact that it gives light, it gives understanding. Father, we would not be so presumptuous to think that we can just understand your word because I've studied and put a message together.
And so we ask for your spirit's help. May he open our eyes that we would see wonderful things out of your law. And as we see wonderful things out of your law, may we have these things pressed upon our hearts.
May we apply them to our own lives in ways that glorify you. Father, we take a moment to pray for our friends at Cornerstone Christian Church. Thank you so much for Pastor Quentin and Pastor Mark and their years of ministry there.
Father, pray for them as they gather together each Lord's Day and each Wednesday to hear your word and to be reminded of your promises. Pray for all the great ministry that is happening there, that you would continue to bless their efforts, that people would grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ and that souls would be brought in to know you even there.
Father, that's our prayer for them and it's our prayer for us even as we come to your word. For we ask it in Jesus' name and for his sake, amen, amen. Please be seated. This week's message is actually the first of a two-part.
I made a slight change to my plans for this series because I realized I could do what I needed to do if I made this a two-part message and will still be done at the same time. So next week will be our last part of this series.
But for this week, I've given this kind of a long time so you can see it there in the study guide you've got in front of you. But really, the title, the first half answers what we're going to discuss this afternoon.
We're going to ask the question, does style matter? Does style matter? And like I said, this will be the first of a two-part message considering that question. And I want to consider that question, as you can see up on screen or in front of you, I want to consider that question biblically and doctrinally.
So some biblical and doctrinal considerations. Traditional or contemporary? Hymns and organs or praise songs and full bands.
Casual or formal?
Amazing grace or good, good father?
How about psalms?
Should we sing some psalms? Only the psalms? No psalms? If you've been around church for any length of time, you know that all of those questions, and those are just some of them, there are a lot more we can get into, all of those questions are at the heart of what has been dubbed the worship wars.
Anyone heard that phrase before? The worship wars. This cold and sometimes not so cold war between differing camps in Christianity that exists when it comes to practices in worship. It can get bloody.
Thankfully, metaphorically, no one actually throws hands over this, but it can get bloody. It can get emotional. It can get, sadly, divisive. And of course, at the heart of the worship wars is the age-old question, who's right?
The assumption with the worship wars is, well, there are differing opinions and we can't all be right, so who's right? Some would say, well, really, we can't know. Nobody knows who's right. I mean, everyone's got an opinion, and in fact, even if you say, well, I don't have an opinion, not having an opinion is still an opinion.
So again, I'll ask my question, who's right? Well, if you read Christianity Today, I don't personally, but for those who do, a while ago, 1993 apparently, they had an article called The Triumph of the Praise Songs, and they declared a winner.
They basically said that, look, the reality is classic traditional worship is basically.
Dead.
The praise songs are here, and they are here to stay, and they are going to win out the.
Day.
Now, let me tell you up front, I have a problem with the whole concept of the worship wars. Here's my problem with the whole concept of what's called the worship wars. My problem is this, they're wars of preference.
When you read the books, and trust me, I did this week, on both sides, what you realize very quickly is that these are not usually matters of principle when you start to dig into it. They're usually matters of preference.
They're usually matters about what one group prefers and what one group doesn't. Now, if you know me well enough, you probably know what my problem is with that. In case not, I ask this question. It's the same question I ask about everything in church.
Does the Bible address this or not? I mean, think about it. If the Bible doesn't address this issue, then we can close it up, be on our merry way, I don't need to preach this sermon. In fact, let's close in prayer and let's go straight to the Lord's table.
But for a moment, what if the Bible does address the question of style in worship? If it does, then I think at the very least, we should listen to what the Bible has to say about that, shouldn't we? I mean, it makes sense if you remember week one.
And not only should we listen to what the Bible has to say, we might want to do well to heed it, to actually give some thought, pay some attention to that. And not just heed it, but apply it. As you may gather, I happen to think the Bible does address the issue.
God I believe is not apathetic about how we worship. And frankly, we should not be apathetic about how we worship. Remember back in week one, those of you who were here, I made a very important distinction.
It's going to come in very handy. I talked about the difference between elements in worship and form in worship. Anyone remember that? That there are the elements of worship, what Dr. Sam Waldron in his excellent book, How Then Should We Worship, calls the parts of worship.
The non-negotiable things that have to happen in our worship. And then there are forms. There are ways in which we exercise or we use those elements. And you remember that I said that the most important thing, and I want to reiterate that now because I'm going to say some stuff in this sermon that may make you think I'm going back on what I said.
I promise you I'm not. The most important thing in our worship is the elements. This is an intramural discussion, and I use the word discussion because I'm sorry, this should not be a war, unless there are things that are being done that is actually unbiblical.
If it's preferences, I will say this again later on in the message, your preferences are not that important that we need to fight over them. That being said, I do think scripture does give us some principles that helps us to think through the matter of form.
It's not just the elements, but the forms as well we need to think about. As I said in week one, this is a sermon series really for our faith family in particular, because I want us to, again, think biblically and think consistently about the way we worship.
And when I say consistently, what I mean is this, on paper we say that we are a reformed church, that we have theological commitments that will place us very squarely in the reformed.
Camp.
Well, I think it's a dangerous thing to have theological commitments on one side, and then practices that are incompatible with your theological commitments. We can't say that we are a reformed and evangelical church, and not have a reformed understanding of what we do in worship.
I happen to think that being made in the image of God, consistency is a good thing, because our God is always consistent, amen? And so, consistency glorifies God, and so since consistency glorifies God, we might want to do some careful thinking about how we can be consistent so that the doctrine that we say we believe and that we preach week in and week out is lived out in the way in which we practice worship.
