Dennis Tuuri

Fire. And those who have the victory over the beast, over his image, and over his mark, and over the number of his name, standing on the sea of glass, having harps of God, they sing the song of Moses, the servant of God, and the song of the Lamb, saying, “Great and marvelous are your works, Lord God Almighty. Just and true are your ways, O King of the saints. Who shall not fear you, O Lord, and glorify your name?

For You alone are holy. For all nations shall come and worship before you. For your judgments have been manifested. After these things I looked, and behold, the temple of the tabernacle of the testimony in heaven was opened. And out of the temple came the seven angels, having the seven plagues clothed in pure bright linen, and having their chests girded with golden bands. Then one of the four living creatures gave to the seven angels seven golden bowls full of the wrath of God.

Who lives forever and ever. The temple was filled with smoke from the glory of God and from his power and no one was able to enter the temple till the seven plagues of the seven angels were completed. Let’s pray. Father, we give you thanks for your word and pray that your spirit would illuminate to our understanding to the end that our praise for you might be more full and complete in accordance with the glory that you are due. In Jesus name we ask it. Amen.

Please be seated. I want to talk today about voices, articulation of speech by God’s imagebearers. We want to focus at the end of the sermon on the use of our voices together in the corporate worship of God in praising his name in song where we join with that heavenly chorus described in Revelation 15 in singing the song of Moses and the song of the Lamb in our worship of the Savior.

We want to work that way in our sermon today. But we want to first go through the voices that we articulate and use before we get to the singing of praise in our worship.

Voices are important. Song and music is important to the human soul. The human person has need for music. It’s interesting that the headline of I think it was yesterday’s paper was in the Oregonian at least was that the law, the injunction against Napster had been stayed by two appeals court judges. Headlines in the Oregonian about this situation. Well, part of it is the current craze over the internet, but a big part of what’s going on there is a reflection of the importance of music, the importance of song, the importance of people’s articulation of song in their singing and with the instruments that they play to the human person. People had this great desire for music.

I went to a concert Friday night by Bruce Cockburn and it was just amazing again to watch thousands of people gather together listen intently to what this man is telling them of his worldview which is Christian but also quite liberal politically. All people at the front were not dancing. They were all gathering together in front of the stage to listen to the words to the voice that came forth from this man in the context of music. Music is glorified speech and music is quite important to us.

In the context of this the scriptures articulate a couple of origins for music. In the description of the line of Cain, the ungodly line leading down to Lamech and his children. One of that line is Tubal and he is the beginning of the making of instruments. And specifically the two instruments that are spoken of are the harp and what the King James calls the organ or newer versions call the flute. Instruments that are played with our hands, the harp and the word has the idea of strumming to it. And instruments that are played by our breath and the word for organ flute in Genesis 4:21, I believe, is basically its origins is the idea of breathing.

So your breath is music and your breath goes through particular instruments, flutes, the mouth organ or harmonica and you create music. So music is an extension of the human person either through the strumming, the use of our appendages, our hands or our feet or through the use of our breath. But it’s an extension of who we are.

We come together to sing praises to God. That’s what we’re doing. So a lot of the young men in this church and young women have a great desire to use their hands to play music of some sort, guitar, piano, drums, whatever it is. And other people have a great desire to use their breath to sing or to play wind instruments that will bring praise to God and somehow provide satisfaction for their soul.

So the scripture said its very description of the origins of music ties it to the human body and says there are basically two kinds of music come forth from us. In the scriptures, singing is music. It’s using this breath to say things in a particular way with inflection to make music. And so there’s this correlation in the scriptures. And it’s very important how we use our voices to sing to God.

But first, I want to talk about the way we use our voices before we get to the shouting forth of praise to God and the glory of or the singing forth hymns to God in the sanctus or in the confession of faith such as the one we just sang.

