Why Liturgy

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I want to invite you to take out your Bibles with me and turn to John chapter 4.
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And as we make our way down to verse 24, I'll give an introduction.
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This is one of those times where if you're a visitor with us, this may seem like a somewhat strange place to land in with us.
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And yet, I see a lot of visitors this morning, so I feel the need to at least bring you up to the speed of where we are.
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We have been, since the beginning of Advent last year, having a study of the
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Gospel of John exposition, verse by verse. We began at the beginning of December last year, so we find ourselves now in chapter 4.
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And when we get to chapter 4 of John, we have this tremendous interaction between Jesus and the woman at the well.
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And the conversation between the two of them is made up of two parts. The first part of the conversation is what
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I call the living water discourse, where Jesus is talking to her. He asks her for a drink. She says, why would you ask me for a drink?
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Jews don't have anything to do with Samaritans. So they go into this conversation where Jesus said, if you knew who it was who was speaking to you, you would have asked him.
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He would have given you living water. Sir, give me this living water so I don't have to keep coming to draw water. So that's the first portion.
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And then Jesus interjects and he says, go get your husband.
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I don't have a husband. I know. You've had five husbands. The man you're living with now is not your husband.
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And the woman does what people often do when confronted with sin. She changed the subject.
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Read the story. She immediately begins going into, well, you know, you Jews believe you should worship in Jerusalem.
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And we Samaritans, we worship on Mount Gerizim. And the implied question, which she never gets to get out, is who's right?
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So she challenges Jesus with a theological problem. You know,
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Jews and Samaritans, we don't agree on how God is supposed to be worshipped. And Jesus said, there is coming a day where neither on that mountain or on this mountain will you worship
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God. But there is coming a time where those who worship
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God will worship him in spirit and in truth. And so the point that is being made by Jesus is, under the old covenant, worship was centered geographically around the temple of God.
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This was where the sacrifices were made. This is where the priesthood exercised their duties.
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This is where the spirit of God was representatively dwelling among the people of God.
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And Jesus said, there's coming a time when that will be no more.
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You see, the old covenant temple system has now given way to the new covenant system where all believers are indwelled with the
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Holy Spirit of God and we are, in fact, the temple of God. And therefore, a distinction is made in worship.
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And so what I've done, having spoken to our elders and talked through the need for this, is what
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I have done is I've written a series of messages on why we do what we do in worship.
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What does it mean to worship in spirit and in truth?
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Because the unfortunate thing, I believe, is that many in the modern church, having been influenced by 50 years of change, and we're going to talk about this a little bit more later, more than 50 years of the latter half of the last century of running far away from structure and trying to find spirit, we have actually gone off the rails in worship in many ways.
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And we need to be drawn back to a biblical form of worship.
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And so when we say we worship in spirit and truth, we're not saying that we worship in chaos and selfishness or in personal desire, but we should want to worship the way
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God intends. As I mentioned in my sermon last week, many people say,
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I want to worship God my way, when the reality is we should want to worship
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God his way. So with that being said, let's stand. We're going to read the text and pray as we do every week, just as a way to give honor and reverence to the word of God.
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Let's begin in verse 22 and go down to verse 24. Jesus is speaking to the woman.
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He says, you worship what you do not know. We worship what we know for salvation is from the
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Jews. But the hour is coming and is now here. When the true worshipers will worship the father in spirit and truth, for the father is seeking such people to worship him.
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God is spirit and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.
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Father in heaven, hallowed be thy name. As we come to you,
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Lord, this morning, I pray first and foremost, as I pray every Sunday, Lord, that you would keep me from error.
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For God, I am a fallible man. I have great capacity for error, but for the sake of your name, for the sake of your people, for the sake of my conscience,
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God, keep me from error. And I pray, Lord, as we examine your word today in regard to the order of worship and why we do what we do,
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I pray that we would not consider this just a lesson for the intellect, but,
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Lord, that this would help us to grab hold with our heart, with our spirit, the very understanding of why it is we do what we do and why worship is not to be chaotic, but orderly.
