Embracing True Worship: The Sufficiency of Christ

"Paul, when he writes this epistle from the get-go, wants them to understand that when you have Jesus, you have everything. You have all that you need to take you all the way home." [00:04:08]

"These have indeed an appearance of wisdom in promoting self-made religion and asceticism and severity to the body, but they are of no value in stopping the indulgence of the flesh." [00:05:31]

"Now the Bible speaks about all of life as worship. For example, in Romans chapter 12, 'I appeal to you, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship,' or in some translations the Greek word for worship, latreia, is translated 'service,' and we still use that term." [00:07:22]

"Now, I want to take you back almost 500 years or so, first of all, to Strasbourg in Switzerland, roughly around the 1550s. Calvin was halfway through his ministry in Geneva. And John Knox from Scotland was in exile from Queen Mary. And if you were Scottish in the 16th century, you would know French and you would speak French, and John Knox knew and spoke French." [00:10:58]

"Now, let me jump forward one hundred years to England, to London, to 1643, and the gathering together of the Westminster Divines whose task, and this task was set to them by the prevailing government of the day to bring some kind of order and unity, and structure to church government and worship." [00:16:21]

"Now this principle has been called 'the regulative principle of worship.' The regulative principle of worship. And what does that entail? What, what does Scripture prescribe for worship? Well, things like prayer, and preaching, and sacraments, and the reading of Scripture, and benedictions and so on." [00:21:48]

"Now, all of that may sound legalistic, but not if your view is to worship God according to the way that He has prescribed. That is not legalistic. To live one's life in obedience to the moral law of God as God has prescribed, is not legalistic." [00:25:09]

"The first is that it prevents the tyranny of ministerial bullying. Now let me tell you a story. And I'm going back, over 30 years and more. And I was writing then for a publisher. They still exist, still produce wonderful books, Evangelical Press, and I had written a couple of books for Evangelical Press, and they had a house, a cottage in the Cotswolds." [00:28:47]

"Secondly, I said there were four. Secondly, it prevents the cult of novelty. I got an email last week. It comes fairly often, from marketing people, and the headline of the email, which I didn't open, was 'Let us maximize your worship experience.' I can't imagine, what this lady was going to do to maximize my worship experience." [00:33:04]

"The third thing about the relative principle in worship is, and I've already alluded to it, but I want to, I want to underline it again, that the regulative, regulative principle does not mean cookie-cutter worship. So, the worship at Saint Andrew's in Orlando looks a little different from the worship, say, of Steve Lawson in Dallas." [00:36:41]

"The fourth thing, and perhaps this is the most important of all, is that the regulative principle enables worship to focus on what is really important, and that is God Himself. You've had those moments and they are sweet and blessed moments when sometimes it's in the singing of a hymn, sometimes it's in a deeply, deeply personal prayer that's, that's, that's spoken to you in your need and hour of trial, or it may be in a sermon and perhaps in the peroration of a sermon, and you have, you have suddenly realized that God is here." [00:37:35]

"Or perhaps, perhaps I should invert that. That it's not so much a sense of God coming down, but of us being taken into heaven to glimpse for a moment something of the glory that awaits. And, and if we listen carefully, we can hear, the sounds of choirs of angels and archangels, singing in a manner that you have never heard before." [00:38:58]