Can you imagine by the way St. Patrick singing? Now this is not the tune he used obviously and we don’t know that he sang his confession but he probably did. This Lorica is an old term meaning a breastplate and St. Patrick was of course the person who evangelized the Irish in the what I think the fifth century early on maybe sixth century picture of God’s grace Of course, he was actually persecuted by the Irish and hurt. His member of his family was killed by them, but he still went and evangelized them for the cause of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Well, to the native tribes there, to the Irish in their in their Adamic fallen nature, they would have breastplates or songs or sayings that would ward off evil spirits, the demons or the trolls or whatever that would get them, leprechauns, whatever it was. Well, St. Patrick’s Lorica, his breast plate was his confession of faith in the triune God. Can you imagine in the context of that world without electricity in the modern conveniences being out in the midst of an area where there was a tremendous lightning storm going on for instance of the sort that we saw here in Portland a couple of weeks ago.

Fear comes self-defense is necessary. But to sing these songs brings to mind that all things in the created order are mediated to us by the grace of God through the Lord Jesus Christ. And so the lightning is not a threat or a curse to us. It’s something to be careful about obviously. But ultimately to sing is to remind ourselves of the love of God to us in Christ. And to sing the confession that St. Patrick wrote is to remind ourselves of the mediation of all things to us through the work of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Well, we get to that place in the service of singing those praises to God by the articulation of a few other voices. First, in the context of this worship, this dialogue, the back and forth, the conversation that the scriptures describe as worship. We can say that there is this portion of the service where we enter into the service of God, the praise of God and his service to us. We then have the preaching of the word which kind of correlates to the synaxis, some call it the synagogue teaching of the early church and then we move to the Eucharist which correlates to the temple worship and to the work of the Lord Jesus Christ described in the work of the sacrificial animals.

So, we go through this three-fold phase that we’ve been speaking of. We’ve talked about the gifts of God. We enter into the presence of God who is glory and all weight and all power. And we cannot come into that presence without either being consumed by God or being glorified by him. And God shares that communicable attribute of glory with us as we enter into him, enter into his presence. And then we respond in praise to him.

He then gives us wisdom if we’re in the presence of God who communicates himself to us. He gives us through the preaching of the word wisdom and knowledge, new minds, and he gives us life. God is glory. God is all wisdom. He’s omniscient. And he is, of course, the source and is life itself. And so, as we enter into the presence of God, these are the things that God gives us in the context of our worship of him.

And so, we enter into this presence of God to receive these gifts from him.

Now, one of the first things we do, the first thing we actually do in the context of our worship, and this is a little bit of review, is that when he calls us to worship him, we are aware of his holiness and of our sinfulness and we confess our sins. Now, we’ve used the same confession of sin for a couple of months deliberately on my part to get to this part of the of the explanation of the worship of God because it states so well a most critical element for our proper entrance into the presence of God.

The order of Compline, that’s an old fashioned term. It meant the completing order, the completion of the day of prayer in the orders of the church early many, many years ago, hundreds of years ago. The order of Compline is where this particular prayer of confession is taken from. And it completes our confession. And in the context of that, it says that we have sinned through my fault, my own fault. My own most grievous fault.

Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. My fault. My own fault. My own most grievous fault. That is the articulation of the voice that God has given to us that he desires to hear from us. Now he says that if you draw close to him with your lips but not your heart won’t work. He’s not manipulatable. He sees the desires and intents of your heart. Now, we can never pray that prayer perfectly, but we can pray it acceptably through our savior if we understand the truth of those words.

When we sin, it is our fault. It is our own fault. It is our own most grievous fault. Which is to say, it’s not your fault. It’s not the world’s fault. It’s not the weather’s fault. It’s not my lack of sleep’s fault. It’s not my genetic makeup’s fault. It’s not the environment in which I live’s fault. It’s not God’s fault who is most powerful and who controls all of these elements of our existence. It is our fault.

Now, 1 Corinthians 10:13 tells us, “No temptation has overtaken you except such as is common to man. Whatever your sin problem is and temptation in, it is common to man. You share it with mankind. But God is faithful who will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able but with the temptation will also make the way of escape that you may be able to bear it wherefore my brethren flee idolatry see that’s the same truth that is articulated in our confession mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa my fault, my own fault, my own most grievous fault we tell God that whatever temptation has come into our lives is common to mankind and we know that with that temptation he has provided the way of escape.

