We've been in a series that is addressing the question, where in the church is the gospel? This fourth message takes us through a typical church service, and much of this will sound familiar. Today, John will walk us through how all aspects of corporate worship should be gospel-centered, and he'll show us just how far off church worship can get. Let's listen now to a message called, Is Worship in the Church Gospel Centered? Where in the church is the gospel?
We've been asking and answering this question, and our launching point for the question is Paul's letter to Titus. And the reason Paul is so concerned for the centrality of the gospel in these young churches in Crete. It's because he understands that the gospel not only creates the church. But the gospel also produces godliness in the church. He says that in chapter 1, verse 1.
He says that he is a servant and an apostle for the knowledge of the truth, that is the gospel, which accords with godliness. And so through the preaching of the gospel in the church, Christ, through the Holy Spirit, takes that gospel and he brings about new creations. He brings sinners from death to life. That's conversion, regeneration. And then, through the ongoing preaching of the same gospel in the church.
Christ, through the Holy Spirit, takes that gospel and he sanctifies and he transforms his people into godliness. That's Paul's argument in the letter of Titus. He's concerned that Titus makes sure that this gospel. The gospel, in its strict sense, joyful news, good news, is central to the teaching and life of the church. And so here's what we've been saying.
If the gospel is to reside at the heart of everything for the Apostle Paul in Crete and also Ephesus and wherever he went, Philippi, Corinth. The gospel was always central to the life and character development of the churches that he went to. Shouldn't the gospel be central and reside at the heart of everything that our church is about? Yeah. And so, what is regrettable is that many believers, including many pastors, know very little of the gospel.
It's always in the heart of writing my dissertation. about the gospel. A pastor of a relatively large Southern Baptist church wrote to me an email that popped up in the middle of the chapter where I was writing on the gospel of all times for it to get me to get it. And he said, You know, I'm just not sure I believe in propitiation. I just don't see that anywhere in the scriptures.
And I was just sitting there writing a chapter entitled, What is the Gospel? How providential was that? There are pastors and many believers who know very little of the gospel, and consequently, pastors and churches fail to see the many implications and functions that the gospel has For the life of the church and how the church is to be ordered. Let me just give you one example from two evangelical authors, and this isn't to pick on them, this is to show you exactly why I'm doing what I'm doing here in this series. To give you a clear, stark, contrast of what we see we're up against and what we are not going to be here in this church.
In their book Perimeters of Light. Elmer Towns and Ed Stetzer. Seek to answer this question. What makes worship Christian? In answer to the question, here's what they write.
Quote. Six elements should occur in all true worship. Examination Expectation. Appropriation, meditation. Consummation.
and transformation. And when you read carefully in that chapter. The author's answers: what is tragically absent are the doctrines of the Trinity. The mediatorial role of Christ as high priest. And the sacraments.
all of which are absolutely Necessary for true Christian worship. In fact, there is nothing distinctively Christian about those six elements that they list. Moreover, it is not the believer's actions, as we're going to see this morning, that makes worship Christian. It's the triune God's actions, as we'll see, in Christ by the Spirit that makes worship genuinely Christian. Paul in Philippians 3:3 says.
For we are the circumcision who worship by the Spirit of God in glory in Christ Jesus. They continue to make similar statements, which reveal their failure to see the many implications and functions of the gospel in corporate worship. I want you to listen to this carefully. According to them, true worship is this: is that people, quote, when people come to worship God, they expect God to show up. There is a certain element of faith and true worship that you believe God will meet with you.
And you think, well, okay, so far that sounds pretty good. But here's the element of faith: that how God meets with you. This is how it works out. You have to make the right preparation. Which means this.
You have to cleanse yourself from sin. And you have to remove barriers that prohibit a relationship with God. When I read that, I thought that was what Christ did. They said, quote, if you worship him, he will come. Do this and live.
God helps those who helps themselves. God's actions are dependent upon your first actions. They say, quote, here's what you get in the conclusion of the service: quote: The conclusion is not just a benediction or a final prayer. God's last word of blessing over your life is not the final way you worship. That's not the most important thing that happens in corporate worship.