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And so, God, be with us as we study. And I pray, oh, Lord, that though this will be focused mainly on how we worship and why we worship, may we never lose sight of who we worship.
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May we not lose sight of the gospel, the reason that we can even come and worship. And Lord, may
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Christ be exalted in this message. May his people be edified in this message.
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And Lord, those who are not yet your people, who have not yet bowed the knee to the Lord Jesus Christ, may they hear of the wonderful truths of the living
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God and may they turn from their unbelief, may they trust in Christ and today be saved.
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We pray this in Jesus' name, amen. Trends are everywhere.
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There are fashion trends. We know that as every generation tends to have its own particular style.
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There are musical trends. Songs that were popular 40 years ago are now being played as elevator music.
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And when we go to publics, political trends have shifted.
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And yes, there are even church trends. There are trends in the church.
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Beginning in the mid -20th century, a major trend in evangelicalism was to move away from formal structured worship toward a more free -flowing and experiential style of worship.
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This gained major traction in the 60s with what was known as the Jesus Movement. And a very loose and flowing and relaxed expression of worship sort of took hold in many churches and was spread throughout the world with churches such as the
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Calvary Chapel Movement and the Willow Creek Movement. I remember a pastor said, we don't follow the
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Willow Creek, we follow the will of God. I always thought that was funny. But it was a method, right?
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It was a movement of what we will call informal worship.
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That spread to the 80s and the 90s where the contemporary Christian music movement began to really spread.
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And the songs began to be popular on radio and on television and it began to spread in the church.
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People didn't want to sing a song in church unless it was also on the radio. And so that began to change the landscape of the church.
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And then going into the later 90s and the early 2000s, what became known as the
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Emergent Church Movement and the Seeker Sensitive Movement, which were churches which were very much concerned with downplaying doctrine and pushing forward the idea of community and feelings and culture, making people feel like the culture of the church was all about making people feel comfortable.
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Churches began to take surveys of their local communities, find out what the community wants, find out how they want to do church, and let's design the worship service in such a way that we can encourage people to come because we'll be doing what they want us to do.
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If you ever wondered where Summer at the Movie series in churches came from, that's kind of the result of all that.
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I mean, there are churches right now that are having services where the entire sanctuary is decorated like the
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Millennium Falcon. That's Star Wars for those who don't know. I mean, that style of worship gives way to this idea of it's all about an experience.
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It's all about being relaxed and free -flowing. And to worship in spirit and truth means I worship my way.
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And what happened is that elements that were once common in worship, like multiple prayers, long prayers, were either shortened or substituted for more music.
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Responsive readings, confessional statements were also removed.
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And churches became very slim in their what we would call liturgy.
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And I know that word may be unique or foreign to some of you, so I will be explaining it. But the idea of the order of the worship service became very simple.
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You come in, you pray, you sing, you preach, you sing, you're gone. And that was the elements of worship, right?
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You pray, you sing, maybe you give. So let's say that. That's the order of service in many churches.
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Pray, sing, give, preach, sing, and leave. And so many elements of worship were just removed.
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They were taken out and it was all in the name of finding a more, or maybe let me say it a different way, finding a less structured worship.
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Because the idea that we convinced ourselves, especially, and I remember this, because again, I grew up in the 80s and 90s, and I was listening when
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I came into, when I got saved in 99 and I began to listen to what people were saying. The church growth strategists were talking and they were saying things like, well, you know, people don't want to engage with dead orthodoxy.
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And if you come in and you have all of these things in your worship, and you have all of this structure in your worship, then what that's going to do is that's going to make people feel like you're dead.
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And you need to be alive. And life means non -structure. That's the weird thing.
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Is that to have a living church meant to have a church that wasn't formal. Well, trends change.
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And guess what's happening now? What's happening now is there is a major shift among young people away from the unstructured, disordered services that we thought were so powerful in the 80s and 90s back towards a structured worship service.
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And this is why so many of them are swimming the Tiber and going to Rome.
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Because, hey, if you want a structured worship service, Roman Catholic Church will give it to you.
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In spades, right? They'll give it to you. And if you really want structure, you go to the
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Eastern Orthodox Church. And they've got structure that they've been doing for a thousand years.