I had to start in John chapter four, because in John chapter four, Jesus is asked to wade into the worship wars of his day. If you're not familiar with John chapter four, and you're not familiar with the Samaritans in particular, the Samaritans, by this time, are the product of intermarriage between Jewish people, who were left after the exile in the land, and Babylonians, who were essentially imported in, in order for them to maintain their hold on Jerusalem.
This was a practice that the Babylonians did so that they could maintain their rule of an area. They would basically marry into the area, so they would always be around. And by this time, in the first century, there was a long-standing beef that existed between Samaritans and Jews.
It was a dry-aged, hundred-year, full-bodied beef that existed between these two peoples. Samaritans typically rejected the rest of the Old Testament, apart from the five books of Moses. They did not go to Jerusalem to worship.
They worshipped on Mount Gerizim. That's the mountain that we read about, that was referred to in our text. And they basically just kind of did their own thing, separate from Israel's worship. And so, as you come to John and chapter four, as this conversation ensues between this woman and Jesus, she raises this question of worship, because at this point, it's a centuries-old debate between the Jews and the Samaritans.
Now, here's the funny thing about this. Jesus doesn't say, and there's a way to read this passage that I think misses the point. Jesus doesn't say, it doesn't matter. Did you catch that? Verse 22, he says, you Samaritans worship what you do not know.
We, referring to the Jews, worship what we know, because salvation is from the Jews. Jesus actually takes a side, first of all. He says, no, you Samaritans are wrong. This wasn't the, just to kind of show you my hands a little bit, as it were.
This isn't, I like contemporary, and one person likes more traditional. It's not quite on that level. This was actually, there's a right and a wrong here. The Samaritans were indeed wrong, but what Jesus does in answering the question is he moves beyond this, it's unfair to call it a petty squabble, because it wasn't a petty squabble, but he pushes past this, and he addresses not the physical act or the physical location, we'll come back to that later on, but he addresses the spiritual foundations of true worship.
Jesus makes us to understand that true worship is not a matter of a physical location or genealogical descent, and frankly, to just merely focus on these incidental parts of worship without understanding the foundation is an exercise in futility.
So again, I feel that too much of the worship wars have been spent arguing about what instruments we should use and what century our music comes from, and not so much on the spiritual principles that should govern our worship.
I'll put it to you like this, if you understand the principles, it may go some way to helping you determine which practices we should keep and which we should avoid. For our message today, I want to comb the scriptures and I want to see what principles that the Bible gives us for thinking about how we conduct our worship of God.
This is not going to be my sort of standard message with you guys, you know I usually like to have a big idea statement, I flesh out my big idea in my various points, I'm not going to do that today. This is going to feel more like a Bible class and at points I'm going to throw some history in and the reason why I've kind of departed from my usual form will become apparent as we go.
One more preliminary and then we'll jump into our content. I'm not actually going to touch the contemporary or traditional question. I'm not going to touch it this week at all, and I'm really not going to touch it till like the last 5 -10 minutes of the message next week, and it might be shorter than that.
Because once we've kind of walked through the, in both messages will end up being about 9 or 10 biblical principles I want us to consider, you'll start to realize that okay this is a little more complicated but at the same time it's a little more simple than we often make this.
Okay, those are all of my pre-flight announcements, so seatbelts fastened, tray tables down, chairs in the upright position, how about we go ahead and take off. Principle number one, I'm going to give you four this week, six next week.
Principle number one, well we should always begin with our worship. If we want our worship to be God-glorifying, our worship needs to be, point number one, God-centered not man-centered. God-centered not man-centered.
Now in our sort of theological camp we use this phrase all the time, but honestly the more I talk to people the more it becomes apparent that means different things to different people. So for a moment let's all agree a definition, at least I'm going to agree a definition, you're welcome to agree with me.
But here's a definition I'm going to give to a God-centered approach to worship. Biblical worship has God as its focus, not man and his needs, his desires, or his agenda. Let me say that again. Biblical worship has God as its focus, not man and his needs, his desires, or his agenda.
We have to start here because consider this the cornerstone of the building we're trying to put up over the next couple of weeks. If this isn't set in the right place, then the rest of the building will be off-center.
You see in our text, did you notice four times the way that Jesus describes this? Let me point this out to you, verse 21, Jesus told a believe me woman, an hour is coming when you will worship the Father, neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem, go down to verse 23, but an hour is coming and is now here when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth.
Yes, the Father wants such people, number three, to worship him, verse 24, God is a spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and in truth. Jesus starts by noticing worship is not about you, in fact, that's a constant refrain throughout the Bible.
I'll give you a couple of verses for those of you taking notes, Psalm 27, Psalm it says, Psalm 27, verses four and five, I have asked one thing from Yahweh, this is what I desire, to dwell in the house of Yahweh all the days of my life, gazing on the beauty of Yahweh and seeking him in his temple, for he will conceal me in his shelter in the day of adversity, he will hide me under the cover of his tent, he will set me high on a rock.
So you see this armistice there, he clearly communicates that the one thing that he desires above all else is to be in the Lord's house, which is the physical symbol of where God was worshipped, and to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord.
The focus of his worship was not him, it was Yahweh, the covenant God of Israel. Psalm 63, verses one through five, the psalmist says this, God, you are my God, I eagerly, excuse me, seek you, I thirst for you, my body faints for you in a land that is dry, desolate, and without water, so I gaze on you in the sanctuary to see your strength and your glory, my lips will glorify you, for your faithful love is better than life, so I will bless you as long as I live, at your name I will lift up my hands, you satisfy me as with rich food, my mouth will praise you with joyful lips.