The peak Of your worship experience is your dedicated and changed life. Lastly, worship must do more than lead to dedication. And they just said it was the peak, but it must do more.
So dedicating your whole life to God is not enough. for true worship. It must also lead to transformation. Many people have dedicated their lives to God, but afterward accomplished very little. When you dedicate everything to God, you come to the end of yourself.
That is, you surrender. There's nothing distinctively Christian about those statements. In fact, those statements are distinctively un-Christian. Who can cleanse himself or herself from sin? Who can remove the barriers that prohibit a right relationship with God?
If you worship God through your action, He'll come and respond to your action because His action is dependent upon your action. The whole emphasis here is on man's actions. In contrast, in Romans chapter 10, Paul sets forth the logic of the gospel. God sends his ambassadors to sinners rather than sinners trying to make their way to God by their self-cleansing, their removing of barriers between them and God, their offering of themselves and their actions, their skill, their cleverness, and their efforts to ascend to God. Paul says that God is already, through the gospel, accommodating himself to our sinful weakness, and that he's not far from us.
If we will but attend to the ministry of the gospel, he's as near as the word coming out of the pastor's mouth. Listen, Paul says, but the righteousness based on faith says, do not say in your heart, who will ascend into heaven? That is to bring Christ down. Who will descend into the abyss? That is to bring Christ up from the dead.
What does it say? The word is near you in your mouth and in your heart. That is the word of faith that we proclaim. It is pointless for sinners to try and make their way to heaven. That happened in Genesis 11, called the Tower of Babel, and that didn't turn out too well.
It is pointless for us to try to make our assent to God in worship through what we do, because God the Father has already sent the Son into the world. to come to us. Neither is there any need for sinners to think that they have to bring Christ up from the dead, work something up in the service to get God to come. God has already raised Christ from the dead, Paul says. Rather, what does Paul say God requires?
He says it's not human efforts of ascent. That is religion to God. That's what religion is: human effort trying to ascend to God and get God through what He does in His act of service and devotion to come to Him. That happens in pagan temples. That's not Christian worship.
Paul says that what happens is, but in faith, Christ through the gospel is announced by God's ambassador, and he comes to us because he's made a promise. James Torrance, in his book, Worship Community and the Triune God of Grace, offers a far better perspective on the church's worship. This is incredibly profound. He says, We go to church. We sing our psalms to God, we intercede for the world, we listen to the sermon, which is too often simply an exhortation.
We offer our money, our time, and talents to God. No doubt we need God's grace to help us do it. We do it because Jesus taught us to do it. He left us an example to do it. But all of this kind of worship is what we do before God.
In theological language, this means that the only priesthood is our priesthood. It's our offering up to God. The only offering is our offering. The only intercessions are our intercessions. Indeed, this worship in practice is Unitarian.
Unitarianism, you know what it does? It rejects the Trinity and it rejects the divinity of Jesus Christ, and it says you don't need Jesus to be your mediator, you can ascend to God yourself. By what you do yourself. There's one God, and He's not a Trinity. This type of worship in evangelical churches has no doctrine of the mediator or sole priesthood of Christ.
It is human-centered, has no proper doctrine of the Holy Spirit, is too often non-sacramental. And it engenders a weariness. We sit in the pew watching the minister do his thing, exhorting us to do our thing until we go home thinking we have done our duty for another week. He says this kind of do-it-yourself with the help of the minister worship is what our forefathers would have called legal worship. Not evangelical worship, that is, worship driven by the gospel.
This is what the ancient church would have called Aryan. That's modern-day Jehovah's Witness worship. Or a Pelagian. That is, you don't even need God's grace, you can just do it yourself. But this worship is not Trinitarian.
So, this brings us to the question: where in the church is the gospel, particularly in relation to its implications for corporate worship? You see, the gospel has implications for all of life. It is to be paramount in all things we say in this church, and that is not a slogan. It is to have implications for all of life, including the church's corporate worship. There is to be a self-consciously gospel-centered logic, a gospel trajectory to the church's corporate worship.