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They'll say this is the liturgy of St. John Chrysostom. And we're going to do St. John Chrysostom's liturgy today.
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And there's something that feels good about that, especially to young people who don't have a foundation.
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They want a foundation in history. They want a foundation with structure. They know that you can't stand on jello.
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Right? You've got to stand on firm ground. I mean, Jesus said you stand on the rock, not the sand.
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Right? And they feel like the structure is giving them something to stand on. The problem is, it's just like a pendulum that swings.
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We swung, swung, swung, swung. We went too far with disorder.
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And now the swinging back of the pendulum is we've got to find the ultimate order. The order that has a pope or an archbishop.
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And so there is this desire for structure. And, again,
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I understand the desire for a connection to history, but trust me, you don't have to go to Rome to find it. You don't have to go to Constantinople to find it.
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But that's what people think. Many young people are being convinced of that online every day.
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I'm talking to young people. I got two emails this week. I do a question and answer show every Tuesday night. I do about two hours of Q &A every
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Tuesday night with people from all over the world. We get questions, and two of the questions this week, I am convinced that I need to move to Eastern Orthodoxy.
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Convince me not to. This is the struggle of our day is young people who have no foundation in history are looking for history to find something to grab a hold on.
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We need not stick our head in the sand and act like it's not happening or pretend it doesn't matter. As Christians, we should know history.
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We should study history. You've heard me talk about the Peanuts cartoon.
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I know I've talked about it a bunch of times, but we've got new people. The old Peanuts cartoon, Lucy goes up to Charlie Brown.
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What are you doing? I'm writing a history of the church. I'm writing a paper on church history.
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My pastor was born in 1935. That's the attitude. It's that church history began with me.
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This is why I love it when I hear people say, I want to sing those old songs, and they'll name a song that came out in the 50s.
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Because that's the old song. That's the tradition. You know, Southern Baptist, four -part harmonies, that's when it was perfect.
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But that's the attitude, right? You realize A Mighty Fortress is Our God was written by Martin Luther. That song is over 400 years old.
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500 years old. So, when you ask the question, you know, we say, why liturgy?
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Why even talk about this subject? Because honestly, it's a subject that's on many people's mind, but it's also something that we need to understand as Christians.
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And today's sermon may feel like a lecture, maybe it might feel like a lesson that I would give in the academy, but, beloved, it is important to know these things.
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And as much as when we come into worship, we ought to have our hearts burning, we ought to also have our intellect challenged.
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And we need to be thinking through why we do the things that we do and why we believe what we believe. I can honestly tell you
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I have never been in a service where we did a whole sermon on why we do what we do.
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We just assume. You come to church, you sit down, and you do what you're told. That's the attitude.
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You just come in and do it. Well, why? Why do we do this and not that?
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Why didn't we have an interpretive dancer up here this morning? No, I'm serious.
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I mean, why? These are questions that we should walk through and talk through.
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So my first question today is, what is a liturgy? When I said today why liturgy, let's just talk about what liturgy is.
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Liturgy comes from the Greek word liturgia, and it means the work of the people.
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It's the idea of offering up a service or a structured order of worship.
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It's made up of a pattern of prayers, Scripture readings, confessions, responses, and sacraments or ordinances designed to guide the congregation in worship.
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Ordinarily, when we think of liturgical churches, we think of those that are intentionally and meticulously following a set pattern.
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Often, when people are unfamiliar with a formal liturgy, they associate it with Roman Catholicism or Orthodoxy because that's what they think of when they think liturgical.
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They think Eastern Orthodox or they think Roman Catholic. But understand this. If you visit a
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Lutheran church, they have a very structured liturgy. And guess what?
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They'd be Protestant. And here's the thing about it. A lot of Baptists will visit a
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Lutheran church and say, Boy, that felt Catholic. It shouldn't. The Catholics don't own structure in worship.
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It should feel Christian, not Catholic, to do worship with all ourselves throughout the whole service.
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You go to an Anglican church and you say, Well, that feels kind of, well, Anglican is sort of that middle way. They describe themselves as the via media, the middle way between Protestant and Catholic.