Faith family, if I can put it like this, there should be a sort of spiritual tunnel vision that exists when it comes to worship, it should be apparent when we gather that this time is not about anybody else, this time is ultimately about God, our triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, that when we gather, we don't come to, as it were, indulge ourselves emotionally, we don't come for a particular high that needs to carry us through the week, no, we ultimately come with this single vision, it's blinkered almost, we just come to worship the Lord.
Now often when we talk about this idea of being God-centered versus man-centered, we often just boil it down to the songs that we sing, and we say that we don't want songs that sing about us too much, we don't want too many me songs, we want more God songs, that might be a part of it, but might I suggest that it's all too possible for us to sing the right songs, to sing them with the right amount of God-ness, if you will, to them, and still be man-centered?
You see, faith family, this is really important, God-centeredness is an approach before it's a set of actions. God-centeredness starts here, actually, I would say it starts here in the mind, making a determination, it then translates to our hearts, and then it translates into our hands.
It's an approach that says, God, we didn't come just to get from you, yes, we come in worship, we talked about this last week, it's a dialogue, God speaks to us, but we have not come just to get, we have come to worship you, it's an approach that says, like the psalmist, not to us, O Lord, not to us, but to your name be all the glory.
It's the kind of approach that you see in Paul at the end of Romans chapter 11, where he says, from him and through him and to him are all things, to him be the glory. And here's the beautiful thing, as we engage in worship with that kind of mindset, the wonderful thing is God gives us everything that we need.
We may not come to worship with ourselves at the center, but God still blesses and gives and strengthens and confirms and builds up through this time, even as we've come to glorify him. And quite frankly, I'm convinced that so much of our worship wars would end if we simply just go over ourselves and remembered that worship is not about us, it just isn't.
It's not about us, it's not about our preferences or our previous experience or our needs. But the beautiful thing is, I seem to recall Jesus, I believe it was Matthew chapter 6, remember what Jesus said, after talking about worry and anxiety, he said, but seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be provided for you.
It's not in pursuing a particular thing that we receive it, no, it's in pursuing God that we receive everything else. If we start with God, we get everything. If we start with ourselves, quite frankly, we end up with nothing.
Okay, so how does this principle speak to issues of style when it comes to worship? Well, simply put, whatever style we make use of in worship, it needs to be the kind of style that gets us out of the way and gives our triune God center stage.
You probably guessed that was coming. And when I say that, I don't mean as in a physical location, as to where the people who lead us stand. We can have opinions about that, I have opinions about that, but again, they're opinions, so they're worth what they're worth.
But what I mean is an attitude that says, we didn't come to be center stage, God is center stage, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. So let's get practical for a moment. Yes, we want to be excellent in what we do.
We want to bring the best of our powers to this sacred work we call worship. We don't want to just mail it in. But can I give a warning? It's all too easy for us to get... There's a phrase, it comes from a context very different to where we are, but the phrase goes, don't get high on your own supply.
It's all too easy for us to get kind of high on our own supply when it comes to worship, isn't it? It's all too easy to say, I really love when they do it in this particular kind of way, that's what I'm looking for.
It's very easy, like I said, for us to get high on our own supply. Yes, we want to be excellent in what we do, but we also have to balance that reality with the fact that whatever giftedness we bring to corporate worship, we don't make that the center of our corporate worship.
Another way this gets practical is we want to sing songs that are worthy of the God that we say we are worshiping. I touched on this last week, so I won't hammer that point again. But we want to sing songs that tell the truth about God and lift up who He is and what He has done.
We want to sing songs that teach us about who our God is. We want songs that, think about this, we want songs that your heart and your soul will reach for the minute tough times come. Some of you maybe have encountered this, I have.
I've had the privilege of being in hospital rooms when saints are going home. It's a very sobering event. And it's always funny to me that when those moments come, they're not reaching for the songs on the radio.
They're not reaching for whatever is top of the musical charts, so to speak. As I was putting this message together this week, I remembered the last time I was with my late mentor before he finally went home to be with the Lord.
92 years old, cancer had basically ravaged his body, he was about ready to go home. And we talked, and he had just about enough strength to maintain the conversation, and finally he gets done. And I'm overcome with emotion, I kind of don't want to be in the room at this point.
But I very vividly remember him grabbing my arm, grabbing my arm and saying, brother, let's sing 100. 100 was the hundredth psalm. He was not an exclusive psalmist, but he loved the psalms. And he particularly loved the version of Psalm 100 that goes, all people that on earth do dwell.
It's one of the reasons that I know that song from memory, because he sang it so often. Here he is, two days later he go home to be with the Lord. But here he is. And what's he asking for? I want Psalm 100.
And so we sang it. Beloved, those are the songs you kind of want to reach for. Those are the kinds of songs we want to sing regularly in our worship. And the beauty of that song is it doesn't say a single thing about us.
It's a call. That's why so many churches start their worship with Psalm 100, because it's a call to worship. So we want our worship to be God-centered, not man-centered. But that leads us to a second mark of biblical worship.
Not only is biblical worship God-centered instead of man-centered, secondly, it's word-driven, not preference-driven. It's word-driven, not preference-driven. Well, this should make sense if you remember week one.
Week one, we saw that God is sovereign. He reveals himself in his word, and his word is our only standard for all matters of practice, especially when we come to worship. If that is indeed true, then it's the word.
I mean, this is almost common sense to the point of being laughable. That should be what drives our worship, not our preferences. I hope you kept John 4 open in front of you. Look at verse 24 again. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.
We'll come back to the in spirit phrase in a moment. But note that phrase, in truth. I phrase this point as word-driven versus preference-driven, because as I've said, for lots of evangelicals, what drives our worship is whether it meets our preferences.
