Theses on Worship: Part IV

Here is more from Jim Jordan's book Theses on Worship

1. The Psalter should be woven into the warp and woof of worship. 
"If we drift from the psalms, the warchants of the Prince of Peace, we shall drift into an easy and lax piety.  The inner warfare will be deemphasized, and the warfare for the world will disappear...The fact of the matter is that the present generation of American Christians will either learn to sing psalms, or it will die...God wrote the psalms, and they are the most appropriate form of and school of praise.  Dare we offer Him anything else?"

2. Worship is sacrificial.
"In the broadest sense, sacrifice is not a negative, but a positive thing. When God sacrifices us, He transforms us into new creatures. He takes us apart and puts us back together again as newer, better, more glorious, more transfigured, more powerful servants. It is only because of sin that this act of God's is painful to us...Worship is to be a transforming, transfiguring event in our lives, a time when God sacrifices us, and fits us for His presence and his Kingdom."

3. Worship is covenant renewal.
"Human beings were created in covenant with God, and we are always covenant-beings...one implication of [this] is that doing worship self-consciously as a covenant renewal is good for us.  We were made to be patterned covenantally, and so the best form of worship is the one that conforms to the covenant pattern."

Here is Jordan's description of a covenant renewal worship service:
1. God calls us.
2. God glorifies us.
3. God instructs us.
4. God feeds us.
5. God commissions us.

Take Up and Read: Thursday Edition

As I noted last week, several evangelical scholars have come out recently denying that a historical Adam ever existed. Evangelicals should be all upset by this jump into heterodoxy, but in general they are not. It seems that we have better things to do than defend the historical Adam. Here are two posts which address the problem. First, Kevin DeYoung gives us ten reasons to believe in the historical Adam.  Second, the Bayly Brothers show how a seminary can corrupt a young man, particularly on the issue of evolution. What is a man to do when one of the most "conservative" seminaries in the country from one of the most "conservative" denominations allows a man to teach who doesn't believe Adam existed?

Here is a short blog post by R.C. Sproul Jr. on myths or half truths evangelicals believe. I thought number 1 was especially good.  When we make all sins equal it is usually to make our sins look not so bad and the other person's sins to look terrible.

Al Mohler shows how President Obama's compromise on contraception was not really a compromise at all.

Rachel Jankovic lists ten ways to love your kids. I found this one, "Don't change your behavior toward you children in public" convicting. It is a fear of man, not love of God that causes us to have one standard for our children at home and another in public.

Theses On Worship: Part III

More from Jim Jordan on worship.

1. Love makes things beautiful
In this section Jim Jordan argues that love for God will cause us to beautify the various parts of worship. This includes our dress, the Communion table, the pulpit and the entire sanctuary. One area that needs a lot more work by conservative, protestants is how to make the places we worship sanctuaries where the beauty of God and his world is seen.  Too often our sanctuaries feel like a shopping mall or a theater.  If there are decorations they are usually not linked with anything in the Bible. One positive sign has been the emergence of cloth banners in churches. They perform the same service as stained glass windows did in early periods. They make the sanctuary beautiful and tell of who God and/or what he has done.

2. Worship should be dramatic
"Worship is drama...The liturgy is theater performed by all of us before God.  Thus, entering, kneeling, standing, clapping, eating, etc. are all aspects of drama.  We don't need to have little skits during the sermon in order to have drama in worship! After all, what on earth is more dramatic than being called into God's presence, kneeling to confess our corporate sinfulness in Adam and our actual daily sins, being sealed again into His community by absolution, standing to praise Him with vigor, hearing the 'orders of the Day of the Lord' from the Commander in Chief, giving Him our gifts, sitting down to dine with Him and being sent out, commissioned by Him to service?  It shows great poverty of thought to imagine that we need to have skits in the sermon, when we have these dramatic treasures to employ."