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Some of them argue it's the middle way between low church and high church. Either way.
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But there is structure, no doubt. But here's the thing.
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Every church has a structure. Every church has a liturgy. The question is not whether your church has a liturgy.
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The question is what is in your church's liturgy. What is actually happening when you worship?
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As I said earlier, if every week a church gathers, has an opening prayer, sings four songs, takes an offering, has the sermon, and then they pray and leave, that's their liturgy.
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It's not much. But that's what it is. Last week in our message, we discussed the elements of worship.
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If you'll remember, and again, I know we have so many new people out here, I almost feel like I need to re -pitch last week's sermon.
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But last week's sermon, we talked about something called the regulative principle of worship.
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The regulative principle of worship basically states this. That we are only to do in worship what
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God commands us to do. And it means our worship is regulated by this.
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That our worship is regulated by Scripture. And a lot of people immediately begin to, well, wait a minute.
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The Bible doesn't tell us to have chairs. The Bible doesn't tell us even to have a pulpit. The Bible doesn't tell us to have lights.
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The Bible doesn't tell us so many things. And we call those incidentals, not elements.
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Whether you have an air conditioner, whether you have lights versus candles, whether you have a piano versus a band or an orchestra.
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And by the way, that always bothers me, and I am going to do a sermon in a few weeks on music, but it always bothers me when someone says, you can't have a guitar, but we can have a violin.
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What makes that? Well, it's so much more elegant. Well, that's personal preference now.
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Now you're getting into the issue of preference. It's not a matter of elements, right? That's an incidental to worship.
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Not an element of worship. And the elements of worship are the things that must take place, that we need in worship, to say that it has been worship.
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And I want to give you an example. A few years ago I heard a pastor talk about this. He was talking about the fact that the early church, you'll remember, once the persecutions began to really arise against the church, that the church began to worship in the underground, and sometimes they would even worship in the catacombs, the caves.
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And this is what he said. He said the elements of worship were really formed in the catacombs, because if it can't be done in the catacombs, it's probably not essential.
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I like that phrase. He said if it couldn't be done in the catacombs, it's probably not essential to worship. So when we break down the elements of worship, what are the elements?
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What are the things that we must do? The elements of worship are the essential parts that make up the worship.
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These are the building blocks of our liturgy. These are the building blocks of our worship service.
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In fact, I think of it like this, and this is sort of an illustration I came up with. If you imagine a stack, here
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I even got an image for you. Imagine a stack of bricks that are just sort of stacked up, and then you have a brick wall.
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Well, the stack of bricks is the elements of worship. Regulative principle determines what we do.
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Our liturgy determines how we do it. It gives a structure to walk through these things. You might say, this doesn't matter.
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No, it does matter, and here's why it matters. Because worship is to be done corporately, not individually, and when you do things as a group, you do things in order.
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That's why it matters. In fact, turn with me to 1 Corinthians 14 in your Bible, and I'll show you that this hasn't just all came out of nowhere today.
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There is actual command for this. In 1
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Corinthians 14, which is at the end of three chapters of the
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Apostle Paul talking to the church about how they are to use their spiritual gifts to minister to one another in the body of Christ.
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In fact, I'm teaching on this Wednesday nights, our spiritual gifts class. We're talking about 1
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Corinthians 12, 13, 14. In chapter 12 is when we have that excellent portion where Paul talks about the body, the hand can't say to the ear, or the hand can't say to the foot,
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I don't need you, the eye can't say to the ear, I don't need you, because every person is valuable in the body of Christ. That's chapter 12.
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Everybody has a gift given by the Holy Spirit sovereignly for the purpose of building up the body. Then in chapter 13, he says, but if you have not love, even if you have all the gifts, if you have not love, your clanging gong or resounding cymbal, right?
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Love is the most important thing. If your gifts are not done in love, then they are without value.
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Then you get to chapter 14. And in 1 Corinthians 14, what do you find? In 1
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Corinthians 14, you find the Apostle Paul challenging, and I would say even rebuking, the misuse of two particular spiritual gifts in the church.