Yet, too often, this goes completely unnoticed, and the implications are almost never seriously thought through, as we just saw illustrated in that book. Let me just walk you through a typical evangelical worship service, and this is how I grew up. Usually, the service starts with a casual welcome and announcements. The band strikes up a chord. The so-called worship leader.
He may or she may give a brief, not well thought-out, extemporaneous prayer filled with just and about every other word. Listen to what C.S. Lewis said about that kind of extemporaneous, unthoughtful prayer in the church. Regarding extemporaneous prayer, he says the congregation is forced to hold to two irreconcilable attitudes at the same time. First, the congregation wants to worship God.
They want to focus attention on Him. But to do this, He says, the congregation must agree with what the minister, in our case, A music leader is praying. He says this involves analyzing the prayers that are spoken. And he says, one continually finds oneself focusing on the prayer and asking. Is this orthodox?
Do I agree with this? And then he makes this point. When that happens, the prayer becomes an obstacle to worship rather than a vehicle for it.
Someone has remarked that when extemporaneous prayer is good, it is very good. But when it is bad, it is horrid. End quote. He's exactly right. Then following this brief, unthoughtful prayer, Yeah.
The congregation sings a couple songs, and typically those songs are set forth by the leader as the sacraments for the church. Meaning, you'll hear them say the music leader is the one who ushers the congregation into God's presence through songs.
Well, I used to think that maybe that was Jesus' function. Nothing I do brings me into God's presence safely. Only Jesus does. Jesus alone ushers me into the presence of God. Nothing else does that.
Nothing. Nothing I do makes me safe before a holy God except the mediatorial priesthood of Jesus interceding for me forever. And then, near the end of the singing, another awkward extemporaneous prayer is offered up. The worship leader, or so-called worship leader, might say a few things up front that you're just sitting there going and kind of cringing, going, Man, I just wish he wouldn't talk. Just saying.
And then, after that, the sermons given, which too often in the church is a mere moral exhortation. Fill with endless principle after secret key principle, how for you to have the best life you've ever lived. As opposed to a serious Christ-centered exposition of scripture week in and week out. And after the sermon, there's communion if they have communion, whenever they have communion. And most of the time, the Lord's Supper is turned into a private, individualistic Jesus and me moment.
And here's how it works. The bread and juice are placed on tables into stations around the auditorium. And when the worshipper feels like he or she is ready and has prepared their heart enough, They just get up by themselves and go serve themselves. And have a little Jesus and me private moment. But in contrast, the scriptures clearly teach that the Lord's Supper, as we learned last week, is a corporate meal where the whole body comes together to give thanks and enjoy fellowship with the triune God through Christ, by the Spirit, and with one another.
At the table. It is a corporate communion. It is not an individual communion. We are to observe the Lord's Supper communally, not individually. That was part of the problem in Corinth, which Paul said, stop it.
Regular gathering around the Lord's table is what builds community and connects members of the congregation. Why? Because only the gospel creates and builds fellowship in the church.
Furthermore, too often communion is not rightly administered. The words of institution are not read. Proper examination is not done. And if it is called to be done, self-examination becomes a legalistic way for you to sit there trying to clean your heart up so that you can come and partake worthily. No warning, apostolic warning is given, although Paul gives it.
No prayers of thanksgiving are offered. No true gospel comfort is communicated. The focus of communion is on the worshipper's pledge of renewed obedience rather than being communicated and understood as God's means of grace, whereby God comes as our servant to serve us at His table and to save us. If there's no communion service, after the moral exhortation ends, the band gets back up with a closing song or two, some type of appeal for a decision is made. And people are dismissed without a real benediction.
It typically ends something like this: the service is over, so goodbye till next week. And that's what's held for it to be Christian worship. In such a liturgy, the gospel is at best assumed. There is no self-consciously clear gospel logic or gospel trajectory set forth. But unlike the Protestant evangelical reformers in the 16th century, who were preeminently concerned for the church's worship, corporate worship.