Sometimes the preferences are how things look. We want buildings that look a particular way. Sometimes it's how things sound. I prefer this instrument versus this instrument. I want it to sound like this, not like this.
Sometimes it's about production value. I need it to be polished and flawless every time. Look, I think that's important. Nobody wants to hear out of tune music. It makes it kind of hard to follow. I've had the privilege of being with those churches that mean so well, but their music was just awful.
So I'm not saying production value doesn't matter. But here's the interesting thing. Those might be good things. They might be wise things for us to talk about. But have you noticed that if you read the Bible, the Bible doesn't remotely touch on any of those.
God is very specific about all the things he wants us to do. He tells us everything you need to know in his word, and he doesn't touch on that once. The New Testament gives us no examples of what worship spaces looked like or what their music sounded like.
I believe you can actually find examples of Christian music in the New Testament. We have fragments of hymns that make their way into scripture, but we're not told any tunes. Have you wondered this about the Psalms?
The Psalms don't have any tunes. There's no music attached. There are titles that tell us what the music was. We don't know what they've seen, so they've been lost to history. God did not see it fit to preserve those the same way he thought the words were worth preserving.
You see, we may have preferences that are influenced by our culture, and our past experience, and our existential needs, and whatever else. But I said it at the beginning of the message, I'm going to say it again.
Because as Westerners, we struggle with this. As affluent people who have access to whatever we want, whenever we want. Think about it. You want something, you can jump on Amazon and at least living here in Medford, you can get it in a couple of days.
Very rarely are you faced with opportunities where you are told no. And the reality is that can come to church with us, where we come to church with a bunch of preconceived notions. My pastor back in London used to call it the checklist.
But there was no clipboard and pen. No, it's an invisible checklist. And we all come to church and we'll kind of just tick off. They didn't do that today. They didn't do that again. When are they going to get it together with it?
And we just kind of check off things that we're not happy with. Beloved, I say it again because I love you. Your preferences are not important. My preferences are not important. As a preacher once said when I was a kid and it stuck with me, God's word is not at the mercy of human opinion.
The only thing that is non-negotiable in our worship is what God has explicitly said in his word. And if that is true, his word should dominate the agenda of our worship. And so it's been wisely said by a great many people that when we gather for worship, we read the word.
There's a reason we devote large portions of our worship to the reading of scripture. That's my friend Mike Abram Joth, who will be here in the summer, famously said, I am not going to be outread by a Roman Catholic.
I say that because how many of you have been to a Catholic service before? Okay. Have you noticed how much scripture is in a Roman Catholic service? There's a lot. Anglican services are the same. Traditional Presbyterian services are the same.
This is full of scripture. There's enough scripture in that thing if you sit in a Catholic church to actually get saved. We read the word. We devote large portions of our time to reading scripture. We sing the word, proclaiming God's mighty work and our response to that work.
We pray the word, humbling ourselves and responding to God's gospel word with seeking his help. We hear the word. Oftentimes people will talk about preaching and say, the problem with you guys who focus on preaching so much is preaching is passive.
Like maybe when you do it, actually it's active. Why? Because you're sitting there, you're hearing it with faith. Hebrew chapter four, Roman chapter 10. It's not just, okay, I'm just going to listen to him do his thing and kind of go off and all the rest of it.
No, actually we're listening with faith. It's an activity to hear the word. And then we see the word in the table as we'll participate in a little bit. And in the waters of baptism as we will next Saturday, we see the word of God, the promises of God made visible to us.
That's why our services are purposefully scripture filled. As Dr. Terry Johnson in his excellent book, Worshipping with Calvin has said, quote, for generations when Protestants sang, they sang scripture.
When they prayed, they prayed scripture. When they were called to worship, urged to give prior to a collection or dismissed with a benediction. It was all in the language of scripture. For a moment, I want to come back to the idea of singing the word.
Here's an idea. And granted, I'm a little biased given my own personal story as you just heard a few moments ago and the example of believers I've been around and where I come from. But why is it in so many of our evangelical churches?
I know people like to debate, should we sing hymns or regular songs? And I want to say, okay, guys, both of you need to calm down having this argument because neither of you want to sing the Psalms. Have you thought about that?
Seems to me if God gave us 150 songs, all of which are perfect, I never have to worry about who wrote it. And I never have to be concerned that the content is off. Why wouldn't we sing them? I'm also an exclusive psalmist as well, you know, I don't believe that the Bible teaches we should only sing the Psalms.
I love my brethren who believe that. I'm just not there with you, sorry. And in a day where we are so blessed to have so many great resources for the singing of the Psalms, it might just be a victory for many of our churches if we took Ephesians 5 .19 seriously, which says that we're to speak to one another in Psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs.
This is one application, like I said, I was preparing this, it kind of stuck with me, take it for what you will. But even if you aren't convinced of that, we should be convinced of this, that the Word should drive our worship.
Biblical worship is God-centered, not man-centered. It's Word-driven, not preference-driven. Thirdly, it's reverent, not flippant. It's reverent, not flippant. What do I mean by reverent? It's reflective of the honor, the respect, the gravitas, and the dignity that becomes the worship of God.
We talked about this last week, remember Hebrews 12, 28 and 29? Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us be thankful by it. We may serve God acceptably with reverence and awe.
Just by way of reminder, remember that term reverence is the idea of caution in the presence of deity. It's the, I used the word restraint last week. It's interesting, Jesus was characterized by this kind of reverence in his own life.
For the note takers, Hebrews chapter 5 verses 7 and 8. During his earthly life, he offered prayers and appeals with loud cries and tears to the one who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverence.