Now is that what you articulate with your first use of the breath that’s the beginning of your praise to God when you come to church on Sunday I pray to God that it is for myself and for you. May God grant us the grace that this truth gets to the depth of our being.

Why do I stress it so much? Because we live in a world that believes that your environment totally determines or nearly so who you are. We live in an age of environmental determinism. We live in an age where not particularly with the near completion of the mapping of the human genome where most things that we have called sin are now being redefined as diseases, illnesses, predispositions. Homosexuals have a particular part of the genome that is somehow involved with who they are. And so it’s not a choice, it’s what they’re environmentally determined. A sexual addiction is now related to a particular part of the genome.

That’s why you think about girls all the time, young guys, because you have this genetic predisposition, some of you, and you just can’t help it. Now, you can order your environment differently so you don’t actually do things you shouldn’t do, but you’re always going to be tempted in that area. So, we’re told if you’re a child who can’t sit still in the context of the sermon, in the context of your classes at school, you’re told you have ADD or maybe it’s ADHD. I don’t know what the alphabet soup is about it today. You’re told you have attention deficit disorder and it really isn’t really your fault. You see, you have this predisposition and what you need are drugs and maybe what you need for all these other genetic predispositions is some magic pill eventually the society will provide.

Same thing is true of drugs. You’re genetically disposed. Instead of being a drunkard, you have alcoholism. It’s a disease model as opposed to a sin model. And the same thing is true of many other things today. Depression. I were talking to a party yesterday, the Coreas I think, down at the hospital, and said, you know, it’s they know so many people in the context of relationships who are on Prozac or some anti-depressant medication. Why is that so popular today? Because depression is treated as a physical condition of the brain and it doesn’t go into the idea of whether you’re sinning by being dissatisfied with God’s providence or you’re concerned about what he hasn’t provided you or you’re just being pitting you’re in engaging yourself in the sin of self-pity or whatever it is

Now I don’t want to say that all the scientific evidence that’s coming forth relative to genes relative to these particular physical conditions are wrong I don’t know I know that the spirit of the age today is that there are these genetic predispositions. And you know, you always in the context of a culture, you always sort of assume it knows what it’s doing. It’s an old expression that he who weds himself to the spirit of the age soon finds himself a widower. I like the brushing your teeth example. I always tell you a different way to brush your teeth or a different kind of toothbrush. Today’s wisdom is tomorrow’s folly. Every generation Job describes appropriately when he says that I suppose you are the people and wisdom she’ll die with you.

Well, there is truth though to societal advance and the scientific basis for some of these things that are articulated. I don’t know. Maybe there really is a distinct element of the genome that people who engage in homosexual behavior have could very well be. But it doesn’t take away the fact that the scriptures say that homosexual thoughts orient want to call it orientation or actions and thoughts are sin and must be repented.

You see, I don’t know about all this previous maybe some people in the in the providence of God and his wisdom, his omniscience, he makes certain people that are more likely to do particular kinds of sin. And maybe part of the way he does that to strengthen who you are as a saint in delivering you from those things is to dispose you genetically. I really don’t know. It’s not my area of expertise.

But what I do know is that our society has moved far away from the Lord Jesus Christ and his command word and there are two effects at least of this kind of thinking in the context of the Christian culture. One is a tendency of a denial of responsibility for sin. So we don’t say it’s our fault, our own fault, our own most grievous fault. It’s a duck, a dodge from responsibility. Secondly, and even more deadly, yeah, I think this is more deadly to the Christian, is that this way of thinking removes hope.

You know the scriptures say the wonderful thing about sin is that it can be forgiven and put behind us. We can get to the place where Paul said, “Forgetting what is behind, I press toward the mark of the Lord Jesus Christ.” I’m not going to go back and say, “What was the environmental reasons why I persecuted Christians?” God’s forgiven me of those things. I’m leaving it behind and I’m pressing toward the mark.

