Dennis Tuuri

# Reformation Covenant Church Sermon Transcript
## Pastor Dennis Tuuri

Psalm 96. Oh, sing unto the Lord a new song. Sing unto the Lord, all the earth. Sing unto the Lord. Bless his name. Show forth his salvation from day to day. Declare his glory among the heathen, his wonders among all people. For the Lord is great and greatly to be praised. He is to be feared above all gods. For all the gods of the nations are idols, but the Lord made the heavens. Honor and majesty are before him.

Strength and beauty are in his sanctuary. Give unto the Lord, oh ye kindreds of the people. Give unto the Lord glory and strength. Give unto the Lord the glory do unto his name. Bring an offering and come into his courts. Oh worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness. Fear before him all the earth. Say among the heathen that the Lord reigneth. The world also shall be established that it shall not be removed.

He shall judge the people righteously. Let the heavens rejoice and let the earth be glad. Let the sea roar in the fullness thereof. Let the field be joyful, and all that is therein. Then shall all the trees of the wood rejoice before the Lord. For he cometh, for he cometh to judge the earth. He shall judge the world with righteousness, the people with his truth.

I think we’ll go ahead and begin. Today we’re going to be summing up the first ten sermons that we’ve done so far on a biblical reformation of liturgy, the order of service, why we do what we do at Reformation Covenant Church, and how our worship should be reformed by the word of God. This is a good place to stop and sum up what we’ve said so far.

We have completed the first half of our formal worship service. The second half happens at the end of our meal together, and then we’ll be talking about that in the next few weeks. But the first half of the worship service is what most people would see as the normal preaching service. And that is the first part of what we do here at Reformation Covenant Church. We concluded that a couple of weeks ago.

So now we’re going to sum all that up and try to put it all together for you, as several of you have asked me to do. We began by saying that liturgy isn’t a word that should scare us. It simply means the work of the people, the worship that we do, the order of service that we perform before God in holy convocative worship on the Lord’s day, the Sabbath. There is not a liturgical church and a non-liturgical church.

There are only churches with high or developed liturgy and undeveloped liturgy. But liturgy is inescapable. And really there are only two kinds of churches: those with good liturgy and bad liturgy. And of course, our value system must be governed by the word of God. And so, good or bad depends on how faithfully we adhere to the biblical patterns that God has given to us for worship.

Now, one of the names in our church is reformation. And we see ourselves as part of a new reformation and having links to the reformation that happened in the 1500s. The reformation produced a group of people known as the Puritans who talked about a thing called the regulative principle, and they said that all of life should be regulated, governed as it were, regulated and kept in proper functioning with the word of God. And so the regulative principle applies to all of life, but it has special significance for what we do in Lord’s Day worship and special convocative worship because the second commandment, the first commandment says we have no other gods.

The second commandment says we can’t have idols. The second commandment has implied in it and in the case laws that we talked about at the beginning of this series that the regulative principle means we can only do in worship, put God’s sanctions in worship. Specifically in worship, he wants us to follow his instructions for worship. We can’t choose which day of the week we’re going to pick to worship him on.

He has given us a day, the Lord’s day, the Christian Sabbath, the eighth day, the day that Christ arose. That’s just one indication. So, what we’ve tried to do is say that liturgy should be reformed according to the Bible because that’s our pattern and our standard for all value. Plus, particularly in worship, it’s very important that we understand that God tells us to do just what he commands us to do.

Now, on the other hand, we don’t have one book in the Bible that says, “This is your worship service.” What we have is worship throughout the Bible and we have indications of how that worship is to be performed in many different ways. And so there isn’t one pattern for worship. We’re not saying that what we do at Reformation Covenant Church is perfect. Number one, of course, because we’re a reformed church, always reforming, always examining the scriptures.

And we’ve made some adjustments based upon these last ten weeks of sermons. And we’re also not saying that what we do is the only way you should worship God. But if your worship doesn’t have the elements that we’re going to talk about today, then it isn’t biblical worship and it’s somehow then not preparing people for life because worship is linked to life and we’ll talk about that as we get to the end of today’s sermon.

I went to Multnomah School of the Bible for one year and I took a course there by a professor named Roger W. and I don’t remember the name of the course—Introduction to the Bible or something—but he had a real nice little way to present it. He started by saying the Bible is a one-part book and then a two-part book and then he went through, the Bible is a three-part book and then a four-part book and a five-part book.

I think he got up to twenty-seven parts or more. I don’t remember. The point is, there’s lots of different ways to outline the scriptures. And so, at our first point this morning in terms of looking for a biblically reformed worship pattern that God gives us from the scriptures, we want to make sure you understand that this isn’t the only way we do here at RCC. There are various biblical patterns laid out in the scriptures, all of which are important to recognize.