3. Worship comes in the context of death.
"The Bible says that the gospel comes to those who all their lives are subject to the fearfulness of death (Hebrews 2:15)  Death is the primordial punishment and the last enemy. Death suffuses human life, rendering it cheap and miserable.  This is a fact that no amount of positive-thinking Pelagianism can make go away...It is the pastoral ministry of the Church and only the Church that can deal with the fact of death...The fact that the gospel comes in the pastoral context of ministry in the face of death is absolutely destructive to two of the most virulent forms of modern gnosticism.  It is destructive to ideology, the promotion of Christianity as a set of ideas to be implemented through a crusade.  It is also destructive to the 'prosperity and happiness' message so often promoted by the media-gnostics over our airwaves...The gospel is good news for real people hurting in real life situations. That is why modern gospel songs are so inadequate. They present a 'happy gospel' without the context of pain, enemies and death.

Worship or Evangelism?

Here are some additional thoughts by Jim Jordan on whether worship should be evangelistic or not.  I agree with his general argument. Our worship service is for believers.

"If worship is turned into evangelism, then it is no longer prayer.  Jesus said His house was to be a house of prayer."

Here he comments on I Corinthians 14:24-25.  "To the marginal extent that worship is evangelistic, it is precisely when it is completely uncompromised.  We don't worship to be seen by men, but if men are going to watch us anyway, we should not compromise for them.  The more uncompromisedly Biblical we are, the better the 'witness' is."

"When we turn worship into an open evangelistic meeting, or try to accommodate worship to evangelistic purposes, we lose the purpose of worship.  Worship and evangelism are two different things. The one is directed toward God, the other toward unconverted sinners.  The Church will be much healthier when these two things are kept separate.  We need to do both; but we don't need to confuse them."

Theses on Worship: Part II

Here are three more of Jim Jordan's Theses for the Reformation of Worship.

1. Worship is a command performance.
"Worship is service rendered to God.  It is a public, ritual affirmation of the primacy of God.  We are the dancers and He is the audience. The world of unbeliever is not the audience, and their opinions of what we are doing should not carry the slightest weight...Since worship is a command performance, it is done at His command. We have been summoned by the King of kings.  To stay away from worship without good reason is to spit in the face of God...Since worship is a command performance, it is to be done under God's rules."

2. Worship is family time.
"Worship is when God's family draw near to Him...since (ideally) unbelievers should not be in the meeting at all, there should never, ever be a 'word to the lost'...Exhortations in worship should be addressed only to believers...The Church should host other occasions for evangelism and open fellowship, but worship is not one of those times...What unbelievers think about our music, our dance, our culture, etc. should play absolutely no part whatsoever in our worship culture.  Their opinions count for nothing."

3.  Worship should be beautiful.
"We are called together to glorify and honor God.  Glory in the Bible is always associated with beauty...Glorifying God means offering our best to Him, not the easiest and not the most familiar...We should first use the resources of Christian tradition in God's worship, not the latest fads of popular heathen culture.  The Spirit has guided the Church for 2000 years. The tradition is not absolute, but it is our heritage all the same...The tradition of the Church is the believer's first culture and his national culture is secondary."

Take Up and Read: Thursday Edition

Here is a link to all the Desiring God Pastors Conference messages. They are all worth your time. I found Pastor Piper's on J.C. Ryle to be excellent.

If you are looking for a crash course on the conservative view of the Constitution, check out these lectures from the president of Hillsdale College, Dr. Larry Arnn.

The Elephant Room 2 has changed some things in reformed world.  Thabiti Anaybwile discusses what has changed and what has not changed. His words are wise. I especially enjoyed these three points: Theological depth is critical, We need a practical understanding of repentance and Our cooperation can have a liberalizing tendency. It is a shame we leave events like these behind so quickly. In our world, lessons are disposable. No doubt, by this time next year the Elephant Room 2 will be forgotten, along with the lessons God intended for us to learn from it.

Here Toby Sumpter explains how corporate salvation and individual salvation fit together. This paragraph was fantastic:

One conclusion to draw from the inextricable connection between our individual salvation and our corporate sharing of salvation is a pastoral one: to call sinners to repentance is necessarily to summons them to care about the people sitting next to them. To call a man, woman, or child to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ is to call them to begin to love their neighbors, brothers, sisters, parents, and children. This is witnessed in the household conversions in the New Testament, and meshes with the big picture.