Sin has been taken care of through the finished work of the Savior. It can be forgiven. If you sin today, if you acknowledge your culpability in your sins today, there is great hope for you because God says sin can be forgiven and that you’re a new creature in the Lord Jesus Christ.

If on the other hand, you’re a sexual addict who because of your genetic predisposition or a homosexual oriented sort of person because that’s just the way God made you and you’ll always be that to define yourselves in terms of always being sexually tempted or of always being tempted in the context of actions and thoughts about homosexuality or of always being characterized by drunkenness.

You see, this is a loss of hope. This is a loss of hope. You don’t have hope. Then you just try to struggle to get by the rest of your life, but there’s no true deliverance. The scriptures say that God absolves us of our sins. He assures us of our forgiveness of sins. He wants us to articulate with our hearts, with the breath he has given to us that whatever sins we committed this past week, it wasn’t somebody else’s fault. It was my fault, my own fault, my own most grievous fault.

That must be the context, that use of our voice for properly interpreting the scientific data correlating some things that go together by way of coincident. Now there’s really in this disease model there’s very little this is why this is the mechanism whereby this genetic structure produces this effect on the homosexual. There’s none of that. There’s just simply a statistical correlation of certain biochemical functions in the body to these particular actions.

You see no causality really involved. Just a statistical correlation, a risk factor if you will. Well, that’s okay. It’s okay to think about those things to take them into account, but the context must be a total confession that when we sin, it’s our own fault.

Now, when we do that, a second voice comes into play in this dialogue, and that’s the voice of God absolving you, assuring you that you are forgiven of those sins that you articulate with your mouth and heart. The first use of the voice, your voice in worship is confession. The voice you hear back is from the officiant representing God who assures you of your forgiveness.

Now, this also we glide by it, but it’s of great importance. John 20:23, we read this. Whosoever sins you remit, they are remitted unto them. And whosoever sins you retain, they are retained. Now, that has some great significance. And the reformed church has understood this for these last four or five centuries and understood the extreme importance I will say need.

I don’t like to use the word need casually anymore. I trying to discipline my my words to not say I need this, I need that because there are things we really need as people. We need the assurance of the forgiveness of our sins. We need some way to cope with the guilt that our heart feels because of the convicting work of the Holy Spirit. We need the assurance that our sins are forgiven. And we need according to the words that God uses here, we need to hear them from somebody other than ourselves.

The second voice in this dialogue isn’t yours. It’s the voice of God speaking through the officiant in the worship service assuring you that his scripture to say that you’re forgiven of your sins. It’s somebody else’s voice. Calvin put it this way. We see the reason why Christ employs such magnificent terms talking of this verse we just read to command and adorn that ministry which he bestows and enjoins on the apostles.

It is that believers may be fully convinced that what they hear concerning the forgiveness of sins is ratified and may not less highly value the reconciliation which is offered by the voice of men. Then if God himself stretched out his hand from heaven and the church daily receives the most abundant benefit from this doctrine when it perceives that her pastors are divinely ordained to be physicians for eternal salvation and that it must not go a distance to seek the forgiveness of sins which is committed to their trust.

Calvin’s saying that God wants you to know that your sins are forgiven. And he tells you in the Gospel of John that when the pastors, the ordained elders in your church assure you of forgiveness, you should count that as the voice of Christ himself. You see, it’s for your good. It’s not for the exaltation of the pastor. It’s for the edification of the congregation to be assured by the voice of men that God has ordained that they are forgiven of their sins.

Calvin says that this word proclaimed, this assurance of forgiveness in a clear voice in accordance with the scriptures by the minister is a verbum sacramentale, a sacramental word to the congregation. Calvin says he appoints his ministers to be organs, vessels of the spirit of God to assure you of your forgiveness of sins.

Now, we don’t we get a little worried at this point because of the Roman Catholic thing. You know, it’s me and God we think and the assurance comes from me and God alone. But no, the Bible doesn’t really picture it that way. The Bible says that the spirit and the bride say come in Revelation. The work of the spirit is articulated through the bride through the church and through the representative of the church that are given to us.