Now, let’s turn then to some of those biblical patterns. Biblical worship is first of all the ascription of supreme worth to God. Before we get to the pattern, I guess we wanted to say a little bit about worship. The idea of worship is important to recognize that words are important. Their root is important to understand, and it helps us understand what words mean. The word “worship” came from a Saxon word “worthscribe,” and it was originally the ascription of worth or value to anybody or anything.

Robert J. and I were talking before the service about the Book of Common Prayer, one of the great documents of the Reformation. Many people don’t realize that, but as the Institutes was produced by Calvin at Geneva and in the Swiss Reformation, and as Martin Luther produced the Bondage of the Will, a great book in the German Reformation, as well as other books, one of the other great books that came out of the Reformation was the Book of Common Prayer produced by Cranmer in the English Reformation and it was a very explicitly Calvinistic document and particularly the 39 Articles that accompanied it.

Very strongly Calvinistic, asserting the sovereignty of God and the need to reform our lives. Well, I bring up the Book of Common Prayer because in the wedding service they have a place there in the wedding service where the bridegroom puts the ring on the bride and he says to her “with my body I thee worship,” and in most modern versions they’ve changed that because it sounds idolatrous for the husband to be worshiping the wife. And indeed I suppose in some cultures and in some families in America that idolatry goes on, but originally the Book of Common Prayer said that because it’s important—and we talked about this when we talked about family life—for the husband to ascribe the correct valuation or worth to their wife. That’s part of what biblical marriage is all about: describing the worth to the person that God tells you to ascribe to them.

And so there’s why that word was used. So originally the word “worship” means to ascribe worth or value to something. Today the word has become more specialized and it means to ascribe ultimate or supreme value to somebody, something or whatever. And so true worship, in terms of description of supreme value or worth, belongs only to God. And so worship according to the scriptures and according to the word that God has given in his providence means to ascribe ultimate worth to God.

And we read Psalm 96 a couple of times. You’ll see that in there. There’s the ascription of glory to God called for. Give, give, give to God the glory to his name. Three times repeated in the middle of that psalm. So worship is the ascription of ultimate value or worth to God.

Additionally, this ascription of worth comes from the heart of a man. And I bring this up just to pass over real briefly. The heart today is seen as the seat of emotions.

But in the scriptures, the heart is the whole man. All of man is summarized in the heart. And so, I guess if we wanted to use biblical terminology, we could talk about how we should worship God with our minds, with our intellect, and we should also worship God with our emotions, with our emotional responses. And you put those things together as well as the other parts of who we are as creatures made by God.

They’re all summarized in the heart. And so, all of man should worship God from all of his being. And so, it doesn’t mean just to have intellectual worship. It means to have emotional worship as well. And all of those things are wrapped up in the heart. The totality of the life of man is involved in worship. That means of course that we have to understand what we’re doing. The intellect must be worshiping God.

And that’s why we’re taking this series going through what we do in worship and what the scriptures teach about it, so you can understand these things. But it doesn’t just stop with understanding. If we’ve done our job correctly, more and more you’ll come to appreciate emotionally as well the response that God requires from his creatures in special Lord’s Day worship. And so all those things should work together.

Now another indication that the whole man is involved in worship are the very words that are the basis for worship in the New Testament: latria and logos, and those are the kind of the root words of the term liturgy that we’ve been talking about. And you’ll find in different translations those words in their different forms translated as either service or worship. And so sometimes when I’m trying to describe to people that if they’re visiting here they need to have an order of service.

Sometimes I call it an order of service that they’ll follow through the worship or an order of worship because essentially those two words are very synonymous. The biblical terms for worship of the New Testament as well as the Old Testament have implied in them work, action, service, duty of the people. And so the liturgy really is the work of the people in worshiping God, the service that they owe to God.

And again, that implies that it’s a participatory thing. You don’t come here to hear worship or to watch worship. You come here to do worship. Worship is a verb, as one man wrote in a recent book. This means you participate in the worship.

Now we have a processional for instance. The whole point of that processional group coming up leading us into worship is to act as a support for you also to sing that processional song as we approach the throne of God. Some of us physically coming up the stairs, other of us mentally approaching the throne of God as we recognize who we’re going to come before here and giving him glory and worship. And so you too participate in that. That is the point. And you’re to participate. We’ve made very self-conscious efforts throughout our liturgy to make it participative, participatory on the part of the congregation. It’s not watching. It’s participating in worship to God.

In terms of the sermon, you’re still participating. You’re listening and thinking about responses. You’re evaluating, judging, and determining how it will change your life.

So, biblical worship is from the whole man. It’s the ascription to God of ultimate worth, involves participation. Okay. Now, let’s look at those patterns I mentioned—different ways to outline worship according to the scriptures. And since Congden started with, you know, one, then he added one and then added another part of the Bible that he explained it by, I started with a three-part model and a four-part model, a five-part model and a six-part model.

You know, this is pretty arbitrary, I suppose, but it’s important to recognize that the scriptures again give us a lot of different angles on worship. And God wants us to put those things together and to reform our worship according to these patterns.