Too many churches today, regardless of where they are on the spectrum, high church, low church, or in-between church. Wherever they are, they give little to sometimes no attention to why they do what they do, they just do it. The service is haphazard and it lacks a clear gospel logic. It lacks a clear gospel trajectory that moves from point A to point Z. And it's important to understand: listen, there are no non-liturgical churches.
That doesn't exist. You don't have a choice between whether or not to use a liturgy. By definition, when a church gathers for corporate worship, that's liturgy. The choice is not between liturgy and no liturgy. The choice is between having an agreed-upon, well-thought-out liturgy or leaving things to the spur of the moment and the discretion of the leader.
As a comedian said, This he observed: if you think organized religion is bad, try disorganized religion. It's really bad. Every Sunday at every church, there will be liturgy. The question is, will the liturgy be a good one or a bad one, deliberately conceived and understood and followed out of an unreflective routine? Or will it be rooted in the contemporary spirit of the age?
Will it be shaped by the spirit of our age and our culture, or will it be shaped by the gospel logic and trajectory given to us in Scripture? Will the churches worship? Ignored the historic worship of the church in the ages past. Or will it seek to retain that which has been proven over the centuries to ensure that the church's worship is robustly Trinitarian? Robustly Trinitarian, in your face, Trinity.
Self-consciously gospel-centered. Christ exalting in its focus.
So why are we called together on church on the Lord's Day? What is the purpose for our gathering together on Sunday, which is his day, his day, the day when he rose from the dead?
Well, that's the only thing that's going to be. The purpose is this. We have to understand that corporate worship, first and foremost, is in terms of God's service and actions towards us. It is not first and foremost our actions and service toward Him. In early Reformed and Lutheran circles, the public worship of the church was called the divine service.
And you're like, wow, the divine service. Welcome to the divine service at Paramount Church, right?
Sounds so big or whatever.
Well, here's the explanation. It was called the divine service because God, who is divine, comes to us Through the means of grace, he has instituted word and sacrament. To give us of himself and all of his saving benefits. That's his service. It's his service.
It's his divine service. This means that the primary but not exclusive emphasis on worship on Sunday is to be God's activity, His service, not our activity, which is response. Another way of saying it. Is that the purpose of corporate worship is called covenant renewal ceremony? I don't know if you've ever heard that term before: a covenant renewal ceremony.
It is all over the Bible. You have covenant renewal ceremonies all over scripture. We just had one last week when we celebrated the Lord's Supper. You may be wondering, well, what is a covenant renewal ceremony? It's simply this, it's very simple.
God remembers his covenant And then we respond and remember back. He comes and he remembers the promise, the covenant that he's made to always be gracious and kind and forgiving and loving and forgive our sin. He never renegs on his promise, his covenant. The Lord has remembered us. He will bless us.
Because you come here thinking after all the sin you've been through all week, he's not going to do it this time. He will bless the house of Israel. He will bless the house of Aaron. Through the speaking of his word of law, he confronts and convicts and directs. And through the speaking of his word of gospel, he absolves, strengthens, renews, and confirms and assures our hearts.
And by his visible gospel sacraments, God in Christ, by the Spirit, continually assures my faith that everything I've heard in the gospel is true for me. And then I find myself wanting to grow more and more through this experience. of God remembering me. First. The emphasis is on God's gracious acts of service to needy sinners in a covenant renewal ceremony is not upon your assent to try to get something to happen and bring God down.
He doesn't work like that. Yet, how often is the main direction and logic in the Church's liturgy from man to God? Placing the main emphasis on worship, on our activity, our effort, and our ascent. And we don't even remember that Jesus has already descended first. At the heart and center of all worship is Jesus Christ and His atoning sacrifice for sin, the covenant of grace.
In covenant renewal worship, Jesus comes by His Spirit through the proclamation of the gospel to give us of Himself and all of His saving benefits over and over again. This is the divine service. This is a covenant renewal ceremony. Worship then becomes dialogical, which just simply means this: you have a dialogue. God speaks to us, He addresses us, and we respond appropriately to what He speaks to us.