Although he was the son, he learned obedience from what he suffered. Have you ever thought about that aspect of the gospel story? Have you ever given thought to the fact that at the heart of God's mighty work in Christ, his work of redemption, that at the heart of that, as the Savior is approaching the cross, I believe all the Hebrews is looking at the Gethsemane event.
Isn't it interesting that in that moment, the thing that he says characterized Jesus was his reverence? Yes, you see this. If you read the life, read the life of Christ, read the gospels. If you're following our church reading plan, we're in the book of Mark right now.
In fact, we finished Mark this week. And you see in the life of Jesus, there's a reverence, a respect that he has for his father. Isn't it interesting that in the glorious work that he does for you and for me in saving us from our sins, part of that was that he carried himself with reverence.
This might be a point where I lose some folks, but I'm convinced that in the 21st century church, we have a reverence problem. How many of you have gone to churches where they boast about having casual worship?
I have. I know that some of you have been judged where they are proud. I come from the marketing world, USP, unique selling proposition. Their USP is that we are casual. We don't take ourselves too seriously.
And then you go there, you're like, yeah, no kidding. You don't take anything seriously. Now, when I bring up the objection I'm about to bring up, some people say, well, we don't mean casual like that.
But then I want to ask the question, well, what do you mean? You all know that I am a stickler for the precise use of words. So since we all speak English, here's what the English language defines, the sort of standard authority on the English language, the Oxford English Dictionary.
Here's what it defines as casual. First definition has like four or five. Number one, relaxed and unconcerned. Made, done, or acting without much care or thought. Is that what you mean? Now, I want to be gracious and say most people when they use that term, as they do with most words in the English language, don't mean that when they use that term.
They probably mean this definition. This was like number four on the list of five. Without formality of style, manner, or procedure. Now you think, okay, well, that doesn't sound so bad. Actually, I have tiny issue with both of those.
That's okay. First of all, should we worship in a way that, again, go back to that first definition, it's made, done, or acting without much thought, about much care or thought. Are we supposed to carry ourselves in worship in that kind of way?
Before you answer that question, keep something in John. Turn with me to the book of Ecclesiastes. We'll go back to the Old Testament. I think I've alluded to this passage already, but I want to show you something here.
If you don't know where Ecclesiastes is, look for the book of Psalms, go to the next book, you'll hit the book of Proverbs, and then you'll hit Ecclesiastes. The book of Ecclesiastes in chapter number five.
Book of Ecclesiastes in chapter number five. Listen to what God's word says. I want to read from verses one through four. Guard your steps when you go into the house of God. Better to approach in obedience than to offer the sacrifice as fools do, literally the sacrifice of fools, for they ignorantly do wrong.
Do not be hasty to speak, and do not be impulsive to make a speech before God. God is in heaven and you are on earth, so let your words be few. Just as dreams accompany much labor, so also a fool's voice comes with many words.
When you make a vow to God, which was one of the simplest acts of worship in the Old Testament system, when you make a vow to God, don't delay fulfilling it, because he does not delight in fools. Fulfill what you vow.
Better that you that you do not vow, than you vow and not fulfill it. I love how Matthew Henry, you all know I have a soft spot for Matthew Henry's commentary. This is what he had to say on these verses.
Quote, address yourself to the worship of God with a solemn pause, and take time to compose yourself for it, not going about with, old school term, precipitation, which is called hasting with the other words, don't rush into this.
Keep your thoughts from roving and wandering from the work. Keep your affections from running out towards wrong objects, for in the business of God's house, there is work enough for the whole man, and all too little to be employed.
Simply put, watch how you carry yourselves in God's house. Think about that before you come here. And yes, this building is not God's house. I understand that. We understand the New Testament buildings are not the house of God.
The house of God is the people of God. Ephesians chapter two, we are the temple of God. But when we gather, there is a sense in which, yes, we are gathering in God's house. We are gathering together as God's dwelling.
And so, Ecclesiastes, I think, teaches us a principle, that if your worship is casual in the sense that you aren't thinking much or caring much, it's safe to say it's probably not God glorifying. Okay, Kofi, fine.
That watch, I'm with you. What about this whole business of formality, though? It's almost a cardinal sin for a church to be too formal. Think about it. Most of us, whether we admit it or not, we are products of our time.
And for most of us, regardless of how old or young we are, we're just about in the generation where we basically threw out every semblance of formality, or at least questioned it to the degree where, if someone practices it, it's a problem.
But this is where we need to, for a moment, ask the question, why does the thought of formality scare us? Especially when it comes to worship. I hear so many messages about worship, as I did this week, warning about the dangers of just going through the motions and it being rote and formal.
But you never hear any messages about the dangers coming to worship casually. Which is weird, because actually we recognize in life that there are some places where formality isn't just a good thing, it's expected.
Married people in the room, you know more than anyone that a marriage has formalities. Think about a wedding. Still remember mine. The interesting thing about weddings is how formal they are. Think about it.
Everyone dresses their best, depending on which tradition you got married in. Your minister probably wore a suit, or you wore a robe. Think about it. When you got married, fellas, you didn't rock up in torn jeans and vans, did you?
You spent money on a suit. In my case, I already had plenty of suits. I bought another one. This was the wedding suit. I wasn't going to wear it for any... After the wedding, I've worn it a ton of times until it got lost in our house fire.
But this suit was set apart for this purpose. Vows were exchanged. Those are formal things. In fact, in the world in which we live, they're both spiritually and legally binding. You even signed a bit of paper and had folks function as witnesses.
You even wear something every day that reminds you of this very formal event and the relationship that began that day. But no one complains about that formality. How about when you go to court? I pray you never have to go to court.
I know we also have a judge here. I'll be careful. But when you go to court, it's a formal affair. I've gone to court before. Don't ask me what for. It was non-violent. It was actually a dumb case, but it is what it is.