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Prophecy and tongues. And I believe it is because those gifts are the ones at the time that were the most prominently displayed among the people, that they were being used by people to try to establish some positional authority in the church.
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And Paul says no. But at the end of chapter 14, when you get to the end,
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Paul says this. He says, but all things...
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And what's the context of the all here? Within corporate worship.
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That's the context. 12 through 14 is all about corporate worship and about gathering together. What is the context of the all things within corporate worship?
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All things must be done... How? Decently and in order.
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Decently and in order. The word decently there is an adverb. It means proper, pleasing, fitting, becoming, or in a seemly manner.
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Our worship should be decent. Not indecent.
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But it should also be cata taxon. Cata taxon.
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What is that? Literally means according to an arranged sequence.
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Or in order. Let me give you kind of how that word works.
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There's a word in science. It's actually the basis of all science. Maybe you've heard it.
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The word is taxonomy. Not taxidermy. I want to clarify.
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All my hunters out there. Saw some ears perk up. Not taxidermy, but taxonomy.
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Taxonomy is the root of all science. It's the basis of all science. Because taxonomy means to put things in order.
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Or to put things in a structure. When you look at a science textbook. And you start seeing classifications.
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Identifying, naming, organizing things. Living organisms, concepts, objects, ideas. In biology you have the classification of the different kingdoms.
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The phylum, the class, the order, the family, the genus, the species. All of that is taxonomy. Can't do science if there's no order.
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By the way, this is one of the reasons why we believe God exists. Because God is a God of order. He gives us a world that functions in order.
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Therefore, we can actually know. Today, water is going to boil at 212 degrees. It's going to freeze at 32 degrees.
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And it's going to do the same thing tomorrow. And it's going to do the same thing the day after that. Because we serve a God of order. Who established a world that functions in order.
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Why would we think he would want his worship out of order? Why would we think he would want us to worship in chaos.
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When everything around us points to order. Simple, yet important.
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Charles Hodge. Former Princeton professor, obviously known very well.
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He says that when Paul here is speaking of order in worship. He said, it's not tumultuously as in a mob.
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But as in a well -ordered army. Where everyone keeps his place and acts at the proper time.
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And in the proper way. That's the idea of worship. That there be order and it be done in such a way.
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That it is done in the proper time and in the proper way. Now again, I want to clarify something very quickly.
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In case this is not making a lot of sense to you. I'm talking about what we do when we come together.
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Because I know somebody out there is going to say. But hey man, I worship alone. And you should.
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Jesus said, we should go to our prayer closets. We should have that time alone with the Lord. We should have our quiet time.
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You should have family worship. You should have those times where you're worshipping along with your wife and with your children.
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All those things are good. But today we're talking about what's done in corporate worship.
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And corporate worship has to have two things. Or has to have, rather, it cannot be two things.
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It cannot be both order and chaos at the same time. It has to be one or the other. I remember years ago,
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I visited a church. Where during the worship service, about half way through the music, people got up and began running around.
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People were doing all kinds of extraneous movements. And one person was even doing jumping jacks.
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Don't know why. And even during the sermon, there were outbursts of shouting.
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To the point where I finally realized why people preach sometimes in staccato sentences.
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And you know what I'm talking about. And the Lord said. And this is this. And this is this. Why? Because they've got to get time for the response.
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Because everybody feels like they've got to say something. Now I like a good hearty amen. Brother Mike's my amen section.
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And Brother Andy backs him up with that nice low vibrato New York amen.
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I thought I'd get one. But that's okay.
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That's right. So I'm not saying we have to be cold and stoic and quiet. But the point is, is the service was chaotic.
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It was chaotic. And so I went to one of the people who was there.
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And not in a way to try to be ugly or try to be in any way boastful or unkind.
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I just wanted to ask. Do you think that this is how
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God wants us to worship? When he calls us to worship in order.
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And the person said, well this is how we keep order. And I said, no.
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We don't get to redefine words based on our wants. Words have meaning.
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If there's anything we need to learn today against the onslaught of absolute crazy wokeism that has tried to make its way into our lives through all these different avenues.
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Whether it be through academia or through politics or anything else. One of the things we need to realize is that there's a constant desire to change the definition of words.