You see, in all covenants, there are two parties. God's work in the covenant comes first. He has promised to come and rescue sinners who call on him. He's promised it. That's called an invocation.
How do we begin our church's worship service? Invocation. Our help is in the name of the Lord who made heaven and earth. Do not forsake me, O Lord, O my God, be not far from me. Make haste to help me, O Lord, my salvation.
When you're calling for help, you're saying, save me. And in worship, our first response is to begin by calling on the triune God invocation: come serve me, help me. Do you know what invocation was? It was a political act. It's not a religious act.
It's a political act. In the ancient times, this comes right out of scripture. A lesser king, called a vassal, called upon or invoked the name of a greater king, which was called a suzerain. And when the lesser king was being invaded by a foreign army and was under great threat of death, he would call upon the great suzerain king when threatened by an invading power. And this great king would come to the rescue every time.
Why? Because the great king had made a covenant promise. And he won't reneg on it. You see this first invocation in scripture appear in Seth and his faithful line in Genesis 4:26. At that time, people began to call upon the name of the Lord.
In Romans 10, verse 13, Paul quotes Joel 2:32, and he's talking about an invocation, and he says, For whoever calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. That's invocation. Invoking the greater king's name was like pulling a fire alarm in the building. Come rescue me. And he's coming.
So, if you pull that fire alarm, there better be a fire because he's coming, he's going to show up. God's This invocation, what follows it in corporate worship? What do we do? We begin with invocation. What follows?
God's greeting. Here he comes. Here comes the king. You pulled the fire alarm, he's coming. And how does he come and greet his people?
Listen. Grace and peace to you. In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. This great conquering king. Comes to you not in judgment, but in peace and favor.
And he greets you. And the pastor, speaking on behalf of God as the official ambassador, ordained by the church and sent to declare God's promises, declares God's goodwill to the standing congregation. And so we call on the triune God to be present among us by his Spirit, and he comes to us on his terms, which is word and sacrament. Jesus, the protector of his people, the great king, the great suzerain, the keeper of his covenant promise, comes by his spirit. And every single week, in the covenant renewal ceremony, Zechariah's prophecy is fulfilled in our presence.
They will call upon my name, and I will answer them. I will say, they are my people, and they will respond, the Lord is my God. It's the heart of the covenant. How does worship continue?
Well, in any covenant, there's a reading of the terms of the peace treaty with the great king. There are stipulations and sanctions.
So as an assembled people before the king and his court, we stand as the king takes his throne and reads the commandments from his treaty, the terms of the treaty, And when he reads them to us through the human mouth of a weak, sinful man. We recognize our sinfulness and our failure to keep the other side of the covenant. We don't love God and we don't love our neighbor perfectly and we fall Far short. And so our triune God addresses us in His law, and we respond. How do we respond?
What is our part of the dialogue? We confess our sin. We kneel as a physical expression of humility before God, the great king, the great suzerain. If you come into the presence of a human king, you better kneel. You can't even get within 20 feet of a king in England.
There's a circle. There's an imaginary circle of 20 feet. You don't get near that circle. You kneel and you don't stand up and you don't look at the king and you don't address him until he says it's safe. It's okay.
Confession in the church is a high act of praise to God. Why? Because corporately, the church together is giving expression to the utter worthiness of Jesus and the utter unworthiness of everybody present. Michael Horton says, Before we heard the reading of the law, we thought we were good people who could be better. But after hearing God speak, we're like the children of Israel hearing God deliver the commands.
You speak with us and we will hear. They told Moses, but do not let God speak with us, lest we die.
Now, to be sure, when we read the law in the church, we're not summoned to the foot of Mount Sinai. Hebrews 12 makes that very clear, but the point is this: it is to recognize that even though we're justified, we are simultaneously still sinful. Falling short of what God's law requires of us. Learning to more and more see our sinful nature, acknowledge our need to more earnestly seek Christ and the forgiveness He gives to us. 1 John 1, verses 8 and 10 says, If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.
