Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript: Reformation Covenant Church
Pastor Dennis Tuuri

Sermon text is found in Romans 12:1 and 2. Romans 12:1 and 2. Please stand for the reading of God’s word. I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service, and be not conformed to this world, but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.

Let us use the provided song as we pray for the illumination of the Holy Spirit of this text to our understanding. Shine thou upon us, Lord, through light of men to thee, and through the written word by their very self. This way that over from heart firm with gazing on thy face. Thy holy ones may learn the wonder of thy grace. Freak thou upon us Lord. Thy spirit living free. So with a cord our lips may tell thy name.

Give thou the hearing ear. Fix thou the wondering God that my dear church may hear the great things thou has brought. Please be seated. Rest in the finished work of the Savior.

The nursery workers and children may be dismissed now. In the preparations for our open house coming up a week from this Saturday, I’ve ordered some brochures for visitors. And as I looked into this, there several companies that make these little folders and they have little inserts in them and the name of your church on them, that sort of stuff.

There’s sort of generic boilerplate little things. And of course, there’s pockets so we can put our own particular materials in these handouts. And it was interesting to have the people over the phone from three or four companies read me what their little introductory leaflet said. And the one I selected seemed pretty close to what we think of in terms of ourselves as a church. Several of them didn’t. Several of them spoke quite a bit about unconditional love and various other things that I think probably can be properly understood but also improperly understood and could be a stumbling block. But in this one particular brochure that we ended up ordering, we didn’t order it for the wording of the insert primarily, but we can—they’re very usable to us. It talked about how we’re to worship the king on the Lord’s day and then when we come into the worship of the king what we receive from God is blessing, knowledge, and the peace that passes all understanding.

Blessing, knowledge, and the peace that passes all understanding. And I thought, you know, really that suits what we believe and what I’ve taught here about worship over the last month and a half. That really can be seen as kind of rearticulating these three gifts of God that we’ve spoken of in the context of the worship service.

These blessings of God are our renewed personhood, the forgiveness of sins, the assurance of our forgiveness. A second phase of worship, the part we’re in now, is the reception of the word. And God transforms our minds. He washes us with the word, and we have new knowledge or wisdom. He blesses us with forgiveness. He gives us knowledge of the word. And all of this moves to the culmination of the peace that passes all understanding in the context of the peace, the presence of God with his people, the blessings of God at the communion table, which as we’ve said before has correlations to the peace offering.

And so this model is what we’re working through. And we’re now at a transition point as we move from a discussion of the first gift in worship to a discussion of the second gift in worship. And I’ve updated just a very little bit this handout we’ve had before, this worship overview. And if you’ll look at that, you’ll see where we’re at in the context of these sermons.

And you see that for today’s purposes, I’ve layered in the third column. Worship as three gifts, these three statements from this material we’ll be handing out in a couple of weeks to our visitors. Blessing, knowledge as the second gift, and then peace, the third gift. I’ve also correlated this in that third column to the Aaronic benediction, the one we typically use at the conclusion of our worship service.

You’ll remember that is from Numbers, chapter six. The Lord bless you and keep you. The blessings of God come upon us in his keeping us from destruction through his saving us and assuring us of our blessedness in the person and work of the Savior. The next verse of the Aaronic benediction reads, “The Lord make his face shine upon you and be gracious unto you.” The light of God’s word comes upon us. We receive the law of God. We pray that he might grant it to us graciously. The Aaronic benediction images that second gift of the blessings of the light of God’s word and then the benediction comes to its climactic conclusion in verse 26. The Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace. So the whole thing moves to peace, the culmination, the peace offering, the communion supper of the Lord, the Eucharist.

And so we have this model before us. Now we spent our first sermon. We talked about in the left hand column now of the dialogue. Worship is dialogue. We’re on our fifth sermon. The first sermon had the call to worship. The second we discussed confession and absolution of sins and the glory of poetry. The third we talked about the seraphim, the Sanctus, and the hymn of praise. And then today—well I got this wrong on my list.