We mentioned these before. First, worship is offering. In Leviticus 9:15-21, we have the account of the Aaronic priesthood as they begin to make sacrifices for the people. They’ve made the sacrifices for themselves. They’re consecrated to do the work of sacrifice and offering at the tabernacle. And then in Leviticus 9 it says specifically in verses 15 to 21 the offerings they made for the people and it says there are four offerings but really three groups of offerings.

First there’s a purification or sin offering and that is followed then by the whole burnt offering and that is accompanied with a cereal offering. The cereal offering or meat offering in the King James version is placed alongside of the whole burnt offering on the altar. And then the third set of offering is the peace offering. And this correlates then to the chronology of what they would do at the temple for the sacrifices of the people. And it should then also teach us how to worship from the temple perspective.

And it implies first of all the sin offering is the confession that we bring before God as we come before his presence. We recognize who we’re approaching. We make a sin offering, a purification offering. We confess that we’re unworthy in ourselves apart from the imputed righteousness of Christ and his atoning blood to come into God’s presence. So that correlates to the sin offering.

The conclusion of the sermon will have an offertory. And you bring forward your gifts, your tithes. You bring forward the production of your hand, the cereal or the meat as it were, the meat offering. But it isn’t just that. You’re also bringing your whole body forward and we have quoted in our order of service Romans 12: present your whole bodies as living sacrifices to God. And so we have the whole burnt offering, or rather whole burnt cereal offering together at the offertory.

Now all these things of course point to the finished work of Christ. Our whole burnt bodies are worthless in God’s sight in making propitiation for sin. Only Jesus’s whole burnt offering and our participation in that by faith is what brings us into righteousness with God, his imputed righteousness, his atoning death. But on the basis of that, we consecrate all that we have our whole lives. And then finally, the third element of offering there was the peace offering, which was a meal with God that the worshipper partook of.

And this correlates to communion or the Eucharist, the Lord’s table downstairs after our agape or love feast, which we’ll talk about next week. And it’s good to start with this one because it reminds us that while this morning we’re really focusing on the first half of our formal worship service, there’s more to come and American Christianity has essentially made the first half the only part and so it’s led to this whole idea of the primacy of the synaxis or the synagogue portion of worship and forgetting the temple portion, forgetting to be Christocentric, Christ-centered in terms of the centering on Jesus Christ and his work at communion which is the second half of our worship.

So in the Bible we’ll talk about this over the next few weeks we think the biblical worship means you do both things on Sunday: you hear the word preached; you partake of the word in the elements. And so that’s one of the patterns that God gives us is these patterns here in Leviticus 9. We have the sin offering, whole burnt offering, and then the cereal offering correlating to confession of sins before God as we come to his presence.

The offertory after the word is preached to us. And then finally, the peace offering, the eating of dinner with Jesus as it were downstairs in our communion service.

Secondly, in Isaiah 6:1-9, we have the account of Isaiah coming before the throne of God. And we noted then when we were going through that particular portion of our worship service that there’s a whole bunch of occurrences in the scriptures where you have worship essentially as a divine encounter, an encounter with God himself. And God’s presence is manifested. That’s the beginning of that process. Man then falls down dead at God’s feet.

God resurrects man and then man is instructed for service. And in Isaiah 6 specifically, Isaiah sees the throne room of God. He falls down as a dead man. One of God’s angelic messengers brings a coal from off the altar, touches the lips of Isaiah, and says, “Your sins are forgiven.” And of course, that has reference to the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. And as a result of that, then Isaiah then becomes enlisted for service to go and tell the world what God is going to do next.

And so Isaiah goes through this four-fold pattern. And we went through, I don’t know, ten or fifteen different selections of scripture. We see the same pattern as the essential pattern of worship. We come into God’s presence. And so when we have the processional, we’re proceeding up to the throne of God as it were the way they would in the temple service and they come before God’s special throne room where his law word is expounded and proclaimed.

We come before his presence and the first thing if you understand the God who you’re worshiping, the first thing you do is you feel your own inability, your own weakness, your own sinfulness before God’s presence, and you recognize that you’re dead apart from the work of Jesus Christ. So we fall down as dead men. We confess that before God’s sight, we’re dead apart from Jesus’s salvific work as our covenant mediator.

And then that’s the confession of sins in response to the presence of God as we enter into holy worship. And God gives us an absolution then—the angel took the fire off the altar in other portions of scripture the Christ would put his hand on the man and raise him up. The picture consistent throughout those ten or fifteen references we used before is that God resurrects man; he brings man back from the dead; causes him to stand back up on his feet. God absolves us through the finished work of Jesus Christ.

So this morning we have a formal confession of sin. And then there was a portion of scripture read reminding us that we were dead in trespasses and sins, but God’s quickened us now. He says, “Get up. You can worship me.” And I suppose that to be really a good pattern here, if we could do it, we’d have kneeling benches and we come into the special presence of God and we hear that call to worship on our feet. We fall down to our knees to confess our sins and then at the absolution, we would be raised back up as a picture of what we’re talking about.

