There is a difference between going to a service 'for the worship' and going to a service 'to worship the Lord.' The distinction appears to be a minor one, but it may imply the difference between the worship of God and the worship of music!
If Christ does not come back within the next few years, I could visualize the possibility of a new alignment. Those standing for the total authority of all Scripture and for the principle of the practice of the purity of the visible Church would draw together and away from relativism, which surrounds us in the total culture and which has infiltrated the Church.
As from true divine love flow all Christian affections, so from a counterfeit love in like manner naturally flow other false affections. In both cases, love is the fountain, and the other affections are the streams.
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| From: The Unhappy Hipster |
“When the unclean spirit has gone out of a person, it passes through waterless places seeking rest, but finds none. Then it says, ‘I will return to my house from which I came.’ And when it comes, it finds the house empty, swept, and put in order. Then it goes and brings with it seven other spirits more evil than itself, and they enter and dwell there, and the last state of that person is worse than the first. So also will it be with this evil generation.”About these verses, scholar and commentator Dale Bruner writes:
Empty, neutral, externally Christianized people sooner or later find their little passions - from civic clubs to sports, from politics to parlor games - insufficiently fulfilling. For our own good, therefore, Jesus summons us to 'Fill the house!' to join the church and to take her worship services seriously, to appropriate our filling by the Holy Spirit given to us in Christian baptism, and to become Jesus' disciples in the world of our work. For our empty, swept, tidy houses will be filled sooner or later by something, because houses are for occupancy.*Emphasis added.
In Jesus Christ the reality of God has entered into the reality of this world. The place where the questions about the reality of God and about the reality of the world are answered at the same time is characterized solely by the name: Jesus Christ. God and the world are enclosed in this name ... we cannot speak rightly of either God or the world without speaking of Jesus Christ. All concepts of reality that ignore Jesus Christ are abstractions.
For many Christians the concept of denying themselves was not part of the deal. They grew up with the message that such a radical decision really isn't necessary. So they signed up to follow Jesus, but if denying themselves was part of the explanation, it was definitely the fine print. That's especially true of American Christians. In part, this ids due to the collision of Christianity with American capitalism. It has created a culture of consumers in our churches. Instead of approaching their faith with a spirit of denial that says, "What can I do for Jesus?" they have a consumer mentality that says, "What can Jesus do for me?"Emphasis added.
People do not drift toward Holiness. Apart from grace-driven effort, people do not gravitate toward godliness, prayer, obedience to Scripture, faith, and delight in the Lord. We drift toward compromise and call it tolerance; we drift toward disobedience and call it freedom; we drift toward superstition and call it faith. We cherish the indiscipline of lost self-control and call it relaxation; we slouch toward prayerlessness and delude ourselves into thinking we have escaped legalism; we slide toward godlessness and convince ourselves we have been liberated.
Suppose we ponder how slippery is the fall of the human mind into forgetfulness of God, how great the tendency to every kind of error, how great the lust to fashion constantly new and artificial religions. Then we may perceive how necessary was such written proof of heavenly doctrine, that it should neither perish through forgetfulness nor vanish through error nor be corrupted by the audacity of men. It is therefore clear that God has provided the assistance of his Word for the sake of all those to whom he has been pleased to give useful instruction because he foresaw that his likeness imprinted upon the most beautiful form of the universe would be insufficiently effective.God always knew that would would need the Word.
Preaching in the contemporary English-speaking world--and even in the evangelical and Reformed community--has not been impervious to the negative forces brought to bear on proclamation as a method of evangelism and discipleship. A video-drowned and educationally-challenged culture, and a church bent on accommodating herself to the dominant communication theories of the day, challenge the minister committed to the "foolishness of preaching." He faces significant pressure to truncate and thin out his message, to entertain, to explore alternate media, and even to abandon historic modes of proclamation altogether. Such a milieu is discouraging to the extreme for the preacher (young or old, novice or master) who simply wants to be faithful. In this setting, every encouragement is useful. Indeed, it helps to beat this old drum and remind men that they are not crazy for wanting to remain faithful, to say to them, "Stay at the wheel; hold fast; keep on; don't give up; you're not alone."Emphasis added.
It is said we live in an age of doubt, in an age of the death of God. We must be careful how we say this. We ought not imply that human nature has normally liked the truth of God and that only recently, in modern times, have people found God doubtful. As the Apology of the Augsburg Confession (1531) ... reminds us, ever since the Fall, human nature has universally resisted the true God, hid from God, doubted, and distrusted God. Adam and Eve hid from God immediately after their rejection of God's command (Gen 3:8). And the apostle Paul taught us that we are not so much naturally seekers after God's truth as we are suppressors of it (Rom 1:18-3:20). Human nature lives in doubt of God's reality because it wants to. The last three centuries have simply succeeded in making this fact explicit and praiseworthy. Care needs to be taken lest we glorify doubt and make doubt seem more mature, advanced, and modern than faith. Doubt of God is not a virtue to preen. The praise of doubt is sometimes fulsome, especially in college settings, and is often boorish. Let us doubt a great deal, but not God. Let us especially doubt what the world exalts, "for what is exalted among human beings is an abomination in the sight of God" (Luke 16:15). And one of the things secularism exalts is doubt of God. "Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that unless we love the truth we cannot know it" (Pascal, Pensées).Emphasis added. Excerpt from Matthew: A Commentary. The Christbook: Matthew 1-12, page 123.