This is actually number five today. So let’s see. I have a copy of what you have as well. Yes, it’s got number four, but this is actually the fifth sermon. So the section under section two, consecration, the responsive reading, hymn of response, sermon, scripture, and the prayer. And then the preaching of the word is the topic for today as we’re moving through this dialogue going back and forth in terms of God’s word.

So that’s where we’re at. We’re in a space of transition here as we begin to discuss the preaching of God’s word and its relationship to the second gift of God in the context of the worship of him by his people. That gift of knowledge, wisdom, a renewed mind through the preaching of the word.

So we’ve moved in the context of the sermon so far through what could be called the entrance as we come into God’s presence and he forgives us of our sins and assures us of that. We’ve moved in the second portion to what the church has historically called the synaxis. Kind of sounds like synagogue. It’s the part of the service where the word is taught as it was in the synagogue. And then we move to the eucharistic portion of the service that has its roots in the temple worship at the Lord’s Supper. So that’s the movement that we’re going through here.

And we could also, I suppose, and Jim B. Jordan in a recent newsletter talks about faith, hope, and love. In this same transition, the culmination of the worship service is an awareness of the love of God manifested to us in the context of the Lord’s Supper.

Today, we’re going to talk about the sermon. And I want to say a few things. First, I’ve got this a little later in the outline, but let me use the illustration. Now, our children play with Legos or the big ones, Duplo, I think they’re called. And you kind of build things by overlaying them the way you do with bricks. So you got three little round circles and this one fits over that one, over the next two and connects them together. And that’s what my preaching has been kind of like in this series. We’re kind of going back to what the brick we laid in preparing us for the brick we’re talking about. And then we’ll review that again as we move forward to the next block as we move along.

Today we’re going to talk about the sermon, but we want to go back a little bit first. I’ve got in your outlines that Jim B. Jordan in one of his books really says that you shouldn’t tape your sermons or if you do tape them, you should just give them to the members that are absent. You shouldn’t make them available across the country. Why? Because the sermon is where the word of God comes in its focalized or focused form. The bridegroom speaks to the bride and says, “This is what you need to hear.” And that message is slanted, so to speak, directed particularly at that congregation.

Our Savior gave the pastors of the seven churches individualized sermons, as it were, to bring to those churches. And if a pastor thinks he’s preaching to a national audience, he may not say the things that he needs to say in the context of the particular church in which he’s ministering.

Now, I say that by way of introduction. I don’t mean to step on any toes here with what I’m going to say, but I do think that in our particular setting as a church historically and now geographically, we need to just review a few things before we go on to the sermon. And the first thing I want to review is this call to worship. The call and the day of worship and rest. And what I’ve got here on the outlines is can’t we all just sit down? We have transitioned into this building and in the providence of God there’s lots of stuff going on. There’s lots of things that I’m doing and it’s real easy to come here and let the work sort of hype us up and speed us up in the day.

We don’t want to do that. We want to rest in the presence of God. This day and the worship service should in a way set the tone for the rest of the day. Now what we need to do is to hear the call to worship and everybody come sit down, rest, and be ready and prepared to receive the gifts of God.

Now I’ve got a little later in the sermon that in our culture we tend to overelevate the sermon and its importance. So somehow the rest of the service is just sort of ancillary. It’s add-ons. It’s not as important as the sermon. That’s where you’re really going to get the word. So the rest of it is just kind of a buildup to and then a climax down after. So we don’t think it’s as important to be in the context of the worship service during the call, the confession of sin, et cetera.

If you’ve understood at all what I’ve said, you understand that what we need to do, all of us need to do is when the call to worship is going to be issued formally at 11:30, we all need to get in here, sit down, and just rest in the work of the Savior. Now we’re going to move into the liturgy there, but you see, we need to collect ourselves together as a congregation. There’s lots of stuff we can be doing here, and the temptation is to do all kinds of stuff and get very busy. But if we neglect the primary call of this day, which is a call by God to worship him for the entire worship service—11:30 to however long it lasts.