This is a pattern for all of life. We’ve been raised up in Jesus Christ. And then of course the rest of the worship service is preparation for service. God says, “You’re here for a reason. You’re here to ascribe glory to me. And because of that ascription of glory to me, I’m going to command you now to do some things out into the world when you leave here. I’m going to prepare you for work for me. And you’re going to do service for me.” And that’s the fourth element of that particular pattern.

Third pattern is the whole book of Deuteronomy. And I won’t belabor this point, but if you look at the book of Deuteronomy, several have pointed out that there is there a rather classic formulation of what’s been known as a suzerainty document, which is simply a big word for a covenant master bringing himself into relationship with a covenant inferior. Remember that the catechism says the covenant is agreement between two or more persons.

But the covenants that God makes with man are always a superior and an inferior. And part of worship is covenant reenactment. And this is why the reformers and other people would frequently have creedal statements in their worship. And we do that in our communion service sometimes. It reminds us of covenant faithfulness on God’s part to us. It’s covenant reenactment. The proclamation of the sermon is a proclamation of the work of Jesus Christ and covenant mediator.

All of scripture points forward to his coming and the work of the covenant. And Diehl’s books—we’ve mentioned them before—are excellent in this regard in saying that the Christ-centered emphasis of the scriptures, which is a covenant-centered emphasis. And so you could look at worship in this five-part model given to us in the book of Deuteronomy.

The whole of Deuteronomy can serve as a model for worship where first we have again the identification of the covenant master, God’s presence and his call to us to be his people. We come forward as submissive people and we recite covenant history as it were. We talk about how the fact that he’s redeemed us out of Egypt. The call is a call out of Egypt as it were, out of our deadness and into newness of life in God.

And so that is pictured as well in this whole cycle of worship that we’ve been talking about. And we come forward as his vassals then brought into covenant relationship with him through the covenant history we really recite in the confession of sins and absolution. He’s made us aware of our sins. He’s paid the price for those sins. He’s redeemed us out of Egypt. He’s redeemed us from sins to be a special people. And that’s part of worship.

And then after that, then God instructs us in the stipulations of the covenant. He says, “You’re in covenant with me and here are the rules, folks. There are covenant responsibilities. There’s covenant privilege. You’re resurrected from life—from death to life—but there’s covenant obligations” and he gives those to us.

And then the fourth part of that outline is covenant sanctions, rather. If you obey, blessing. If you disobey, curse.

Now, that is—these models, by the way, this model here and the one we just talked about are both done twice during our formal worship service: upstairs and then downstairs at communion. And both of those two patterns of worship, both those two cycles, as it were, of worship have the idea of sanctions in them.

When you hear the word preached, the word is a proclamation of what’s happened in Jesus Christ and what he’s done. And it’s a proclamation that calls us to transform ourselves in the offertory. We remember that from Romans 12:2, to transform ourselves in obedience to that preached word. And if we don’t, God’s going to bring curses against us, penalties against us for disobedience. And so, biblical preaching has always either implicitly or explicitly stated, you do this, this is the life that comes out of it.

You don’t do this, this is the death that accompanies your failure to do it. And so, sanctions are involved.

Now, downstairs at the Lord’s table, of course, that’s a lot more obvious because we have specific instructions from scripture again there that he who partakes unworthily drinks judgment to himself. And so, we have reenactment of covenant history. Remember what Jesus did 2,000 years ago, the central actual historical event that purchased our salvation and brought us into covenant with God.

On the basis of that, he gives us his law word. He tells us to live in covenant faithfulness. Then he tells us that you either drink judgment or blessing to yourself as you drink from the cup. And then finally, covenant succession is stated. The covenant model of worship ends with a call to go out in covenant faithfulness. And if we do that, God’s blessing resides upon us. And the covenant cruises then through time in history in terms of us being his people.

So that’s another model for worship.

And then finally, we’re going to talk now about what we actually do at Reformation Covenant Church, trying to mold these things together, these various aspects of worship that God has given to us. We’ve talked about so far in other places in these series. We’re going to actually go through the six-part pattern of worship that we do here at Reformation Covenant Church.

So I would suggest for this that you just follow through, among other things, using your actual order of service, because this is what we’re talking about. You make notes in this and then you take this home and use this with your children if you have children or use it for yourself to review what we’re doing on Sunday, why we do these crazy things, and teach your children why this part of the service comes next as we go through this order of service.

Okay. And this fourth pattern is worship as dialogue. We’ve talked about worship as offering and all of worship really is an offering, but there are some specialized emphasis as we go through there. Worship as an encounter with the divine; God who is worship; as covenant renewal. And now we’re going to talk about worship as dialogue. And these things are not exclusive. These things all work together. All these patterns for worship really—worship is dialogue.