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And we cannot allow that. Words have meaning or we don't have any truth to stand on.
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And when Jesus commands us through the apostle Paul by the scripture that we are to do these things decently.
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And in order, we don't get to interpret that any way we want. We have to say that there is at least a structure that we need to consider.
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I got to thinking this week also about the armed forces.
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My son, of course, in the Air Force. And got to thinking about the fact that in the military, and those of you who served in the military, you know this.
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War is chaos. It's absolute just pandemonium.
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Stuff's blowing up. Bullets flying by. War is, well war is hell.
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As it says. But when you go to basic training in the military, do they train you in chaos?
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No, they train you in structure. You learn how to walk together. You learn how to march together.
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You learn how to run together, eat together, work together, sing together. You know what's so surprising to me?
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Men out there on the battlefield training for war, they'll sing together. Hup, hup, hup, hup.
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And they'll sing loud. We come in here to church and you guys, how great is our
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God. We need to train like men going to battle.
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Because the world is full of chaos. And we come to God's house and we get structure, and foundation, and order.
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Something to stand on when the world tries to knock us down. This is the foundation of what we do when we come together.
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Christ is our commander in chief, amen? He's the one commanding us to go out to make an impact on the world in His name.
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But where do we come for our basic training? Where do we come to prepare for war?
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We come to worship Him in spirit and truth. And that we might be prepared to go out and slay the dragon.
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Therefore, knowing God commands us to order and structure in worship, we should expect that our worship service would contain the commanded, or excuse me, contain the necessary elements of worship, those commanded or regulated in scripture, and that those elements be clearly laid out in an orderly fashion.
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We should expect there to be a clear liturgy. I'm not saying every church has to do it the same way, and I'm not saying that any of us are demanded to do all of the particular things in the way that all the other churches do them.
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But beloved, we should be orderly in worship. The scripture commands it. And so what
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I want to do is I actually want to talk about our order of worship.
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You came in this morning. Hopefully you were handed a worship folder, a bulletin.
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If you weren't, I'm going to have it on the screen, so it's okay if you don't have one in your hand. I don't want everybody to feel like you need to run and go grab one.
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But I want to simply, as we, over the next few weeks, we're going to actually dive into some of these elements.
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Why do we sing? What do we sing? Why is that important? Why do we actually read publicly the scripture, and why is that important?
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Why do we pray? How do we pray? Those are questions and whole sermons we're going to do on the subject of these things.
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But today, I just want to look at our order and say, why are we doing what we do? Why are we doing what we do?
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And here, it's on the screen. This is the elements of worship. Remember, this is not the liturgy.
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This is not the order that you have. But this is the elements that make up our liturgy. Number one, corporate prayer.
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Corporate prayer. Are we commanded to pray in private? Yes, yes.
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Jesus says, when you pray, pray like this. Go into your closet. Pray the Lord who sees in quiet.
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Jesus tells us, and I can't apparently quote it. He tells us to go and pray alone.
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Surely, we should do that. But you know what? The Bible also commends to us corporate times of prayer.
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Corporate times of prayer. You know the Lord's prayer assumes corporate prayer? Think of the pronouns.
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Our Father in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come.
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Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our trespasses.
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By the way, Brother Andy led the corporate confession earlier. You want another reason why corporate confession is actually something that we are commanded to do?
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Read the Lord's prayer. The Lord's prayer includes a corporate confession. Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.
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We have seven prayers that we do every Sunday. You ever think about that? We have seven specific prayers we do every
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Sunday. We have a prayer of invocation. That's when the person comes up and reads the scripture and they pray that the
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Lord would be with us as we worship. That he would hear our worship and that he would be satisfied. A prayer of dedication.
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That's the prayer when the person comes up and prays over the offering. Lord, may you take these offerings and use them for your glory.
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Prayer of supplication. Supplication is the prayer of request. This is when Brother Andy or Brother Mike or myself come up and we call it the pastoral prayer.
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And a lot of churches, I have Presbyterian friends. Matthew Everhard is a friend of mine. He calls it the long prayer.