If we neglect that then everything else is wasted. You see Mary and Martha is the illustration. Martha wants to do all the work and get everything done. Good thing to do. Work needs to be done. But the better part when we come together, when the call is issued, is to gather together and wait to hear the Savior’s word assuring us of our forgiveness and of preaching to us what we need to hear and then assuring us of his presence with us and our peace and the love that he gives us as the culmination of our worship service.

Can’t we all just sit down together?

I’ve got a reference here to Isaiah 28:8-13. Let’s just I’m going to take the time to look at that. Let me use a different reference. And again, it’s a little bit out of order. It’s on your outline in another place. But in Isaiah 65:12, God says this, “Therefore will I number you to the sword. You shall bow down to the slaughter.”

Okay, do I have your attention?

These are things—what we’re going to hear now are things for which God says if you don’t do them, he gives you to the sword, and he gives you to slaughter. When I spake, you didn’t hear, but did evil before mine eyes, and chose that wherein I delighted not. I also will choose their delusions, will bring their fears upon them, because when I called, none did answer. When I spake, they didn’t hear. They did evil.

Now, we know that this is characteristic of a lifestyle that God is talking about. But I think that what we want to see is that if worship is the model for the rest of our lives and we somehow become dullled to the sense of God’s call in terms of worship or dulled in the sense of God’s call for this entire day to be set apart for the consideration of the worship of God, rest, and recreation in the Lord, then I think we’re in big trouble.

I was talking to a member of the church this week and they said, you know, they really get fearful when people stop or start sliding on their reverence of the entire Lord’s day or Christian Sabbath because this person knows that these warnings predominate in the Old Testament. When God brings judgment, it is almost always as a reference to calling the people to worship and them not hearing him, them hardening their hearts. Oh, they might be present in physical sense but not with their hearts or may not be present at all.

You see what we do on Sunday is important and we want to set this tone of rest in the Savior in response to the call to worship.

Now I need to talk about something else again because someone from the congregation talked to me about this. They said they’d never heard me say this before. I’ve said it several times and I want to say it very clearly. I want to talk about the purification offering and the trespass offering along with the confession of sins. There were five offerings in Leviticus. The one that comes chronologically by way of time first is not the purification offering which we enter into when we confess sins and receive assurance at the beginning of the worship service. The first thing you had to do, but not every time, was a trespass offering.

This is in Leviticus 5. It says if you took a vow and didn’t keep it or you stole something from somebody and didn’t return it, then you’ve got to bring a trespass offering and you got to add 20% to what you stole as you go take it back to him. You weren’t caught. See, your conscience bothered you.

Now, the trespass offering is for more—let’s see, how do I want to say this—sins that should not dominate or be everyday sins that we engage in. It’s not every day that you make a vow to God and break it. It’s not every day that you steal from your employer or from your neighbor, from whatever it is. But when those things happen, you are to bring a trespass offering.

Now, this is not part of the normal pattern of the worship, the sacrificial worship system of the Old Testament. The normal sacrificial day would be purification offering for normal inadvertent sins, then whole burnt offering with the tribute offering and the peace offering. That’s what you do. But when you committed a big sin, let’s just say that—a big sin, not inadvertent. If you sin, you knew you sinned. You’re not supposed to wait for the purification offering to confess that sin. You’re supposed to confess that sin during the week or in the case of the Old Testament, you bought your trespass offering during the week.

The point of that is this. This is why I don’t use heavily penitential psalms or prayers for the confession of sin. You are supposed to be living a life of repentance before God. You’re supposed to be applying the blood of Christ as your trespass offering during the week. Don’t come here. Don’t wait till you come here to confess the sins that may dominate your life or that you might have sinned in a big way during the week. You confess it there. You prepare your heart for worship by doing that trespass offering, pleading the blood of Christ before you come to church.

So the trespass offering takes place Monday through Saturday when you sin and are brought to conviction. The purification offering is different. And that’s why the confession of sin is more generic. That’s why we don’t have a quiet time when people can confess in their hearts their huge sins of the last week. You should have done that before you came here. That’s why the confession of sin is the way it is in this church.