God calls us to worship in the first part of the service and then we respond with a confession of sin. That’s the dialogue. God does an action. He says, “Come worship me.” He said in Psalm 96, “Sing praises unto God.” That’s a call to worship to us. We’ve read lots of calls to worship over these last couple of years. He says, “Turn aside your feet from doing your pleasure on this day. Come to the Lord’s temple.

Come to God’s special presence with his people in terms of convocative worship and make my thoughts your thoughts today.” So he calls us out. He calls us to worship. And our response then, of course, is to come and confess our sins before Almighty God.

Now, as we went through this, excuse me, as we went through this, we used Psalm 95 as the model for the call to worship. Remember, we said in Psalm 95 that God calls us out with reasons.

First, he tells us in Psalm 95 that he’s our creator. Because he’s our creator, we’ve been created for the purpose of praising him. We’re supposed to come forward. He tells us he’s our redeemer. And because we’ve been redeemed and brought back from death to life, we’re supposed to come forward in gratitude to God then and worship him. And then he tells us he’s our sovereign. And in Psalm 95 and Psalm 96, it talks about God as opposed to gods.

And the gods in many places in scripture refer to civil rulers. And so God exerts his civil supremacy over us as well in this call to worship. We’re supposed to leave everything else behind, all obedience that we might have to secondary authorities because the primary authority now—God himself, the civil ruler of all rulers, the King of kings as it were—has called us forward because of our creation and our redemption and of his civil supremacy that Jesus is King of kings and Lord of lords.

These are all good reasons. When God says come, we come in response to that.

But it’s important too we point out that in Psalm 95, as we pointed out in our sermon on this, that call to worship is accompanied in the second half of the psalm with a warning. Psalm 95 starts with a real bell-like tone to it. It bangs right along and it sounds great. And then the second half—I think it was Spurgeon who said—the bell sort of starts to sound a death knell, a tolling, a slow tolling in the terms of the meter of the psalm itself as it warns people that they don’t come, you’re going to be cursed by God.

You’re going to fall into death. And so there’s a warning there. If you hear his voice, don’t harden your hearts. Don’t stay away. If you know that call is coming, if you hear it, come out to worship me. He says, the book of Hebrews picks that Psalm 95, the last few verses up, repeats them in the book of Hebrews.

Book of Hebrews is written to Christians who were forsaking the assembling of themselves together, weren’t coming to church anymore. They were sliding back to the Jewish synagogue instead of the Christian worship service. And while certainly Hebrews is a lot more than what they did on worship—worship, the individual, the particular—consecrates and emphasizes all of life. And so you can’t say, “Well, the rest of the six days out of the week I worship God, but on this day I’m not going to go to worship at church because the Jews don’t like that and I may get persecuted.”

No. Hebrews says worship begins the pattern for all of life. And if you start to slip away from Sunday, you start to slip away from covenant life across the board. It’s a natural cause and effect. But more than that, it’s God’s special cursing upon people who hear his call and harden their hearts and don’t come forward for that call.

Okay? So in the act of worship is dialogue. God calls us as our creator, redeemer, and our sovereign. And we come forward asserting that he is those things and praising him and ascribing ultimate worth to him for that reason.

The second part of the dialogue: God pronounces his forgiveness of our sins. As we said in the absolution of sins, God gives us what the reformers called comfortable words from the scriptures, reminding us that if we’re truly contrite for our sins, relying upon the work of Jesus Christ alone, that he’s done that work for us.

Sometimes we get a little confused about confession of sins both in this service and downstairs as well. We want to partake worthily and so we want to clean up all that sin and make ourselves good enough to meet with God. But really the point of confession of sins is that we’re never good enough to meet with God. You can try to clean up as many sins as you want, but if you remember that sin is not just transgression but one of nonconformity unto the law of God, as the catechism tells us, then you recognize you are always in sin to some degree.

You can’t get perfect enough to come before God. We come before God to hear the words of absolution, not based upon our great confessions, but because of the work of Jesus Christ. That’s the basis of forgiveness. Our confession of sin is evidence that we understand that relying not upon our own works but upon Jesus Christ. And our confession throughout the week in terms of what we do is also evidence of whether or not we’ve been brought to salvation in Christ and gain entrance in.

Remember we said that from the book of Jeremiah: Jeremiah would stand outside the temple and the call to worship would go out. Maybe the bells were tolled. We’re not sure exactly how that happened, but the people knew it was time to go to worship. They’d come forward singing psalms just like we did as we came before worship to God. Jeremiah met them and said, “You can’t get in today. You’ve lived lives that are not worthy.” He didn’t mean to say, “You’re not good enough to get to heaven.” He’s saying, “Your lives indicate you have no understanding.

You have not been brought to grace in Jesus Christ or the covenant mediator—to come, which he knew about. You are outside of the covenant household by your deeds.”