If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us. In contrast, 1 John chapter 1, verse 9, John gives this promise. To the believer who is walking with the Lord, if we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us of our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. That is a promise, not a condition to me.
So, in confession, we agree with God's just sentence as our king against us for our sins, and we come in the service acutely aware that it were not for the fact that we were under Christ's covenant faithfulness on our behalf, we would be addressed by the living God and His presence and our covenant unfaithfulness. We would be exactly like Adam and Eve in the garden, who were fully exposed to the all-seeing gaze of a holy, righteous, law-giving God and hear guilty and be done with it. But this brings us to the transitional pivotal point of the service where we move from judgment to grace. Think of it, Michael Horton says, of coming into God's court in a court trial. And after the judge has convicted and sentenced you as a criminal, he's found a way to acquit you.
And what do we do in our service after we've read the law and confessed our sin? We come to the declaration of pardon, absolution. We hear our covenant-keeping king promise us again that all who call upon the name of the Lord will be saved. And so, this declaration through God's official ordained ambassador announces that the great king has forgiven our sins for the sake of Christ alone. In fact, we're more than acquitted by the judge.
We're justified. Our primary spiritual need is met, salvation from God's judgment and condemnation. Our highest gospel privilege is given to us as a gift. We're told that we are sons and daughters of the living King. Adoption, the highest privilege of the gospel.
God, the King, takes us into His family and fellowship, and He's not only our King, He becomes our loving Father. We're brought into his family as children and made co-heirs with Christ, so that whatever Christ has and Christ has earned by his perfect obedience is yours and mine with him. This is pronounced over our life. It is like when Jesus, who healed the paralytic, said to him, Take heart, my son, your sins are forgiven. It is like Paul when he says, Since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.
You want to have peace with this king. You do not want to be this king's enemy. He is coming back as a conquering king one day to subdue all the enemies in his kingdom. You want to have peace with him. Concerning the public act of absolution, listen to what John Calvin said about this.
Yeah. Christ intended to assure what love. Assure his followers of salvation promised to them in the gospel that they might expect it as firmly as if he were himself to descend from heaven to bear testimony concerning it himself. In a word, it is a wonderful consolation to devout minds to know that the message of salvation brought to them by a poor mortal man is ratified before God. And with this declaration of pardon from the King that all is forgiven, you are holy and righteous, the way is opened up for us to hear God's gracious invitation.
Come and sing. And so, what do we do? We have a call to worship.
So, now you can hear God calling you to praise Him properly. You're not praising Him to get Him to come to do something for you. You're praising and thanking Him through song because you know He is present with you now because He's promised to be here. He has come to you by promise through the gospel, by the Holy Spirit. You don't have to work anything up, he's here.
And so you have this grateful response of praise and thanksgiving, and then God's worship continues. Listen by God addressing us to the ministry of the word. The ministry of the word in the church is the public reading of scripture. Listen to 1 Timothy 4, verse 13. Paul instructs Timothy: devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture.
We publicly read Scripture because God tells us to. It's not an option. We don't do it because we think, oh, well, this would be a good thing to put into the service. Devote yourself to the public reading of scripture.
Okay, we'll do that. It's just so simple. Devote yourself to exhortation and teaching.
So, in the public reading of scripture, God addresses us in his word. What do we say? Hear the word of the Lord. Having heard the word of the Lord, we respond with thankful hearts. Thanks be to God, he spoke to me.
What comes with the ministry of the word? The public reading of scripture, preaching, which is the chief means of grace. We could camp here forever, but I won't. But listen. Preaching is the chief means of grace.
What is means of grace? That is God's acts of delivering Christ to you. The word of God and the sacraments deliver Christ to you. Nothing else does. Preaching is the chief means by which he does this.