I want to talk about a 2,200 acre fungus. There’s an article in the Oregonian this week about the largest living organism in the world. They say—you know, it’s the Oregonian—but the largest living organism in the world is in eastern Oregon. It’s some fungus that is 2,200 acres in size. Now it exists under the ground. You can’t see it. And what it does is it sends out these rope-like substances away from itself.

Now they know it’s one single organism because they’ve done petri dish studies and I don’t know DNA. I don’t know how they—maybe it isn’t. But they call it one organism. And what this organism does—it sends these things out, these little like tentacles, and it grabs onto—whoops, to the mic. Grabs onto the root of the tree, hits it, and by pressure as well as chemical interaction, it starts to embed itself into the root system of the tree.

Now I hope I’m getting this story right. I heard about two such plants this week. One from my son and one from my wife. So maybe I’m mixing them up. If I am, it’s an illustration anyway.

Suppose one of these organisms—I think this 2,200 acre one is selective. It doesn’t kill every tree. It can use that tree differently than it uses the next one as a mechanism to get to the next one and kill it all. I mean, it’s pretty diabolical if you think about it. And you know, you can’t really tell if the thing is on your land or not because only a few trees will start to die. Eventually they’ll all die, but it manifests itself in a few.

Well, so what? Interesting story, Dennis. But what I’m talking about here is the confession of sin. See, these sins that inhabit our lives during the week. You know, if they’re not regularly dealt with through the application of Christ’s blood, they are a 2,200 acre fungus growing at the root of the church. And some people will start to die off. Some will look okay for a while, then they’ll eventually die. But the sin, if it’s allowed to continue in your life, will destroy you. It’s like that fungus.

Now it happens through pressure. Pressure is usually correspondent of our sins that enter in, and then this chemical interaction—the dynamic nature gets to work. What’s interesting is under the bark of the tree there’s kind of a white substance behind the bark of the tree and supposedly it enervates the entire tree. Sin saps your energy if you don’t confess it before God. It hardens your heart to the Holy Spirit. It weakens you as a person just as that fungus weakens the entire tree. And to a degree, if unrepented of in the context of the corporate congregation, it has a covenantal impact on the church as well.

It’s white stuff underneath the bark. The test for leprosy was to see if your skin was transparent. You can see white blotches under your skin or on the skin. See, it’s a nice picture that God has given to us of the effects of sin on the planting of the Lord, which is what the church is.

Now, my point of all this is you need to know the trespass offering and its application during the week. By which I simply mean to say you need to be sensitive to God in terms of the confession of your own sins to him during the context of the week. You don’t wait for Sunday to do that. If you do, that fungus is growing all week in your life and it will kill you.

Now, I don’t know you. The Lord God does. And you know what sins you were involved with this last week that dominate your life or that would be horrific to you and very embarrassing for God to play a videotape this morning—”Oh, this is what this person did” or “This is what this person was thinking about” or “This is what this person said to this person.”

If I threw a videotape up here of your life this last week, you know what parts of that video—well, I hope you know—if you still have sensitivity to the Holy Spirit, which I assume we all do, then you know which of those sins you need to get serious with God about in terms of pleading the blood of Christ. The beast is at the door of your home. The only thing that keeps the beast out is the blood of Christ applied to that door.

It’s not all your efforts. Now, you have to work diligently, but ultimately it’s not your work that can overcome your sins. It’s the blood of the Lamb that overcomes. And it’s also the use of the corporate body of Christ, your pastors, your friends in the church to keep you accountable relative to particular sins.

Now, just keep in mind the 2,200 acre fungus when you sin this week and get yourselves right with Christ the Lord during the week as you—if you’re committing these sorts of sins, that kind of sin happens and confession of sin rather happens prior to the worship service. The Christian life is not to be a life dominated by such sins.

I’ve got here Leviticus and foot washing. In the normal Christian life we use a formal confession prayer of sin, rather a written prayer. Why do we do that? Because the Bible says to do it. Well, where does it say to do that, Dennis?

Well, it doesn’t say you have to do it, but we have 150 written songs which are for the most part prayers to God in the Psalms that were used in worship. Now, that means that it is not a lack of piety to have a written prayer that somebody else imposes upon you to be used for the prayer—the great prayer that, say, Pastor W. is doing today before the confession of sin. If it bothers you, understand that you know, it’s in concert with the word of God. That’s what the Psalms were. Written prayers that were sung and imposed upon the congregation for use in worship. And many of them were penitential.