Okay? So, confession of sin doesn’t attempt to get us good enough to get in. It is an evidence that we recognize that we rely only upon Christ’s righteousness and his atonement for sins to get into the temple, as it were, into God’s special presence before his people.

Okay, so that’s the idea of confession and then absolution. God pronounces our forgiveness of sins is the second part of the dialogue and we then respond to that absolution by singing forth his praises.

And in Psalm 96 that we read, you’ll find in those first three verses of Psalm 96, there’s a thrice repeated admonition to sing. So it’s Psalm 96, the pattern there for worship. We see as we come forward singing to God. And we do that because we’ve been forgiven in the covenant mediator. We’ve been brought back from death into recreation.

And we talked about that biblical model, as I said, in lots of different scriptures. And we also talked about the fact that what’s pictured there is death and then resurrection. And we said that God created us in the first place with breath. The primary purpose of that breath is to sing praises to God.

We fell into death. And so, we didn’t sing his praises. Instead, we sing the praises of other men and other beings in the created order. And so God resurrects us to new life as we come forward with a confession of sins and the absolution. He raises us back up and we then use the new breath that he’s given to us as it were to sing forth his praises.

Remember Jesus breathed upon his disciples and said “receive the Holy Spirit.” He breathed on them indicating that they are brought back to newness of life the way that God breathed the breath of life into Adam. And so they’re a new creation. And if we’re a new creation now, we’re going to use the breath that God gives us back for the right purpose to praise him. We’ve used that breath to curse him and our neighbor throughout the week and before we were regenerate in Jesus Christ.

And now we’re going to use that breath to sing forth praises to God and blessing and not curses. And so when we are given the absolution of sins, we respond by singing praise to God.

And we talked about the hymn of praise, the model given in Revelation 15. Revelation 15, the new song that’s sung there by the saints around the throne. And by the way, there are instruments of course that those people use, so instrumental music is good.

The praise that we give to God according to Revelation 15 is first of all praise for God’s work, his mighty deeds of salvific action for his people. We praise him because he saved us. We also praise him for God’s ways according to Revelation 15. The way he works with his people, his law, his ethic. We praise him for his standard of righteousness and his ways. Then we praise him for his name, for his very person.

And there is a progression that’s being worked out here as we praise God. God brings us back to newness of life. We praise him for the fact that he’s done that for us. It’s a nice thing done for us. But the progression pointed to in the hymn of praise is that we move through that to appreciate and love and praise God for his works. And then finally, we praise God for who he is.

We don’t stop at static obedience or simple gratitude. We move beyond that to rejoice in the person of God. The scriptures are not a revelation to us of how to get a better life or a better wife or a better job. The scriptures are a revelation of who God is and it brings us to an awareness of that and we rejoice before him for who he is. Not ultimately in the end result for what he’s done.

What he’s done indicates to us who he is. God told Abraham, “I am thy exceeding great reward.” And so you to praise me for who I am. Part of that is what I’ve done for you, but part of it has nothing to do with you. I’ve created flowers up on mountains man has never seen, but God has seen them, and he delights in them. And we get to that understanding, then we understand what the hymn of praise is all about. It’s moving beyond the simple fact of what God has done for us to a rejoicing in who he is in and of himself.

The hymn of praise. Okay, so going pretty fast here, but I understand that people can listen a lot quicker than I can talk. And most of this is review for you. And for those who listen to the tape later on, they can always slow the tape down and take notes. We ought to get through all this stuff and bring it all together here.

Okay. So, we’ve been recreated to use our breath to praise him. And we then praise him for who he is. And that’s the second pattern of the response. God calls us. We come forward confessing our sins. He forgives us.

We sing forth his praises. And then he instructs us through the reading of his word. We then do a psalm responsively.

Now, you don’t have to do it at this point of the service, but it’s important to remember that as we’re prepared for service by God, that preparation begins with God giving us a pattern. I hadn’t thought of this—maybe it’s not a very good illustration—but you know, there was that Star Trek movie with the Genesis machine or whatever it was, and it set up a matrix, and the matrix would work itself out into the whole new world that was created then by man, right?

Well, it’s kind of the same way. The response of reading from the psalm that we do every week is kind of like a matrix for us. It tells us that God’s word comes to us and we respond antiphonally and in terms of the psalm itself using his very words that he has written to us to respond to him with. That’s what they’re written for. The very way the psalms are written, they were written to be used antiphonally in worship.

And so we use them in worship. We use them antiphonally and that forms a matrix then or a pattern for all of our lives being lived out as an antiphonal response to God. And so we respond that way. We used various psalms to indicate that at the time we looked at some of the parallelism that happens in the book of Psalms and the way it’s written in that way and there’s more information on that tape. But in any event it’s important to recognize that God sets us in the right pattern for service.

This is part of that four-fold pattern of the four-fold pattern of worship: present confession, absolution, and preparation for service. The rest of service now is preparation for service. And he then tells us that the right way to begin preparation is to understand that we are to respond antiphonally to God by using his very words in that case as a pattern for all of our lives.