When Christ wants to speak to the seven churches in the book of Revelation, he gives a message to John to give not by way of writing so that the congregation can read it in their leisure in their homes. He gives John a revelation by word that he is to give to the angels and the angels are to articulate it to speak it forth. The pastors are in the context of the worship service. The book of Revelation tells us that blessed are they who read that is read aloud and all of those who hear the words of this prophecy and keep it.

The blessing is not on those who read it in their homes in private devotion. Now there is a blessing to that. We don’t want to downplay the need to know the word and to read it in our homes. But specifically in its first application, the book of Revelation says, “Blessed are you when you come together to hear the words of this prophecy articulated by a minister called by God to speak to you and the reformed churches have always taken this as a tremendous truth that God has given great assurances to the congregation in knowing that it is just as if the Lord Jesus Christ had come down to this pulpit and had said to you when you confess your sins in accordance with God’s word God’s word my word Jesus says promises you that your sins are forgiven now that’s the assurance that you should have when I speak those words or when Elder Wilson speaks those words as the officiant in the worship of God’s people.

The Bible does not say faith comes by reading. The Bible says faith comes by hearing. Hearing the articulation of the voice is what goes on in the scriptures to produce growth and maturation in the context of God’s people. Now, I’m not saying don’t read your Bibles, but I’m trying to put in context this voice of the ministers who officiate in worship beginning with that assurance of forgiveness first call to worship the assurance of forgiveness leading us all together in song in our joint voices and then as we move next week to the sermon it’s so important to understand you know why the reformers place the preaching of God’s word at a pulpit like this to say that the gospel message is being adorned through his vehicles in the church to reach you with the power of Christ and the power of the spirit.

We’ll talk more about that next week. But for now, it’s important to realize here that this second voice comes from outside of yourself. It comes from another into your life. God talks to us through another. One of our great problems as a result of the fall is isolation. And we have need to move away from isolation into community. And God says that you know what happens is Adam and Eve hide. They hide from each other. They start accusing each other. Isolation is a result of the fall.

It’s a wonderful song by Jackson Browne about the woman this person he loved having something she wore piece of jewelry in the shape of a heart. And then there’s sets it up beautifully. The shape of a heart. The shape and then he goes talks about his own stuff and how there’s a hole in the wall of their house and the shape about the shape of a fist. A fist. And by the end of the song, the girl has left him. She’s left that thing sitting there in the shape of a heart, the jewelry, and he drops it into the hole in the wall, the shape of a fist.

You see, the love in our world is eaten up by the anger of men who in their anger produce isolation from those who are closest to them and who love them the most. Our lives as fallen Adamic creatures are filled with frustration, anger, particularly men, great sin of men. Impatience. Then that anger we spew out at people. Women do it too. And the end result of that is further isolation. Further isolation. Never thought she was talking about me. He said, “Never thought she’d leave me. That’s the way we are. It’s the way all men are. All women are the same way.”

God says that the beginning of the breaking down of this isolation, the context of the representation in worship, is for you to hear that it’s okay your sins are forgiven from someone outside of yourself from another. Luther said that the church is not so much a pen house as it is a mouth house. See, it’s not the written word. It is the spoken word that is emphasized in the context of God’s people. The reformers understood this over and over and over. They would speak of it.

The Westminster Confession of Faith says that the public reading and preaching of the word become and I quote here effectual means of convincing and converting sinners words from outside of you. It’s not so much what happens in the private meditations of our hearts. Even when men come to the faith in isolation from people speaking with them usually almost always there has been a voice of someone that has urged them to repentance who has shared with them the hope in the work of the Lord Jesus Christ. And the command word for all men to worship him. Somebody said it to you. You thought about it. You’ve meditated.

When I became serious with the Lord 28 years ago or so, seemed at the time that everybody I ran into when I was hitchhiking would speak to me of Christ. Ultimately, that transaction goes on in the context really between you and God. But you see, the way it works is God brings other people to speak with you and mediates his grace to you through other people and through the spoken word.