Now, I mentioned the Psalms because they tell us, I think—not just the Psalms, but the Psalms inform us—what the normal Christian life is all about. And if we pray through the Psalms the way we’ve done here in this church in various times or families have done, it really challenges you as to what you think the Christian life is all about. See, because the Psalms are not dominated by confession of sin. They’re just not. They’re dominated by warfare. They’re dominated by cries for deliverance and praises to God for the King coming and changing the world. That’s what our Christian life is supposed to look like. What the Psalms say it’s supposed to look like.

We’re not supposed to have big sins going on. When we read the Ten Commandments in our home or at church, we’re not supposed to be doing that stuff very often. We’re not supposed to be killing people every week or having adultery, engaging in adulterous actions every week or being thieves, thieving or lying against our neighbors. These are not to characterize the Christian life. Certainly sins easily beset us. But the mature Christian moves ahead away from that style of life because he sees in the Psalms and gets empowered by those Psalms to live the life of taking the word of God and creating a new world in the power of the Holy Spirit.

We get to communion. It’s the wedding feast, a picture of the ultimate wedding feast to come in the future. But that’s what this communion meal is. And we as the bride adorn ourselves and we adorn the world in the providence of God and bring it to our groom. So that’s what the life—the Christian life is all about. I think the normal Christian life is not dominated by that 2,200 acre fungus. Can’t get rid of that thing.

I don’t know why they haven’t killed it off. Don’t think they can. But I’ll tell you what kills off whatever roots or tentacles of sin in your life. It’s the blood of Christ that puts that fungus to an end and kills it and frees you from life-dominating sins. Okay?

That’s why we have this idea in Leviticus where it’s not always the trespass offering. It’s usually the purification offering. There’s always inadvertent sins we’re engaged with, but they’re completely different in kind. I think that might be why our Savior washed the feet of the disciples. So you don’t need for all of you to be washed, just your feet. When we come here, if you’re dirty from head to toe because of sinful thoughts, sinful actions in your life, sinful speech—you know, this is not the place for a shower or a bath. Ultimately, this is a place for a foot washing.

Written prayer, songs of the Psalter, model for the life of the Christian. I’ve talked about that. Legos, songs in the Bible. I’ve given you here again, touching off now, this last building block before we get to the sermon proper. I’ve given you some scriptures here that talk about the way the songs in the scriptures are used. How do we—you know, singing? We talked about the importance of this last week and we don’t want to go through these now. But I just want to use this to challenge us all a bit in terms of our entertainment and our songs.

I’ve listed here some ways songs are used in the scriptures. Used didactically—they teach things. They’re used as a witness. We talked about that in Deuteronomy 32 last week. Moses used a song to teach people, and also used the—I mean, Deuteronomy is a series of sermons and the last sermon Moses gives he sings to them. So maybe I should have sung last week’s sermon on the song. Maybe I will someday. Moses did.

And that sermon song was to be a witness against God’s people. So songs can be used by God as a witness. Songs are used in terms of consecration. They’re used pastorally, of course. David soothes with music Saul. They’re used in prayer by Jeremiah. They’re used, of course, in battle. One of the books I have is called the use of Psalms in everyday life, and it talks about all these different Psalms the reformers and others would go into battle with when they would have to go to war. The Psalms would be on their lips. Songs are used for warfare.

Songs are used in the sacrifices—accompanied by songs is told us in 2 Chronicles 29. Now, that’s not true of the tabernacle. From what we know, the tabernacle sacrifices were done silently. But when we get to the temple and God moves the culture along and produces a Psalter—not for the tabernacle, for the temple. Now songs are sung apparently always while the sacrifices are going on. The Psalter is being sung. So songs can be used in terms of sacrifice. And songs, of course, can be used to express love.