Okay. That’s the third part of the dialogue. The fourth part of the dialogue: he then prepares us for service through the exposition of his word. Through the exposition of his word, we move then to the sermon.

Now, in this particular I could have broken this out and made a nice seven-part outline out of this particular dialogue pattern because the sermon really has two parts to it. There’s the recitation of the sermon scripture and then we respond to that statement of God’s by praying for illumination.

And then we have the exposition of the scripture, another word from God and we respond at the offertory. And I put both those two statements and responses under this section—Section four: he prepares us for service through the exposition of his word.

First, God reads—has his representative as it were in the worship service—read the sermon scripture and then we respond to that with the prayer for illumination.

Remember we said that helps us to understand that the Bible is not like all other books. The Bible is different from all other books. It is God breathed. It is incomprehensible to man apart from the illumination of the Holy Spirit. And so we pray to God that he would open that word to us and we’d be able to understand it. We send the prayer for illumination teaches our inadequacy apart from God and his Spirit to understand the spiritual truth that’s in this book.

It’s a different sort of book. We must ask for God to illumine our hearts to the reality of it. It says that the prayer for illumination is very important. Remember someone said last week that wisdom from above rather is not characterized by sensualism or sensory experiences. Wisdom from below is sense-oriented.

And if we look back at the Enlightenment and before that to Thomism, to Aquinas and others, they were sense-oriented. Sovereignty had been removed from God to man. Man’s senses then became the vehicle by which man would understand and come to obedience to God supposedly. They were sense-oriented though. And so the call to illumination—or the prayer for illumination rather—tells us that our senses are inadequate apart from God’s revelation of who he is in the scriptures to come to a real reality of what this is all about.

So, it’s a denial of our own abilities apart from God. It says, “Our reason, our senses are fallen and inadequate to understand what you have given us to hear.” Here, on the other hand, is a statement of God’s adequacy to open these scriptures up to us. We pray to God because he’s the only one that can answer that prayer. Our minds can’t and he will answer that prayer.

Finally, we said that another aspect of the prayer for illumination is that it teaches God’s sovereignty in all this. Remember, we read from Isaiah 44:18 says they’ve not known or understand for he—that means God—has shut their eyes; they cannot see; and their hearts they can’t understand. We need to pray that God open our eyes and our ears and our hearts. And God shuts the eyes and ears and hearts of men that he doesn’t want to come to knowledge of him.

And so God’s sovereignty is plainly spoken of in the prayer for illumination and the need for God to open our eyes. Fact is that God doesn’t open everybody’s eyes. Calvin said that 100 people may hear a sermon, 20 people may go out having heard the sermon and made application to their lives. Why is that? Said that’s because God has only chosen in his sovereignty to open the ears of 20 people out of a 100. Why is that? We don’t know why that is.

Augustine said God could turn the will of evil men to good because he is almighty. Obviously, he could. Why then does he not? Because he wills otherwise. Why then does he will otherwise? That reason rests with him alone. God’s sovereignty, his choice in salvation and election and illumination is talked about in the prayer for illumination.

As a result of that, of course, teaches us also that God’s grace. It’s God’s grace that comes to us and opens the words of scripture to us.

And finally, we said that the prayer for illumination links the Spirit with the word. Very important that the Spirit speaks to reveal to us. He comes to teach us the things of Christ. He comes to teach us the things of the scriptures. And so any movement that ties the Spirit and removes the Spirit rather from the word of God is the denial of the prayer for illumination which asks for the Spirit to illumine the word to us. And it’s a denial of the biblical faith. The Spirit comes to teach us the truth of God’s word. He doesn’t come to give us new insights apart from the scriptures. He comes to open the scriptures to us, not to give us new scriptures.

Okay? Very important we recognize that.

Okay? So God reads—has the sermon scripture read to us. We respond by praying for illumination. He then speaks to us in the sermon. And we talked about biblical sermons about how in biblical sermons the pattern is that the word of God interprets the word of God.

Remember we looked at Jesus and a couple of sermons he gave and we said that what he did was the pattern that is pointed out in other portions of scripture. The case law is exposited in relationship to the rest of the Old Testament and then it’s made application in the gospels and further explained then in the epistles in our day. And so some churches have actually had in the history of the church have had four readings every Sunday before the sermon is preached: case law, prophets, gospel and epistles, showing the unity of the word of God and showing this principle that the word has to interpret itself.

And so we’ve used a lot of scriptures in most of our sermons to show how the word of God is a whole. And we can’t understand things unless we look at and let the scriptures interpret themselves in this pattern of sermons that’s given to us.