And that’s what the Westminster Confession of Faith is saying. The Scottish Book of Church Discipline, they were certainly not Catholic in their approach to things. And yet they say this, “Whoever hears Christ’s ministers hears himself.” Knox’s First Book of Discipline, “Whoever hears Christ’s ministers hears Christ himself. Whoever despises their ministry and exhortation rejecteth and despiseth Christ Jesus.

See, Herman Hoeksema, his Reformed Dogmatics put it this way. Through preaching, you do not hear about Christ. You hear him. The difference is easily understood. When you hear about someone, he isn’t present. You don’t hear his own voice, but the voice of someone else who tells you something about him. But when you hear someone, you hear his own voice. He is present with you. He is addressing you personally.

Now, we’ll talk about that more next week in the sermon, but that’s what’s going on in reformed preaching. You’re hearing the voice of Christ through the communication of the spirit when it’s in accordance with God’s word that brings you conviction when the minister preaches and speaks to you.

First chapter of the Second Helvetic Confession now going to the continental reformers says the preaching of God word. Wherefore when this word of God is now preached in the church by preachers lawfully called we believe that the very word of God is proclaimed and received. Received by the faithful, that neither any other word of God is to be invented, nor is to be expected from heaven. And that now the word itself which is preached is to be regarded, not the minister that preaches. For even if he be evil and a sinner, nevertheless, the word of God remains still true and good.

Even if the minister is sinful and evil, the word of God preached through him is the effectual means of the Holy Spirit to bring you to conviction. A voice comes to you articulate your confession of sin, hopefully mirroring your heart that you know your sin’s your own fault. And you hear the articulation of wind coming through a human organ, the spirit of God coming to you through the officiant assuring you of forgiveness of sins and through the preaching of the word that you might be convicted of sin and assured of the forgiveness of Christ the Savior.

One of the worst notions in modern-day Christianity is the idea that piety is totally a matter of us and God away from the interaction of people. I’ve talked about the minister, but you know the the implications of this and there are hundreds of scripture references that confirm what I’m saying that the spirit uses human voices to communicate to you.

Ephesians, be filled with the spirit singing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs to one another. You see, I’m to be filled with the spirit and sing to you the spirit’s words and you’re to sing to me the spirit’s words and we’re to be mutually edified through the spirit speaking to us not off in a corner in our personal devotion life with Christ in our prayer closet. Now that goes on but the emphasis repeatedly in the scriptures is that the spirit communicates to us not in isolation from people but in relationship to the church of the lord Jesus Christ to the ministers and then to the people the spirit of God moves socially.

Socially. And the model for that, the beginning model of that way to live our lives in community, not in isolation, is to understand the way that God has ordained his minister to speak to you the voice of God assuring you of forgiveness from outside of yourselves. You see, and that’s the model. It tells us that our lives are to be lived in the context of people, the people of God who bring the word of God to us.

And so the spirit moves us along. We move away from the people of God or from the church. We move away from the means of salvation and sanctification of the spirit. It’s that clear. Words that we speak to one another. Words that are spoken to us. Words that pass between Christians. This is the vehicle. These words by which the spirit moves and the scriptures are replete with evidences of these things.

Okay. Your voice, the officiant’s voice. And then in response to this officiant’s voice of assurance of forgiveness is the song. We then upon the hearing of the assurance that we’re forgiven, all our voices are joined together to give praise to God. We sing the glory of God. Glory be to the Father, to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost. The voice calls us. Our voice confesses. The voice of the minister assures us of forgiveness.

And we join our voices together to sing forth to shout this wind out of our lungs. Praise to the one who has brought us to a realization of our need to worship him, of our sinful state, and yet the assurance of his forgiveness. Getting us into community, breaking down our isolation, breaking down our avoidance of the sin issue by blaming the environment. All of these things come together and we say, “Pray God that we’re a redeemed, forgiven people. We’ve been made whole and we’ve been brought into community together to sing forth his praises.