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I don't know if you do, Steve. My brother Steve is here. Do you call it the long prayer too or do you all just call it the pastoral prayer?
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Pastoral prayer. But it's long, right? That's the long one, right? That's it. That's the one where we come up and we're praying for people's needs, right?
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Then we have prayer of illumination. When I come up and open the word of God or Brother Mike or Brother Andy, whoever else is preaching, we open the word of God and we pray,
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God, keep me from error. Pray, open God, open people's eyes. Right? And then we finish with another prayer of illumination.
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God, apply this to the people's heart, right? Apply these truths. And then we have the prayer of consecration.
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When one of our deacons comes down to the table and they say, Lord, these elements represent your body and your blood.
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Right? We're praying over these elements and over what we're about to do. And then finally, what's the last one?
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Benediction. You know what the word benediction means? A prayer of blessing.
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Now, may the Lord bless us and keep us. May he make his face shine upon us and be gracious to us. May he lift up his countenance to us and give us peace.
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That's a prayer of benediction, a prayer of blessing. You ever think about how much our worship service centers around those seven prayers?
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Everything we do either begins or ends with prayer. That's just part of it.
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That's just one element, but it flows through our service. Corporate praise.
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Singing. We sing out our theological convictions. Passing the peace.
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This one I always... I know people... Some people hate the meet and greet.
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And God bless the introverts. I know it struggles because we feel a little inhibited.
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But nobody's seeking to embarrass anyone. This is actually one of the oldest parts or the oldest things that we know they were doing in the church.
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Is that when the church gathered, they greeted one another with a holy kiss. Just be thankful we don't do that anymore.
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But they greeted one another. And that's again, that's not...
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People say, oh, you stop worship to shake hands. No, we don't stop worship. We are worshiping our
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God by acknowledging that we're not doing this by ourselves. But that the person next to us is worshiping along with us.
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And we reach out and we put our hand in theirs. And we say, welcome little brother. Welcome brother.
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We're thankful that you're here. That's important. Can it be a little uncomfortable?
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Yeah. But worship ain't supposed to be about making us comfortable.
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That was the problem in the 80s and the 90s. We made worship all about ourselves. It's not about ourselves.
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It's about God and his people. I gotta move on. I know I'm taking more time than I meant to with this.
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Worship through offering. We don't stop worshiping when we give our offering.
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We worship through the offering. Confession of sin and assurance of forgiveness.
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I'm the first to say, this is new for us. As I've been listening to other preachers talk about this for a long time.
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And I've been seeing it in churches that I've visited. And as I have been studying this idea for myself. I said, I think this is such an important element that we haven't done.
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And that's why the elders and I have been talking about it for a while. And why we decided to introduce it. And it just got introduced last week.
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So if you're new, it's new to us too. That's why today there was a little bit of a hiccup. Because we're just starting to do this.
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But it has historical but also biblical foundation. And that's the most important.
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It doesn't matter if it has history without the Bible. But if it has the Bible and history, then there's no reason not to do it.
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And I tell you what, there are some days. I don't know about you, but I come into worship. And I'm struggling with something from the week.
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And what a blessing it is to be reminded. That we have forgiveness in the Lord Jesus Christ.
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That he has taken our sin as far as the east is from the west. The public reading of scripture.
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Paul tells Timothy, give yourself to the public reading of scripture. Brother Mike reads a chapter a week.
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You know why? Because this is part of worship.
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He's not preaching it. Even though I am very thankful that he gives us at least a little bit of the context. Because sometimes, especially reading the prophets, we can be a little lost.
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So Brother Mike gives us a little bit of a context. So we understand what we're reading. And sometimes I know he's just yearning to preach.
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And I'm thankful that his heart wants to preach. And so, why does he read from Jeremiah?
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Because currently I'm preaching through the New Testament. So we ask him to read from the Old Testament to remind us that both testaments are from God.
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And that we not become so consumed with one that we would leave out the other. If I were preaching in Genesis, like I did a few years ago, we'd be reading from the epistles.
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It would just be the balance of worship at that point. The exposition of scripture.
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This is where we seek to understand God's word. My job is not to entertain.