I went to court once, and I remember very vividly. At least in the UK. I've not been to court here in the US. Have you ever watched legal dramas? I don't know if it's the same. But from what I understand, the judge wears robes when you go to court.
You have to swear. Even if you're not religious, you swear on something. And if you decide to be stupid enough to lie to a judge, you can go to jail. We call it perjury. You may not like our current president, but chances are if he says he's going to address the nation, many of us would be surprised if he walked up in a polo and jeans.
Think about it. You expect him to wear a suit every single time he addresses the nation. You expect him to suit up, stand straight, and talk like he takes the job seriously. How about police officers?
Police officers wear a uniform unless they're playing clothes, and even that's for a purpose. You get the picture. Formality is around us all the time. So Kofi, is this your pitch to make all of us men wear suits and bow ties to church?
I mean, fellas, you would look great, but no. It's my way of saying that formality isn't the monster under the bed that we sometimes make it out to be. Yes, the Bible itself addresses the reality that people can come to acts of worship and just go through the motions and just do stuff to do stuff, but the answer is not then to say, well, we don't have any formality in worship.
As it were, throwing caution to the wind and making this not that big a deal. No, the answer is to take seriously the things that God takes seriously. I think we can all agree that. I think that's a good compromise.
Will we all agree that it's not so much what you wear to church? I mean, I like to wear shirts and bow ties and stuff, but I would be very hard-pressed to make a case it's unbiblical for you to. That's not the issue.
The issue is taking seriously the things that God takes seriously. So we take his word seriously. We take prayer seriously. We take the sacraments or ordinances seriously. We take the gospel itself seriously, and we're not flippant about these things because, quite frankly, they are indeed matters of life and death.
Biblical worship is God-centered, not man-centered. It's word-driven, not preference-driven. It's reverent, not flippant. My fourth and last principle on this one we might take a little time on. Number four, it's spiritual, not carnal.
It's spiritual, not carnal. I told you how to come back to this. I hope you've still got John 4 open in front of you. John 4, 24, what did Jesus say? In fact, he says it twice. Verse 23, he says, the hour is coming and is now here when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth.
Verse 24, God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and in truth. That phrase, spirit and truth, has been used a lot in Christian history. Those of you who've been at Redeemer, I will remember that I did a whole sermon series called Spirit and Truth, talking about the personal work of the Holy Spirit.
I took my title from this verse. It's a good, it's a good phrase. It's worth thinking about. Jesus tells the Samaritan woman that the true worshippers worship in the spirit, and I'm just going to sidestep the debate and say, I take the view the spirit here is referring to the Holy Spirit.
They worship in the Holy Spirit and in the truth. In our circles, we can be very big on the truth part, if we're honest, and that's a good thing. I don't want to throw that out. I heartily affirm that.
We should care about the truth of what we do in worship, but sometimes we're not as big on the in spirit part, if we're really honest. Now, here's what some people take this idea of in spirit and truth to mean.
That it's not rational. That opposed to, you know, more formal types of worship where, okay, there's lots of reading the Bible and lots of thinking and all of that. No, this is non-rational. It's bypassing of the mind, as it were.
Your rational faculties kind of get skipped and you go straight for the heart. It's visceral. It's raw. It's emotional. It's tears and being overwhelmed. It's a total takeover of your senses. Now, let me pause for a moment.
Please don't hear me saying that physical expressiveness is wrong. It's not. Actually, I can make a case from the Bible. It's perfectly acceptable. I'm not saying that being emotionally overwhelmed to the point of tears is wrong.
I'm not saying that. There are moments when there are songs we sing where I feel that emotion. I'm not saying that is wrong, so please don't hear me as saying that. I'm simply going to ask for a moment, why is it that often we assume that that's the mark of the Spirit's presence?
Ever thought about that? You all know me. I can get controversial. If we're honest, since the advent of the Pentecostal and charismatic movements, our view of the Spirit's work, even in worship, even for those of us who would say we are not Pentecostal and charismatic, our view of what the Spirit's work looks like among us has been more influenced by those movements than sometimes we'd like to admit.
For the guys in our training group, you remember this, remember what I said? Difference between being charismatic and what I call charismatic adjacent. That, yeah, you may not speak in tongues, you may not prophesy, you may not do all the stuff that Pentecostal and charismatics do, but there are assumptions about the presence of God in worship you've bought right into.
So when people come to a church like us, where we have a liturgy, by the way, every church has a liturgy, but we have a very explicit liturgy and it's very, I won't say procedural, because that's not true at all, but it follows a very clear order.
You can tell what we're doing. It's if you have a bulletin, you know what we're going to do today. People look at that and say, well, that just felt like they were quenching the Spirit, like the Spirit wasn't there.
Well, for a moment, let's ask the question, what does it look like when the Spirit is present in worship? Well, before I can answer that question, I need to take a step back and ask, what is not necessarily the presence of the Spirit?
You know what I mean when I say that? What might be but might not be markers of this? So letter A there, if you've got the study guide, what true spirituality isn't, and I'll put in brackets, necessarily.
It might not be this. Again, I'm thankful for Dr. Terry Johnson and his work, Worshipping with Calvin. Strange title, but really good book. He says this. He gives a few points for what true spirituality isn't necessarily.
First of all, emotional exuberance isn't necessarily a sign of the Spirit's work. It might be, but we have to be very careful that we don't judge people's worship by how emotionally exuberant they are.
Allow me to turn this on its head for a moment. In fact, when you read the Bible, more often than not, when people are seriously worshiping, they don't get loud, they get quiet. Habakkuk chapter 2 and verse 20, but the Lord is in his holy temple.