And we want to do that. And at the end of that assurance of forgiveness, we burst into glory be to the father, to the son, and to the holy ghost, joining the church for at least 1600 years that have sung this particular hymn of praise. Modeled of course on the scriptures, the triune message of the scriptures given for instance in Matthew 28:19.

This is called the lesser doxology. It has been a song of the church for many years. We then are a we at the conclusion of that singing forth of that praise to God. We are then called into the heavenly places. God tells us to lift up our hearts. We lift them up to the Lord. I’ve listed a lot of scripture references here under the Sursum Corda. We won’t go through them, but the scriptures over and over again, particularly in the altar, which is our worship manual, tell us to lift our hands toward God’s temple, to lift our soul to that heavenly perspective.

You know, when Mike and I flew to Poland, when Howard flies, when you guys fly, you get above the environment and you see things from a heavenly perspective. The sun is always shining up there. You go up high enough, the sun is always shining. You see, clouds are down close to the earth. You go through those clouds, If you go up high enough, you can always get away from the clouds. Now, the clouds are protection, too.

But in terms of the Sursum Corda, lift up your heart. That’s what the word means. To lift our perspective to a heavenly perspective is a belief that God calls us into his throne room of worship. And we’ve talked about this many times over the last couple of weeks, and we won’t continue to belabor the point, but in Revelation 4, John is told to come up here. And we’re told to come up to the heavenly perspective to God’s throne room in heaven and to sing forth his praises.

And so we sing those truths in the context we yeah we’re going to lift our hearts up to the Lord. It’s fitting and right so to do and so we draw near not just with our lips but with our heart. We bring our souls into the heavenly perspective. And so the Sursum Corda then leads us into the actual more formal hymns of praise to him.

Now in addition to our ascent during worship. The word of God also said that God descends. The Lord is coming. And we talked about this a little last week. I’ve got some scripture references to here. Here, remember Jesus in Revelation 3, behold, I stand at the door and knock. Open the door and let me in. Jesus comes to us today by means of the spirit. He comes to have a meal with us.

So, as surely as we’re going up to heaven, so also God descends to earth to be with us in the context of worship. That’s real. Reality as defined by the scriptures. Psalm 96, he’s coming. He’s coming to judge the earth. The Lord is coming. The Lord reigns. God’s presence comes to his people. The psalter is filled with these expressions of God’s drawing near and then changing the world in which we live in.

Psalm 98:9, he is coming to judge the earth with righteousness. He shall judge the world, the peoples with equity. Genesis 3:8, the sound of the Lord comes to the garden. Adam and Eve have sinned. But on the Lord’s day, God comes into the garden to meet with us. And in the book of Revelation, at the end of the book, behold in Revelation 1:7, 10, and 11, he is coming with clouds. Every eye will see him, even they who pierced him. All the tribes of the earth will mourn because of him. Even so, amen.

That isn’t a reference to the last coming of our savior. It means his coming in the Lord’s day worship service that John described. The repentance of the people who pierced him is our repentance whose sins necessitated the work of the Savior on the cross and God assures us of our forgiveness for those sins. John is in the spirit on the Lord’s day and hears behind him a voice of a trumpet saying, “I am Alpha and Omega.” Before he ascends, Jesus is there with him. Jesus saying, “I am Alpha and Omega. Take this message to the churches.”

We ascend. God descends to us. And we have tremendous reason now to shout forth praise in our worship service. Because now the one who is all glory, all power, who is omniscient, who is all wisdom, and who is life has come to be with us to give us his communicable attributes to the work of the Lord Jesus Christ. And we are astonished at the God whom we serve. And we are also even more astonished at the gifts he gives us.

And we praise God.

Now, another problem we have with this is we think that somehow our praise is independent of our need for God. But understand that our praise always is the praise of a dependent needy creature. We like to think of ourselves in our forgiven state as almost on a par with God. And now we can just praise him without any sense of need that we have relative to his gifts to us. And people preach this regularly.