Songs, as I said last week, create community. They’re almost sacramental in that sense. And when you see them tied to the sacrificial setting of the Old Testament, you can see where people interpret the reality of the sacrifices going on according to the song—the songs that they sing from the Psalter. And we interpret our life and gain strength from God when we sing songs. It creates community, and I’ve been several places where music is played. It creates a community of some sort. The question is for those of us that believe in the antithesis, which community are we communing with?

The antithesis God has placed judicially in the world is warfare between the seed of the woman, Christ and his people, and the seed of the serpent. There is an antithesis built into the nature of culture until the seed of the serpent are completely eliminated from the face of the earth and the seed of the woman dominates.

Well, if music is so important for the development of battle and culture and pastoral youth, and it creates community, I think it behooves us and it behooves our young people to think through what community are they communing with when they listen to particular songs. Now, I’m not trying to be overly pietistic here. I’m not saying it’s wrong to listen to some of those songs, but I’m saying that worldviews get represented typically through song.

Remember I said last week, heresies came in and were popularized not by tracts and pamphlets and books. They were popularized by songs. And the same thing’s true today. So we just need to think about the songs that we use.

Now, remember, like I said last week, songs come from the ungodly line. They came from the line of Enoch. They came from Lamech’s kids. It’s where the first music comes from. But God appropriates those instruments and brings them into his worship. So, you know, I’m not trying to draw an antithesis between what we do as Christians and the use of music. It’s just we got to think through what is this thing doing in terms of causing us to commune.

Okay. Now, let’s talk about the sermon. Again, I spoke to this already, but we have this idea, the heresy of the primacy of the sermon. And this can result in either an undue attention on intellectualism or an undue attention on emotionalism in worship. We get together and the main reason we come together is to hear the sermon. That’s wrong.

Well, the sermon is one of the three gifts, or the focal point of it, but it is not the center of worship. Yes, the rest of the stuff is not, you know, flopping stuff to fill up the hour or two. That is just a wrong way of thinking about what the preaching of the word is.

If you have that view though, then you get together to get some new ideas, to think some new thoughts. “Tickle my ears. Make me have a thought I’ve never had before.” Man, that’s all I really want. Then I’ll go home and say, “Man, that was a good sermon. That was a good day of worship.” Good sermon because it was interesting. Doesn’t change your life. But it’s interesting.

You see, that’s because you focused on the sermon as opposed to the whole worship service. But don’t think it’s just intellectualism that can produce that. It’s emotionalism as well. “Give me a sermon that’ll rock me down to the bottom of who I am, man. Make me hurt. Whip me with that word. Make me feel bad ’cause I don’t feel good when I’m forgiven.” See, move my emotions. That’s why I come to church. I come to church so my emotions can be moved, and if you preach right, preacher, you get the right illustrations, you’re going to move me. You’re going to have me barking like a dog—like Finny did with people—exaggeration for effect, but that’s kind of the idea.

See, both of those things are two opposite errors, but their root is this error of thinking that the sermon is the most important part of the worship service. It isn’t. It’s one of three gifts, if we want to look at it that way. It’s an element of the worship service. And really the entire service is sermonic if you understand that this is the way the scriptures have given us a model for worship that we’ve tried to implement here—that he’s given us this dialogue. God calls. We better hear and come. God wants us to rest in Christ. We better be here resting. God wants to assure us of our personhood. We say yeah, amen, we’re happy about that.

God preaches the word and we come forward—not just with our thoughts, we come forth with our bodies saying we want to worship God with all that we are. See, that dialogue back and forth is a sermon by God. The word of God shouldn’t just be heard at the sermon. It should be heard peppering the entire liturgy because the entire liturgy is sermonic. Okay?

When we sing the Psalms, it can be said that we’re singing sermons that were supposed to be sung in the temple. And if we think of it that way, it helps us not to focus so much on what we call the sermon.

Well, let’s talk about that. So given that caveat, let’s talk about the sermon a little bit—its context, the sermon itself, and God’s second gift of wisdom. And to let you know where we’re going here, it’s really pretty simple.

In Romans 12:1 and 2, you know, “I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God,” the context for this transformation that the word of God affects in our lives is the mercies of God. So the context for the sermon is the grace of God. And we’re going to talk about that as we talk about the responsive reading and as we talk about the prayer for illumination.