How often do we view repentance only as a turn away from sin towards God?  But if what Jesus says in Matthew 22:37-40 means anything then repentance also involves turning in love towards our neighbors.

Finally, Eric Metaxas gave a speech at the national prayer breakfast. With President Obama in the audience he winsomely decried false Christianity, declared Christ to be the one way and compared abortion to the Nazi Holocaust. I did not agree with every jot and tittle, but in our age it is a rare man who will speak with such boldness on a very public platform.  Here is an article at nationalreview.com describing the event. Here is the video of Metaxas giving the speech. He begins speaking around the 34 minute mark. Here and here are links to Metaxas' two biographies, one on Bonhoeffer and one on Wilberforce.

Take Up and Read: Wednesday Edition

Coal is close to the heart of many West Virginians. Since  I make my home in West Virginia this photo gallery of coal operations around the world was interesting.
 
Here is Pastor Voddie Baucham on his invitation to Elephant Room 2, why he declined, the subsequent fallout and how race can push out orthodoxy.We need men like Pastor Baucham because he can confront black pastors who are heretics without race clouding the discussion.

In 2005 Peter Enns wrote a book that toed the line about Biblical inerrancy. Many felt the book opened the door to the Bible being fallible, though this may not have been Enns' intention. This eventually led to him leaving Westminster Seminary. Now he has written a book claiming that evolution and Christianity can coexist. (All you "there is no slippery slope" people need to take note.) Peter Leithart, who is a friend of Enns, takes him to task here and here.  (Call it Peter vs. Peter brought to you by Peter.) The view that the early chapters in Genesis are not historical has gained considerable traction in "evangelical" circles lately. Tremper Longman is another man who has denied that Adam was a historical figure. This battle is not going away any time soon. I am grateful for Peter Leithart and the CRE (my denomination) which hold strongly to six-day creation. 

Kevin DeYoung on why we should still have an evening service. Our church currently has only one per month. But DeYoung's points are worth thinking about. One question he doesn't address is "why has the church dropped the evening service?"  The answer to this will tell us something how thinking in the church has shifted in last couple of decades. Has it dropped because our society has changed so much that getting to church twice on Sunday is now almost impossible?It is a logistical shift with people living further away from the place they worship?  Or has it dropped because we have substituted discussion groups for preaching?  Or has it dropped because we have become a lazier society that doesn't really want to show up at church twice in one day? It would be interesting to know why people stopped coming to the evening service and why churches stopped having them.

Here and here are some wonderful quotes from Doug Wilson's lectures at the Desiring God Pastor's Conference. He is my favorite teacher/pastor on the home and pastoral ministry.

Prayer in Worship

On Monday I quoted James Jordan's first two theses from his book Theses on Worship. This morning I wanted to bring together his two points that worship is prayer and worship does not come naturally to make some observations about prayer in public worship.

1. Prayer should dominate the public worship of God's people.  There should be many prayers in a worship service. They need not be long, but they must be frequent.

2. During worship, God's people should pray some prayers together. At our church we confess our sins with a corporate confession of sin that we all say. I would like to add more corporate prayers over the coming years. Anyone who doesn't like this should stop singing songs like, "Great is Thy Faithfulness" or "Come Thou Almighty King," which are both prayers.

3. Praying correctly and biblically is not something automatically inserted into a new believer's brain.  Proper prayer is learned.  Prayer is primarily learned in corporate worship. Those men who wish to pray in the public worship service must be well versed in the prayers and psalms in the Bible. Their prayers must be built on the foundation of God's Word. They would also be wise to have The Book of Common Prayer on hand, as well as Hughs Oliphant Old's book Leading in Prayer.

4. Learning to pray requires work.

R.L. Dabney on Public Prayer

Yesterday I quoted from James Jordan's Theses on Worship.  I want to now do several posts on prayer in the public worship of God's people, thus bringing together Jordan's first two points, worship is about prayer and worship is not natural.

Here are some quotes from R.L. Dabney on public prayer. It comes from the final chapter of his excellent book Evangelical Eloquence, which is a book on how to preach. These quotes will focus on the duty of the ministers, and I would add elders, to prepare for public prayer.