You should worship God expecting nothing from him. I just don’t I think that comports with reality. Reality is that God wants us to understand our dependence. It’s why he takes us through this process of confession and remembering who we are as we come into his presence. He wants us to know that he is going to feed us. And we come to him needing understanding with every bit of our body our need for glory from him, our need of forgiveness, our need of wisdom, our need of life.

And if we think somehow we’re satisfied with our lives and what he’s given us to date without him giving us more. No, that’s not what the scriptures say. The scriptures say we come forward to God needing. You go home, the dog comes. You left the dog outside the hot weather without water. The dog comes. He’s happy to see you. He needs water. And when we come into the worship of God, you know, we are praising God who he is.

But we’re praising him because we need him. And he promises to send us. He’ll come into to be with us and he will feed us with his resurrected humanity. We sing praise. We sing the sanctus. Sanctus is a combination of a couple of portions of scripture. We’re singing Isaiah 6:3 when we sing holy, holy, holy, Lord God of Sabaoth. The whole earth is full of his glory. The song the sanctus that the church has been singing for over a millennia is the words of scripture sung back in praise to God.

Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of Sabaoth, the world is full of your glory. And then we move to what the church sang in the context of the gospels reiterating the words of the psalm. “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. We have blessed you from the house of the Lord.” So Luke 19, blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord. Peace in heaven and glory in his highest to this one.

Blessed is he that cometh In the name of the Lord, we sing forth those great passages of scripture as we begin our praise of God. And we sing, and we don’t always do this, but the idea is to sing praises to God. We sing prayers to him. The book of the Psalms is our model for our songs. It is prayers to God for deliverance, prayers of praise, and it’s music. It was to be sung in temple worship. When we sing, it’s really simply beautified, glorified prayer to God.

And our hymns of praise should be sung to him. We’re praising him. We’re not singing about him as much as we’re singing to him. That’s what the hymn of praise is all about. And we chose today in Revelation 15 a particular song that God says that is being sung in the heavenly throne room. And there are many songs in the scriptures. There’s the whole book of this psalter. There’s the song of Moses. What is that?

Well, we don’t know. It could be Deuteronomy 32. In Deuteronomy 31 and 32, Moses writes and sings a song. And it says specifically that he was supposed to teach it to Israel that they might sing forth this song to him. And it’s a song about witness and judgment against his people and yet bringing them faithfully to repentance for their sins. Wonderful song. Psalm 3, Deuteronomy 32, Song of Moses. Exodus 15, the very first song recorded in the scriptures as a song.

We read it today in our Sunday school class with the kids all about the judgment of God on Egypt. And that could be what the song of Moses referred to here in Revelation 15 is. We don’t know. Moses also wrote Psalm 90, the beginning psalm of the fourth book of the psalter. And we don’t know, maybe that’s what’s being referred to. Probably Exodus 15, we think. But there are many songs in scripture besides the psalter.

So when people talk about exclusive psalm. It’s really kind of goofy. Now, we really do need to stress the psalms and the psalms are very important for us. Elijah was being registered at Clackamas Community College this past week and they had all these college age kids there who were and some parents who are being told certain things about the school and they want people to interact and see if they listened or not and give back answers that they’d spoken.

And you know how they did it with these college kids and adults? Now, they’d ask a question. Now, what is this, this, and this? Did you hear what we said? And if somebody was bold enough to answer, they would throw them candy. They would throw them candy. College students, adults, being motivated, answer that question, right? And we’ll throw you some candy like you’re in kindergarten. Well, that’s what worship has devolved into.

You know, originally, there were psalms chanted Then there were metrical psalms and paraphrases of psalms. Isaac Watts, some we love of course. Then came hymns that really weren’t psalmlike at all or Bible song like the song of Moses like then there were gospel songs and now there are gospel choruses and refrains. I mean we’re that far removed from an understanding about what our praises to God should be like in the context of worship.

And so many people go to church that you know essentially are throwing little eggs of candy. Just try to sing the gospel chorus. Yeah, this is the day.