We’ll see that the context for receiving the word is according to the mercies of God. So “I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God that you present your bodies a living sacrifice.” The sermon is to produce an effect—not on our minds, now we’ll get to that here, but the first emphasis is that you’d present your bodies a living sacrifice.

You know, the tongues come down, fire comes down to show that first century church, they’re on the altar. You come together today, you’re on the altar. The altar isn’t death. The altar is transformation into new life with Christ in heaven. The ola—the burnt offering of the Old Testament. It doesn’t mean burnt. It means to rise up or to ascend. The first of the sweet smelling offerings means when we present ourselves before God or when we bring our tribute offering, we bring who we are, our tithes, offerings, our whole bodies up in response to the word of God.

It is a whole life response to God’s word that is demanded from the sermon. “Present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service.” This is your liturgy. The word service here in the Greek is the root word for what we call liturgy. Your reasonable liturgy is to, in response to the preaching of God’s word according to the grace in the context of God’s mercy, come forward at that new mind and present yourselves as living sacrifices.

Now, the end result of this is that you’re not conformed to this world. Cookie cutter image is the idea of the Greek word that’s used here. It’s like silly putty before they fixed it. You take a cartoon character off the Sunday paper and put it on another piece of paper. That’s what this conform means. Cookie cutter image. You see around you, and by imitation you do what the world does. Don’t do that.

But rather to be transformed. This is not cookie cutter. This is middle of your person outward. You become a new thing. You get on that altar and instead of, you know, your present body cut up by the word, you rise in an ascended body. You’re a different deal. You become wine, not grape juice. It’s not the same stuff. It’s been transformed. It’s been transformed by the word of God in the power of the Spirit that has that ability to transform our lives.

How? “By the renewing of your mind.” The mind is involved in this. It receives the instruction of God’s word, “that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.”

So the sermon is said in this gracious context. According to this text we want to spend a couple of minutes talking about its context and very briefly then talking about again just reiterating what I’ve just said in terms of the sermon.

What is the context? Well we have this liminal time—this idea of cusp space or liminal space. That’s a word—I read it before. I didn’t know what it was and asked Peter Leithart a couple years ago up there in Seattle—what is liminal space? It isn’t even in my spell checker in Word, you know, on the computer. Well, liminal is a doorway. It’s a threshold. You know, the cusp is the space between two astrological signs or astronomical signs, the doorway.

So that’s a liminal space there at the back of the sanctuary and you come through the liminal space. So when you’re at the doorway, you’re in liminal space. You’re moving from one room to another. You’re on the cusp. You’re coming out of this place and you’re coming into this place.

Well, remember we looked at Isaiah 6, that when God calls Isaiah forward, he begins by assuring him of his forgiveness. But it doesn’t end there. He says, “Who will go for me?” And Isaiah, in his resurrection, in his transformed state—”I’m God’s messenger. I’m his angel. I’ll go. Send me.” And God gives him a message to transform the world, to dress up the creation, to dress up your world, your workspace, not in terms of external adornment. That’s part of it, but to change the way business is done, to change the way political action is done, to change the way recreation is done.

You see, so God brings us forward so that we might do those things, so that we might move in the context of this resurrected state. And as we come through the assurance of that forgiveness, we get to the second of God’s gifts, the gift of wisdom that correlates, you know, to the whole burnt offering along with the tribute offering. We’ll talk more about that next week. But as we move from that purification offering to the whole burnt offering, the responsive consecration to God’s word of who we are, we have this transition going on.

And the place in the service that we have decided to place this transition is with the responsive reading. You get assured of your forgiveness. You praise his holy name. And then Pastor W. says, “Okay, sit down now.” And now we’re at that doorway to the next part of the service. Having been prepared by the mercies of God, we’re moving now to receive through God’s mercy and grace the right way to think.

We’re going to get our minds straight, which means we’re going to get our actions right, which means we’re going to become different people as a result of the sermon—three times different people as a result of the sermon. So we’re moving, and that transition—the doorway—is that responsive reading. Responsive reading is this transition state.