In Titus chapter 1, verse 3, this is so crystal clear. You just can't miss it unless you're just reading too quick. Paul teaches Titus, and Titus chapter 1, verse 3, listen to this. That the hope of eternal life is manifested when the pastor in the church preaches the gospel. Usually When that phrase is used, it's talking about Jesus in his first coming.
Jesus appeared, the hope of eternal life appeared. This is not talking about the incarnation in Titus chapter 1, verse 3. In Titus chapter 1, verse 3, by means of the preaching of the gospel, the relevance of the Christ event, Jesus in his birth, life, death, burial, resurrection, ascension. That is made real, continued in the church. Paul says in Galatians chapter 3, verse 1: when he preached the gospel, it was as if the Galatians themselves were standing at the foot of the cross watching Jesus be crucified.
When you hear the gospel proclaimed in the church, God is there in Christ by his Spirit, giving you the life, death, burial, resurrection of Christ right there. But depending on the church's tradition, the Lord's Supper follows the ministry of the Word. Why? The Holy Spirit creates faith in our hearts by the preaching of the gospel, and then He confirms, comforts, strengthens, nurtures, and assures that same faith by the use of the sacraments. The Lord's Supper was a regular element in the liturgy of the early church, Acts chapter 2.
Frequent communion, however, fell into disfavor in church history. Still today, some churches observe communion very infrequently. Often the argument goes like this. If we celebrate the Lord's Supper weekly or frequently, it's going to become routine and mundane, to which I say If we preach weekly in the church, if we sing weekly in the church, if we read the scripture weekly in the church, if we pray weekly in the church, it might become routine and mundane.
So why don't we have preaching twice a year? Why don't we pray once a year?
So that when it's time to pray, we're ready. Part of the problem of thinking about the Lord's Supper like that is because baptism and the Lord's Supper, the sacraments, have lost their gospel-centered focus in the church. If the Lord's Supper and baptism are simply your oath pledge of faithfulness, your public renewed obedience, burnout is the only option for frequent observance of the Lord's Supper because you can only do that so often until you're just dead. But if the Lord's Supper is seen as God's means of grace, his acts of delivering Christ to us, if the Lord's Supper is seen as his revealing of Christ and all of his saving benefits to us, because God has made a covenant promise to meet us at this table. Then the church needs the regular, frequent administration of that sacrament because it is a visible gospel that nourishes, strengthens, and confirms my faith in Christ.
So what is our response after the ministry of the word, the ministry of the Lord's Supper, or the ministry of baptism? Our response is to offer a sacrifice. You go, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, what kind of sacrifice? Not a guilt offering. That was Jesus on the cross, a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving, a thank offering.
A simple thank offering. A thank offering for the sins forgiven because of the one perfect, complete sacrifice of Jesus on the cross, we express our thanks. How do we express our thanks? We first express our thanks in this church by giving financially to advance the work of the gospel through this church. That's how we express our thanksgiving.
That's how we respond. That's our part of participation in the service. We do not give out of duty. We do not give out of an obligation of some false percentage that has been foisted upon us by a misreading of Scripture. We give, Paul says, from a willing, cheerful heart in view of the mercies that we've received from our covenant-keeping God.
And I want you to notice as I've taken you through this service that we have, the intentional gospel movement of our service, God acts upon us, He works repentance in us, renewed faith in us, obedience in us, and we respond with joyful, cheerful hearts at the end to love God and to serve our neighbor. We respond with songs of thanksgiving and joy in light of the good news that we've received. Whether the response could be given than just to be thankful. There is no other response. God doesn't need anything else.
Just be thankful. And so, how does our service end? We end with a benediction. We end with God's word. God gets the final word in the service.
One final time, God addresses his people. His last word of address is grace, it is goodwill, it is all blessing, it is all favor, it is no judgment. The people would receive God's blessing through the pastor as he raises his hands and pronounces the benediction upon his people. Thanks for listening to the Hymn We Proclaim podcast with John Fonville. Hymn We Proclaim is a ministry of John Fawnville of Paramount Church in Jacksonville, Florida.
You can check out his church at paramountchurch.com. We look forward to next time.