"I deem that the minister is as much bound to prepare himself for praying in public as for preaching.  The negligence with which many preachers leave their prayer to accident[chance], while they lay out all their strength on their sermons, is most painfully suggestive of unbelief toward God and indifference to the edification of their brethren."

"The many blemishes which we hear in public prayers are to be traced to two sources: first, deficient piety, and second, deficient preparation."

Here are the six things Dabney believes we should remember about public prayer. The sentence in italics is my summary of Dabney's point.

1. The grace of prayer is to be secured only by a life of personal and private devotion. He who carries a cold heart into the pulpit betrays it not only to God, whose detection of it is inevitable, but almost surely to the hearers also. Powerful prayer in the pulpit comes from a holy life and much time in prayer outside the pulpit.

2. The pastor should remember that he is praying on behalf of the people, therefore his language should be simple, his petitions corporate, not private and he should make sure he is praying, not preaching. The pastor is to pray for the people, not for himself.

3. "The leader of the church's prayers shall present distinct and definite petitions, and these not too numerous....The leader of prayer should therefore speak as one who has an errand at the throne, a point to press to God." The prayers should be filled with specific requests for both the local body and the church at large.

4. "He who leads the devotions of others must study appropriateness of matter.  He should ask himself what would be uppermost in the hearts of Christians at that time"  Pastor should pray about those things which matter most to Christians. 

5. The language of prayer should be well-ordered and considerate. He who speaks to the Searcher of hearts should beware how he indulges any exaggeration of words, lest his tongue should be found to have outrun his mind and to have "offered the sacrifice of fools."The pastor's prayers should be carefully thought out so he does not say things he will later regret or that offend the Lord.

6. "Above all should the minister enrich his prayers with the language of Scripture. Its inimitable beauty and simplicity, it is hallowed and sweet to every pious heart by a thousand associations.  It satisfies the tastes of all; its use effectually protects us against improprieties; it was doubtless given by the Holy Spirit to be a model for our devotions." Pastoral prayers should be filled with language from the Bible.

Theses on Worship: Part I

My own views on worship have shifted dramatically from my younger days. The book that started me thinking more biblically about worship was James Jordan's Theses on Worship. Jordan gets into your face and under your skin and forces you to reevaluate what worship is.   I wanted to quote several of Jordan's theses here my blog. My hope is to introduce his ideas. Here are the first two theses from the book followed by some of his comments under that section.

1. God's house is a house of prayer
"The Lord's Day meeting of the Church is for prayer first and foremost.  It is not for evangelism. It is not [for] entertainment.  It is not for miracle, mystery or morality plays. It is not for an organ recital or a rock concert. It is not for intensive instruction.  It is for prayer."

2. The faithful worship of the true God does not come naturally to fallen man.
"It is pervasively assumed today that worship is easy, and that it should be easy.  There should not be anything hard about it.  It should be easy to learn and easy to do. Says who...It takes practice to learn to dance. It takes practice to play the piano.  It takes practice to learn to ride a bicycle. It takes practice to learn to tie your shoes.  But when it comes to worship, what we hear is, 'No, no!  May it never be! Worship must be easy.'  What insanity is this?

A stranger comes to Church and says, 'My goodness. I don't know any of these psalms.  I don't know when to stand and when to kneel and when to sit. I'm confused. I'm out of step. I don't feel like I belong here.' Well, what do we say?  'Aw gee, we're so sorry.  We'll just take out all the beauty and form of worship and we won't do anything that you in your total ignorance won't appreciate.' Yes that's what the modern conservative, evangelical Church says.

But that is not what we should be saying.  What we should say is this: 'That's right.  Worship is an art, something beautiful done before God's throne for His glory.  We had to learn how to do it, and if you come into the Church, we'll teach you how as well. Anything that is good and wonderful takes effort, and our worship is not something we do sloppily and with backs of our hands.  Worship is something we cultivate, and it takes practice and patience to learn it.' That is what we should say, and if we loved men, it is what we would say.  After all...true worship is good for men; while sloppy worship is destructive."