We said that’s the pattern. The message of the sermon is a challenge. It’s God’s word challenging man’s word. We used the sermon where Jesus talked about bread—that he was the bread that came down from heaven and they wanted to be fed bread from earth. And the first thing they do when they come out to see Jesus, they find him finally; he has gone away from them. They find him in the synagogue and he said the first thing they ask him is how’d you get here and he doesn’t even answer that question. He starts to teach them about how they’re out of line looking for bread from heaven when they have the bread of the manna—from—they’re out of line rather looking for earthly bread when he is the heavenly bread come down from heaven.

And so God’s word challenges man’s word. It confronts us in our sin. It’s a challenge to us as such. It must be a challenge to those particular idols of the day.

We read in Psalm 96 that God is exalted above the idols, above the other gods. The other gods are idols. And sermons teach us how those other gods are idolatrous. Why the secular state is idolatrous, why the public school system is idolatrous, and why property taxes are idolatrous.

Why the sovereignty of the state or the sovereignty of the school or the sovereignty of man through free will and Arminianism—why those things are all idolatrous before God. The sermon confronts us with those facts.

The sermon is also, of course, a proclamation of the reigning Savior. It challenges us, but it challenges us through the proclamation of what Christ has accomplished. The scriptures, as we said, are a revelation of the person of God and what he has accomplished. The scriptures are administration of grace to us, and the sermon ministers grace as we hear the proclamation of the gospel. And kingdom work is enabled as the sermon is expounded. We’re prepared for life.

Remember, this is all under the part of the dialogue where God prepares us for service. It’s not—we don’t hear sermons to satisfy our intellectual curiosity or to analyze what somebody else is doing wrong. Ultimately, we hear the sermons so that we’re enabled for kingdom work to go out into the world doing what God requires us to do, to do those works that he’s prepared beforehand that we walk in.

The sermon is a call to belief. It’s a call to action and it’s a call to reversal. It’s a call to reverse away from the sinful activities we’ve engaged in and instead do the proper things in terms of obedience to God.

Our response to that is the offertory. We talked a little bit about that. The offertory is offering not just of our works, but of our very selves themselves in obedience to God. And that’s why we come forward with our bodies at this church. You don’t have to do it that way, but it’s a good picture of this biblical truth that God says should be part of the offertory. We went through Old Testament, New Testament examples of that.

God expects us as we move forward our tithes and offerings to be offering ourselves. These symbols, as it were, are just part of the whole and the whole is consecrated to God in the offering. And the offering reminds us that we are to be transformed by the renewing of our minds to the word of God and not be conformed to the world.

And starting next week, I’ll put that second verse in Romans 12 on that offertory page. Offertory page has Romans 12:1 listed on it. We’ll list verse two, which really goes on to talk about what that means for our life.

The offering, it means we are consecrating ourselves in obedience to the sermon. You’ve heard the sermon. You’ve heard demands made in your life. And after the sermon and after the prayer, we get up then and say, “Yeah, we’re going to obey God’s word, okay? To whatever that sermon expressed the word of God to me and challenges me, then I’m going to go forward and consecrate.

I’m going to say to God now that, yeah, I’m going to change my life based upon your law word. My service will be better enhanced. My kingdom work will be more enabled because I’m going to confess that I’ve been unworthy in this area, and I’m going to consecrate myself to being transformed in that area into the image of God in a fuller sense.”

Remember, we said there are only two options. You can either be conformed—silly putty image to a comic book world, I think is the phrase I used. And go back to the tape for more explanation of that. Or we can be transformed, go from glory to glory. If we’re regenerate, then to be conformed is just like a silly putty image in that it’s the exterior only. And it doesn’t really reflect who we are interiorly.

But God says we’re to be transformed. We’re supposed to work out the implications of our salvation in all that we do. Transform, going from glory to glory as God brings us along, as it were, increasingly to image our Savior.

Okay. So he prepares us for service through all this and then in the fifth part he prepares us for service by a final charge from his word. And after the offertory we then have one final scripture reading. The point of that scripture reading is to reaffirm what was said in the offertory and/or what was what you committed yourself to in the offertory and what was said in the sermon.

It’s a final word from God saying do this thing, go forward being changed as a result of this enabling for service that you’ve experienced this day and change yourself. And then we respond by singing a song that is usually—I try to make it a song that’s a song of dedication in response to what we’ve heard about. And so that’s the final statement as it were of God’s charge to us.

And then we sing a song of dedication and then the sermon—then the first half of our service ends with God placing his blessing upon us and our response to that being to ascribe him glory and ascribe power and glory to him alone. We talked about the benediction being the link to life.

It prepares us then to go out from the service with God’s blessing upon us as we’ve gone through this series of dialogue statements with him. God then finally puts his blessing upon us and sends us out to do kingdom work. He links us to life and the blessing says that we have peace with God, a well-ordered life in all areas because we have been blessed with him graciously. He has given us grace. He has pardoned our sins.

He’s given us blessing, life, prosperity and the life that is in him, he then gives to us. He gives us life in Jesus Christ and we go forth with his blessing upon us.