Let all the earth be loud, and no, he doesn't say that. Let all the earth be silent in his presence. You and I and all of us who live in the entertainment generation, we are not used to silence. Just this week, I was in the car and I was listening to a podcast.
Some of you know I am very interested in true crime, so I was listening to a true crime podcast in the car. And the storyteller, that's one of the reasons I love true crime, I love the art of storytelling.
The storyteller was trying to demonstrate he was playing an interrogation and was kind of breaking down what they were doing. It was very helpful. And at one point, he said, for most people, silence that is more than a few seconds is very awkward.
And he did an experiment. He said, I'm going to be silent for just five seconds. And he was just silent. Driving up, where was I going? I was driving up to McAndrews, heading back home. Five seconds felt like an eternity.
For most of us, silence is awkward. But silence makes sense if you come into the presence of God. The God who, if we understand him rightly, he blows us away. We come to worship with so much distraction.
So much of the world's noise, as it were, in our ears. I talk a lot about preparing for worship. Sometimes it might just be good for us to just take a few seconds and just set ourselves for this act of worship.
I had the privilege of attending a church I'd always wanted to go to this past year, St. Andrew's Chapel. If you know the late great R .C. Sproul, that was the church he pastored for a great many years.
Got to go on a Sunday morning for their worship service. And one of the things that they did that was interesting, that they were very, if you know the taxonomy of how worship styles look, they were very high church.
Very high church. And it was interesting when a few minutes before the service got there, I got in there early. Some of you know I like to sit on the front, no matter where I am. So I got my seat, I got myself ready, and they had like prelude music playing.
And then the prelude ended. They had the tradition where they strike a bell, and then there was just silence. And I got curious, like I do. So I picked up the bulletin they gave me. I hadn't read it yet.
And they said something that struck me. They said, at the striking of the bell, we go silent to show that we are crossing from the secular into the sacred. Think about that for a moment. That we've come to church.
We are leaving the world and its concerns behind for a few moments. And we have come into the presence of God in worship. Coffee, that sounds kind of boring and joyless. If you say emotional exuberance isn't a sign of the Spirit's work, then you're saying that people shouldn't be joyful in worship.
Pause. Allow me to use an illustration. I'm gonna go back to a wedding again. Typically, a wedding is made up of three parts. You have the service, the reception, and then the honeymoon. All three of those, if they're done well, are joyful occasions.
I say that because I have been to some wedding services where it's like, this guy does not want to get married. Like, I can see it on your face, and I can see it on her face too. Neither of you want to be married.
I used to help with the sound at my church back in London. Not in my church, thankfully, but I'd go to weddings enough. They'd be like, I don't know if you guys want to be married. This might not. And let me stop there.
I get myself in serious trouble, but suffice it to say, the joy of the wedding service is a very serious, reflective joy. At least it should be anyway. But the joy of the reception is very different. It's much more exuberant and much more public.
If you're married couples, you know that a honeymoon carries its own joy. It's a more private, a more intimate joy. There's joy in all three, but does the joy look the same depending on the context? No, it doesn't.
I understand it's playoff weekend. How many of you have been to a sports game before? A good sports game is not a library. It's chaos. Some of you know I played rugby when I was younger. Love the game of rugby.
The traditional home of English rugby is a place called Twickenham. It's in Southwest London. If you've ever been to Twickenham when England are playing, Twickenham seats about 50 to 55 ,000. To hear 55 ,000, almost predominantly men cheering their English heads off.
All that stuff about stiff upper lip goes out the window. Why? Because the setting, especially if England are winning, calls for a different kind of joy. Context determines response. I love this from Terry Johnson on this point.
He says, Christian joy is not the joy of the ball field, the concert, the dance hall, or the pub. Luke tells us that Jesus rejoiced in the Holy Spirit. That joy was spiritual joy, inward joy, holy joy, quoting Matthew Henry, solid substantial joy, like deep rivers making no noise.
And again, I'm not saying this to say, because again, there's another side to this, which is personality. God has all made us with particular personalities. We express joy in particular ways, but we have to be very careful that we do not judge somebody's worship by, wow, he just sits there like a bump on the log.
You don't know what's going on in his heart and mind. The person who's all loud and exuberant might just be putting it on. So it might be a sign of the Spirit, it might not be. Here's another one, maybe.
Spontaneity. Spontaneity isn't always a sign of the Spirit. You hear this in churches. As a pastor, it drives me mad. I'll just be honest. The assumption that if something is unplanned, oh, the Spirit was really working in that.
If we planned it, oh, we basically told the Spirit, you're not invited. If you plan it, the way I've heard it more than once, you'll quench the Spirit. In seminary, they taught me a term for this. I hope it blesses you.
It's the word baloney. Actually, when you read the Bible, structure and worship are connected all the time. If you're taking notes, two verses. First Corinthians, they're both in the same chapter. First Corinthians 14.
First Corinthians 14 .33. God is not the God of disorder, but of peace. I mean, you see this, remember when we were in Genesis in creation? God is orderly. He forms the earth and then He fills the earth.
There is a rhyme and reason to what He does. It's funny, the Corinthian church was a church that had all kinds of problems when it came to their worship. And Paul says, right as he ends his treatment of their worship in 12, 13, and 14.
First Corinthians 14 .40, everything is to be done decently and in order. The idea that because something is spontaneous and unplanned, that was the Spirit at work. It's an assumption. It's not a very good one when you read the Bible.
Well, if that's the case, well, what is true spirituality then? Actually, true spirituality, when you think about it, is actually quite simple. First of all, spiritual worship depends on the Spirit working through the Word.