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My job is not to make you laugh or cry or to tell you stories. But my job is to read the word of God, explain the word of God, apply the word of God.
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That's my job. When I exposit the scripture. That's what exposition is. If you want to know what biblical exposition is, it's not hard.
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It's hard to do. It's hard to do well. But it's not hard to understand. You read the text, you explain the text, you apply the text.
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That's the job of the minister. Or the person preaching. And then finally, and this is going to take us into our next portion of worship.
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And that is the administration of the ordinances. Now, sometimes we might use the word sacrament.
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And I don't want anybody to run away afraid. Because the word sacrament is not a bad word.
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I think it's been co -opted by Rome and others to misuse the term. But to say that the
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Lord's Supper is a sacrament unto God. When I preach, and like I said, I'm preaching through these things. When I get to this,
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I'm really looking forward to talking about the history of the Lord's Supper. And why we hold the view that we hold. I'm actually already, that's going to be the last message
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I do. And I'm already prepping for it. Because I think it's such an important thing to consider. But understand, when we come to the end of the sermon.
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And we come to this table. This is the part of the service that everything has driven toward.
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Everything has driven toward the reminder. The memorial.
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The feast. Where we gather around the table of Christ. And we take into ourselves a reminder of his body and his blood.
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And in that exercise, that corporate participation of eating and drinking together.
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We are reminded, one, that we are one body. That we have one gospel.
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That we are united with Christians all around the world. Who are taking the same bread, the same cup for the same reason.
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And we are reminded of the gospel that has saved us. The whole point of liturgy is corporate participation.
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That all of us would come together with the same mind and the same heart.
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Doing the same thing. Driving to the same purpose. And that is to be reminded of the glorious gospel of Jesus Christ.
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We don't pray individually in corporate worship.
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We pray corporately. We don't sing individually. There may be a solo every once in a while.
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But you'll notice we don't do that a lot here. We sing together. We pray together.
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We read and study corporately in unity. We confess together what we believe.
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Because that's what corporate worship is. Many people coming together to make one body.
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Doing the same thing together. Drawing us to put on display.
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And this is it. The elements of worship work together to put on display the drama of redemption. Point us to the finished work of Christ on our behalf.
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And bring us before our God. That's why we do what we do. And so I want to now prepare us for our time to take the table.
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Because that's the next element of worship. As we consider what we're moving towards, let us not forget why we do this.
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Jesus Christ commanded us to remember his death until he comes.
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He commanded us to gather. And he says, do this as often as you do it.
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In remembrance of me. What are we remembering? Well, we're remembering one, that we need a savior.
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Let us never forget that we are sinners who desperately needed a savior. We're remembering that God sent his son.
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We sang about this in our first song. In the fullness of time, God sent forth his son, born of a woman, born under the law.
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That he might redeem those who are under the law and give us the adoption of sons. We're remembering that he was beaten, bloodied, bruised, battered, and nailed to a tree.
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Where he hung between heaven and earth and received in himself the fullness of the wrath of God for our sins.
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And now he says to us, anyone who believes on him will not only have their sins forgiven, but will be given his righteousness as their standing before God.
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And so I ask, is that you today? Have you trusted in the finished work of Christ?
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Has your sin been forgiven through his blood?
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And are you standing before God not by your works, but because of the works of Christ as righteous before him?
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You may have come in today and never heard the gospel. You may have never heard that you were a sinner. You may have never heard that you needed a savior.
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Jesus can save anyone who trusts in him.
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His arm is not so short that it cannot save, as the scripture tells us. He can reach even you.
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So if you've never believed on the Lord Jesus Christ, turn from your unbelief and trust in him.
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If you have trusted in the Lord Jesus Christ, we welcome you to participate with us as we remember his body and his blood.
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Let us pray. Father, I thank you for this time of worship through the preaching of the word.
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And now as we move to the worship through the participation in the ordinance, may it be, oh God, that you are glorified.
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For Lord, everything we do in worship, we want to do to glorify you. Everything we do, we want to do with purpose, not haphazardly or chaotically, but orderly.
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And so, Father, may it be that we worship you now through the participation of the bread and the cup.