Revelation 2 and 3, same thing. John sees Christ, falls down dead, gets raised back up, and then comes the sermon, you see, and then he goes out and does that stuff. Liminal space.

Now, the Psalms are written—we use the Psalms typically because, in their very—first of all, we use the Psalms because we know they were again used for temple worship. So they’re going to be used for our worship as well. Not exclusively, but the Psalms should dominate us because it’s the book—it’s the worship manual from the Old Testament along with an understanding of Leviticus. So it informs us and we use the Psalms.

Well, as we look at those Psalms, we find out that a great number of them are written responsively—are written to be used—and we know that they did this responsively in the temple. Priests or Levites would say this, the people respond here. Or they’d have a priest here, a priest here, people here—he’d say something, they’d say something, this priest would say something, he’d say something. There’s different forms in the Psalms, and they’re very structure in terms of how that’s to be done.

We’ve used a very simple form for 15 years. Maybe in another 15 years, now that we’ve got two podiums up here, two men up here, maybe start to do some of this triple antiphonal stuff. And we don’t do that because we think it’s fun or cool or interesting or will hold your attention. We do it because the Psalms have this structure and it seems to us that God is commanding us to enter into that structure.

You see, and as we think about that and as we meditate about how God is calling us to worship and how he had people worship in the Old Testament, we say, “Hmm, that’s interesting because, you know, the pastor’s speaking for God and the congregation are repeating the next line of the Psalm. That sounds many times just like the first line of the Psalm or maybe it’s the opposite of the first line of the Psalm or describing the curse as opposed to a blessing.

And so what’s happening is when we do this, when we conform ourselves to the Psalms, our lives change because then we see that, oh yeah, in terms of the dialogue of worship, that’s what our life is all about. God does things in our life. And we’re to speak back to him—not just with our words, but with our actions. Not bitterness, grumbling, disputing about what’s going on. We’re to respond to him with thanksgiving using his thoughts.

New Testament says you’ve got an unction of the Holy Spirit and you know all things. We’re supposed to bring every thought captive to the mind of Christ. And here’s the training to do that. We say God’s word back to him a little different with a little variety. And we—that’s what we train ourselves throughout the rest of the week to respond in this particular fashion.

Now, as I said, you know, one way to look at this, we could look at these examples of God structuring this antiphonal worship, but I used this illustration earlier from Isaiah 65, that God says that if he calls and we don’t answer, we’re up for the sword and slaughter. Now, this is an eschatological statement to a people. I mean, it’s the end point of a series of rebellions. I don’t mean to tell you that God doesn’t forgive your sin. But what I am trying to tell you is this: that in terms of this antiphonal nature of the Psalms, we’re training ourselves for when God speaks his word in a larger sense—rather than just one line in the sermon. We’re training ourselves to live our lives in response to that, to hear his call in the sermon and change our life as a result of that call.

And if we do not do that then God will give us over to various delusions and difficulties. So life is a response to the sovereignty of God. He trains us to respond to him correctly. That’s what the responsive reading in the Psalter is all about.

Let’s talk a little bit now about the sermon proper. Now we’re in this middle section. The doorway is the responsive reading. We then sing a part of that—that hopefully something very related to, if not the very Psalm itself, reinforcing to ourselves that the word of God produces worship as well as a change in life as well as an understanding of his word. We talked about that in the meeting this morning—knowledge, character, and worship. And then after that’s done, then the sermon proper begins. The sermon scripture is read and there’s a prayer for illumination.

David—we believe it was David—in Psalm 119:18 says, “Open thou mine eyes that I may behold wondrous things out of thy law.” David says that unless you open my eyes, I will not behold wondrous things. David understands his limitation, his need, his absolute blindness to understand God’s word apart from the illuminating work of God himself, the Holy Spirit. David has a desire to hear things out of the law of God. And David understands the source of assurance that indeed he will behold wondrous things out of God’s law. He goes to God. He doesn’t go to a computer program. He goes to God as the source of assurance for knowing that he’ll know God’s word.

I think it was Augustine said that, you know, it’s it’s—