57a) Directives for Ordering Public Worship #2

The point: Plan worship services with an awareness of an unusual number of unconverted people present, aiming to confront them with God's reality.

Ellie Maxwell's definition of a rut as 'nothing but a grave with the ends kicked out' is quoted to warn against falling into predictable, lifeless worship forms.

you must seek under God to arrange the God-ordained elements so as to secure a maximum measure of these four God-ordained ends. And that is a kind of spiritual artistry to be cultivated to the end of your days as surely as preaching is, another form of spiritual artistry. Never feel you've attained, as you remember old Ellie Maxwell said when warning me about getting in a rut, brother, you know what a rut is? No, sir, it's nothing but a grave with the ends kicked out.

8:13 - 8:48 Read in full sermon

Driving home: It is not, in a text here and there, that the New Testament bears its testimony to the doctrine of the Trinity. The whole book is Trinitarian to the core.

Extensive quotes from B.B. Warfield's 'Biblical and Theological Studies' are used to demonstrate that the Trinity is not merely inculcated but presupposed throughout the New Testament, being revealed in deed through the incarnation and outpouring of the Spirit.

And therefore, if we are worshipping God as He has revealed Himself in the New Covenant, that worship will be worship of the God who is revealed as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Let me give several extensive quotes from Warfield before, turning to some of these specific texts. On page 32 and following of Biblical and Theological Studies, where I have that article on the Trinity. It is clear, in other words, that as we read the New Testament, we are not witnessing the birth of a new conception of God.

12:43 - 13:20 Read in full sermon

Driving home: He that fails in any one of these, he breaks all order in Gospel worship. Owen says, if that Trinitarian consciousness does not pervade our worship, we break all order in Gospel worship.

John Owen's treatise on Gospel Worship is quoted to explain that in New Covenant worship, each person of the Trinity affords distinct communion to the worshiper, and failure to acknowledge this breaks 'all order in Gospel worship.'

Therefore, in Owen's treatise on Gospel Worship, Volume 9, a marvelous treatise, on pages 56 and 57, he makes the following observation focusing on the first of those texts listed, Ephesians 2.18, for in Him we both have our access, or through Him we both have our access in one spirit, unto the Father. Through Christ, in the Spirit, unto the Father. The first thing in general observable from these words is that in the spiritual worship of the Gospel, the whole blessed Trinity and each person therein distinctly do in that economy and dispensation

19:28 - 20:11 Read in full sermon

The point: Ensure worship is suffused with filial liberty, allowing people to approach God with intimacy and freedom as sons and daughters.

The Aramaic word 'Abba' is explained to convey filial liberty and intimacy, contrasting it with a formal, austere approach to God, emphasizing the Spirit's role in enabling this closeness.

It's unthinkable. If he has come to attest to our sonship and to enable us to approach with liberty, filial liberty, and say Abba, that word of intimacy, I'm not prepared to say Daddy, because it has too many connotations that take in the direction I don't want to, but neither am I going to bleed that word of its significance. That Aramaic word was not the Son coming in his Sunday go-to-meet-and-best with a previous appointment to his austere Victorian father and coming into his drawing room and saying, Father, may I speak to you? It was Dad.

36:24 - 37:00 Read in full sermon

The point: Ensure worship is suffused with filial liberty, allowing people to approach God with intimacy and freedom as sons and daughters.

William Taylor's 'The Ministry of the Word' is quoted to assert that a 'filial heart' is the first indispensable qualification for leading public worship, as it attunes the heart to spirituality and cures dull devotion.

Listen to William Taylor's comments in his classic work on the Christian ministry called The Ministry of the Word, pages 2, 10, and 11. And I quote this because many of you don't have that book, and this is so critical at this very point. It's in the section on the conducting of public worship. But the question with which I now have to deal is this.

38:21 - 38:45 Read in full sermon

Driving home: We need no splendid liturgy or gorgeous ritual. And if you were living today, he'd say, we need no mine, we need no rock groups, we need only a fresh baptism with the spirit of adoption.

The analogy of a child bounding into a parent's room, confident of welcome and having their ear, illustrates the natural, sincere, and liberty-filled approach believers should have to God as Father.

What liberty is that which a son enjoys? How he comes bounding into our room, no matter how we may be engaged, calculating that we'll welcome him, and knowing he's laid hold of our fatherhood, he has laid hold of our strength. When his appealed daddy gets to our heart, he's got our ear. How little is there of the artificial or insincere in such an approach as a child makes to his father. But is it not

42:27 - 42:53 Read in full sermon

The point: Do not quench the fire of the Spirit by rigidly adhering to predetermined lengths for elements like prayer, especially when conscious of unusual enlargement.

The analogies of an active volcano and a madman are used to illustrate the undesirable extreme of total unpredictability in worship, which can intimidate and threaten congregants, contrasting it with sanctified flexibility.

ought to be regular, normal, ordinary structures, because again, decency and order do things according to the scheme of things, that they are seemly. So on the one hand, we don't want that kind of wooden, inflexible rigidity that moves toward a kind of cold rationalism. On the other hand, if you're like me, I'm in intimidated and threatened by the total unpredictability of an active volcano. I'm not going to pitch my tent at the base of an active volcano whose eruptions cannot be predicted. Nor

52:00 - 52:36 Read in full sermon