It it is worse than useless for Christians to talk about the importance of Christian morality, unless they are prepared to take their stand upon the fundamentals of Christian theology. It is a lie to say that dogma does not matter; it matters enormously. It is fatal to let people suppose that Christianity is only a mode of feeling; it is vitally necessary to insist that it is first and foremost a rational explanation of the universe. It is hopeless to offer Christianity as a vaguely idealistic aspiration of a simple and consoling kind; it is, on the contrary, a hard, tough, exacting, and complex doctrine, steeped in a drastic and uncompromising realism. And it is fatal to imagine that everybody knows quite well what Christianity is and needs only a little encouragement to practice it. The brutal fact is that in this Christian country not one person in a hundred has the faintest notion what the Church teaches about God or man or society or the person of Jesus Christ ... Theologically this country is at present is in a state of utter chaos established in the name of religious toleration and rapidly degenerating into flight from reason and the death of hope.Emphasis added. (HT: The White Horse Inn)
A gospel which is only about the moment of conversion but does not extend to every moment of life in Christ is too small. A gospel that gets your sins forgiven but offers to power for transformation is too small. A gospel that isolates one of the benefits of union with Christ and ignores all the others is too small. A gospel that must be measured by your own moral conduct, social conscience, or religious experience is too small. A gospel that rearranges the components of your life but does not put you personally in the presence of God is too small.Emphasis added for the contemporary American churchgoer.
There is water somewhere in the world that ran down the body of the Word Himself as John, His cousin, baptized Him. No doubt it is water still, uncherished by man, known only by the Author of this story. Drops were chosen to serve as His tears beside Jerusalem, more were chosen to wait in His side for the tip of a Roman spear. They burst forth and completed their poetic calling, a flourish in the story, a picture within a picture."
A church that is not nourished yesterday, today, and tomorrow by the wholesome food of the Word of God in Scripture - a church not ruled and dominated by exegesis - is on her way to death. For too long the mainline churches in Christendom have illustrated this death march by teaching and preaching a Bible that has been only marginally appropriated (witness the death of the biblical-language requirement in many seminaries and denominations) because, it is said, there are in fact so many other imperative issues. (What is Hebrew in a hungry world?) We have become churches without doctrinal passion (for doctrinal passion would be "fundamentalism," the kiss of death), and a result has been people leaving our churches in droves and flocking to what are called independent or Bible churches where, at least, they are given doctrines served with fire. A return by mainline churches to a responsible christocentric biblical passion will be a return to apostolic-catholic-Reformation Christianity with all of this Christianity's perennial sources of spiritual and social renewal."Bruner's words were first published in 1987, and yet most mainline denominations persist with their marginalization of the Word of God with predicable results. For example, on July 1, the stated clerk of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) announced, in a classic Friday-night-news-dump kind of way, that the denomination lost 61,000 members in 2010 alone.
You have to deliver your Lord's errand as he enables you, and if this be done, you are responsible to no one but your heavenly Master, who is no harsh judge. You do not enter the pulpit to shine as an orator, or to gratify the predilections of your audience; you are the messenger of heaven and not the servant of men. Remember the words of the Lord to Jeremiah, and be afraid to be afraid. 'Thou therefore gird up thy loins and arise, and speak unto them all that I command thee: be not dismayed at their faces, lest I confound thee before them' (Jer. 1:17). Trust in the Holy Spirit's present help, and the fear of man which bringeth a snare will depart from you.-- Charles Haddon Spurgeon, Lectures to My Students, 175.
The wrath of God is not to be set in sharp contrast with the love and mercy of God. It is so often asserted that if God is truly love then he cannot be angry. But wrath and love are not mutually exclusive. In the NT as well as the Old, in Jesus as in the prophets and apostles the proclamation of God's mercy is accompanied by the preaching of his wrath. A holy God does not stand idly by when men act unrighteously, transgress the law, show disdain to him as their creator or spurn his love and mercy. He acts in a righteous manner punishing sin in the present and especially on the final day. Yet God also acquits the guilty, and only the person who understands something of the greatness of his wrath will be mastered by the greatness of his mercy. The converse is also true: only he who has experienced the greatness of God's mercy can understand something of how great that wrath must be.-- Peter T. O'Brien, Colossians, 185, quoting Stählin's TDNT entry on the wrath of God.
A sign you're growing in grace: You remain humble & grateful when God uses someone more powerfully than you in your city.-- Scotty Ward Smith
Using a little imagination every reader of the OT soon realizes that these ancient sacrifices were very moving occasions. They make modern church services seem tame and dull by comparison. The ancient worshipper did not just listen to the minister and sing a few hymns. He was actively involved in the worship. He had to choose an unblemished animal from his own flock, bring it to the sanctuary, kill it and dismember it with his own hands, then watch it go up in smoke before his very eyes. He was convinced that something very significant was achieved through these acts and knew that his relationship with God was profoundly affected by this sacrifice.-- From Gordon J. Wenham's commentary The Book of Leviticus, page 55.
This I suppose to be the blessed Trinity that we read in the Scriptures. The Father is the deity subsisting in the prime, unoriginated and most absolute manner, or the deity in its direct existence. The Son is the deity generated by God's understanding, or having an idea of Himself and subsisting in that idea. The Holy Ghost is the deity subsisting in act, or the divine essence flowing out and breathed forth in God's infinite love to and delight in Himself. And I believe the whole Divine essence does truly and distinctly subsist both in the Divine idea and Divine love, and that each of them are properly distinct persons."--Jonathan Edwards, An Essay on the Trinity
Many people visualize a god who sits comfortably on a distant throne, remote, aloof, uninterested, and indifferent to the needs of mortals, until, it may be, their importune cries badger him into taking action on their behalf. Such a view is false to the point of blasphemy. The bible reveals a God, who, long before it even occurs to man to turn to Him, while man is still shrouded in darkness and sunk in sin, takes the initiative, rises from His throne, lays aside His glory, and stoops to seek until He finds him.-- John R.W. Stott, from chapter 1 of his terrific little book entitled Basic Christianity.