You knew I was going to go there with this. If you're taking notes, Ephesians 5 .18 and 19, and then Colossians 3 .16, look at the parallel that exists between letting the Word of Christ dwell in you richly, Colossians, and being filled with the Spirit.
Almost as though Paul says, they're the same thing. Word and Spirit are distinct. The Word and the Spirit are not the same thing, but they are inseparable when they work. Where the Word of God is faithfully upheld and faithfully practiced and faithfully preached, we can trust the Spirit of God will be there.
So I don't need to move you emotionally. I love our worship team. They do great work. They don't need to hit a killer solo or blow you away with runs so deep you think they're mining for diamonds. That's not how the Spirit works.
The Spirit works through the Word. Okay, Kofi, Kofi, I hear you, I hear you, but if it's just the Word, won't that get stale and old and just repetitive? You don't really need the Spirit for all of that.
You're saying we just need a Bible. No, because secondly, spiritual worship not only depends on the Spirit working through the Word, it relies on the Spirit in prayer. That's the key here. There's a reason why I begin every sermon with a prayer for illumination, asking for the Spirit's help.
There's a reason why if you come to our prayer meetings, we're always praying for the service that we're about to go into. We pray for God's help. Think about this. God commands us to worship, and yet we go to God and ask Him to give us the strength to do what He's commanded us to do.
We don't pray in desperation, excuse me, we don't pray in vain, excuse me. We pray in desperation. We pray in hope, settled, certain conviction that God will act. You've heard me say it before. I borrowed it from my friend, Pastor John, who'll be here in a few weeks.
A culture of prayer is a culture of dependence. I see I've got to get done real quick. I've still got a whole page to get through, I'll see if I can make this quick. Romans 8 26, for those of you taking notes, that relationship between the Spirit helping us in our weakness, because we don't know how to pray as we're supposed to, but the Bible says that He intercedes for us with inexpressible groanings, literally groanings that are too deep for words.
Faith family, a spiritual church is a praying church. And I say spiritual with a capital S. A church where the Spirit is at work. Show me a lack of interest in corporate prayer and I'll show you a church that is as good as dead.
One more point, I'll be done. Spiritual worship depends on the Spirit working through the Word. It relies on the Spirit in prayer. Here's where it can get interesting. Spiritual worship demonstrates dependence through being simple.
Something I know is, I hope you've still got John 4 in front of you. Remember the conversation that the woman starts with Jesus? Should we worship on Mount Gerizim, which was pretty much in the background around them?
Should we worship on Mount Gerizim or worship in Jerusalem? Do you know what Jesus says, verse 21? It says, believe me woman, an hour is coming when you won't worship the Father neither on this mountain, Mount Gerizim, which was in the background, nor in Jerusalem.
Jesus says something, and again it rocked me this week, my views on some things changed as a result of this. Jesus says that the age of the new covenant, catch this, would not be marked by an emphasis on the visible and the temporary.
Think about it, Jerusalem was where the temple was. It had a priesthood, system of sacrifices, it had a calendar of feasts, but Jesus says, listen, you guys might be wrong in your worship, but guess what, a time is coming even Jerusalem will be wrong.
That won't be the center of true worship. You see, true worship is not necessarily where the flashiest gimmicks are, it's not where the most impressive buildings are, it's not where the greatest level of technical savvy is.
Do you know where true worship is? True worship happens wherever the Spirit of God is at work through the Word of God as made known in the, here's that phrase again, means of grace. Remember what Paul said?
I'll say this and I'm done. First Corinthians 2, 4, and 5. He said, my preaching, my speech and my preaching, excuse me, were not with persuasive words of wisdom, but with a demonstration of the Spirit's power so that your faith might not be based on human wisdom, but on God's power.
The beauty of worship is not how technical you make it, the beauty of worship is how simple you keep it by doing the things that God commanded us to do. And please hear me, that's not an excuse for being sloppy, for just mailing it in and not functioning in excellence.
Like I said, I think I said it last week, God gives us all things, I think we can give Him our best when we come to worship. It's not an excuse for saying, well the Word is enough, we don't have to care about anything, we don't need to think about how people are going to follow along, we don't need to think about bulletins and slides and all of this stuff, just let the Word do it, we'll be fine.
That's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is this as I close, it's simply recognizing that God's way of working, as human beings we love the visible, the powerful, and the strong, but that's not how God works, is it?
We read the Bible and it makes it clear that God uses ordinary and on a human level almost simplistic means. He uses words, He uses water, He uses bread and wine, unimpressive and simple things, but He uses them to affect the greatest spiritual change in His people, and that's how we know the Spirit is at work.
I've got so much more I'd love to say, but thankfully I have a second message. So we will pick this up next week as we continue thinking about the marks of a biblical style of worship. For now, let's pray and let's come to the Lord's table.
Wonderful Father, we thank you so much for your Word. We thank you for the clarity that it brings as we think about not just the contents of our worship, but even how we conduct ourselves in worship. Father, we acknowledge that we all come with our preconceptions, with our ideas, with our preferences, with the things that we've experienced in the past.
Father, I pray that you would simply, as you've done in my own life this week as I prepared this, that you would humble us, that you would work in helping us submit to the simple yet life-changing principles of your Word when it comes to our worship.
Father, we thank you that even when we fall short, our worship is not acceptable just because we do the right things. Ultimately, our worship is acceptable because of your Son and our Savior. His perfect righteousness and his all-atoning death make the difference.
Father, we thank you for the Gospel, we thank you for its truth, and we thank you for the celebration of it that we have each week as we come to the Lord's table. Father, we know you're always with us, and yet we would ask that you would draw near to us in a special way even now as we come to the table before we ask you in Jesus' name and for his sake.
