Jesus provides us with timeless and definitive insights and instruction about what is acceptable worship. First and foremost, it needs to be grounded in the truth of God's Word. Today on Truth for Life we'll find out how we go from merely attending a church service to encountering the living God. Alistair Begg is teaching from the Gospel of John chapter 4 beginning at verse 19. If in terms of our declaring our understanding of what God has done for us in Christ, we actually use language that the New Testament can count on us.
Because then the people listening can then look and say, oh yeah, that makes sense. Come meet a man who told me everything I did. Can this not be the Christ? So the testimony is, I used to worship myself and now I worship Jesus. Now, as Jesus makes that clear there, it's equally clear in verse 20 that there is a measure of confusion on the part of the woman. And the woman here speaks in a way that has a kind of contemporary ring to it. She poses two alternatives, neither of which are ultimately acceptable in that they are both inadequate.
And around these two options, all of our error and confusion is gathered. Our fathers worshiped on the mountain Gerizim. The Samaritan worship was sincere. It was even enthusiastic, but it was devoid of truth. You Jews claim that you worship in Jerusalem. The Jerusalem worship was full of truth, but it was devoid largely of sincerity of heart. Remember, Jesus said, quoting from old, these people draw near to me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. So she said, how do I make sense of this?
Where do I go? Because up on Gerizim, they seem to be really into it. But it's sort of shaky. Down in Jerusalem, it's really solid, but they don't seem to be into it. One of my friends in London refers to the two extremes as the carnival on the one hand and the crematorium on the other. So you go one place, and as a carnival, you go other places, a crematorium. And the great journey is to try and settle neither for the chaos of the carnival nor the deadness of the crematorium, but for something that is actually grounded in the Scriptures and yet is expressive of the pulsating work of God the Spirit in the lives of men and women. So the first thing was about worship that it is biblical, it is grounded in the Scriptures. Secondly, if it is to be acceptable worship, it is rational in that it engages the mind.
It is rational it engages the mind. Now that's a truth, of course, which needs to be sounded out at a time when unity on the basis of sensation or on the basis of feeling or familiarity is to the fore. The Scriptures remind us, 1 Corinthians 14, 20, that in all of our thinking we are to be mature, mature in our thinking. So if we're going to adjudicate on the nature of our worship experiences in coming together as the people of God, and we're going to say that we have to have them grounded in the Scriptures, and we're going to say that they have to be rational in that they engage the minds, there are a number of practical things that emerge from that. One is the absolute necessity of concentration, that worship is a conscious activity, that the Bible would say to us that you cannot worship without thinking. Now, this immediately has implications for those of us who would be tempted to try and create sensations or feelings or sort of whatevers to try and, quote, induce a framework of worship. Now, if there's going to be concentration on the part of our people when they come together for worship, there needs to be preparation on the part of our people when they are getting ready for worship.
And that has to do with Saturday night, and it has to do with Sunday morning. And we need to teach our people these things, and frankly, as I speak this to you, I think I need to preach this sermon again to my congregation and remind them of this again, because I need reminded of it myself. Do we honestly think that we can step from whatever Saturday is meant or from whatever chaos we've lived in in the early hours of Sunday morning into the corporate gathering of the people of God, and somebody presses a button or says, Let's worship God, and all of a sudden we go? Well, you say, Well, of course we should be able to go, because we've been living in a framework of worship, as it were, throughout the week. Yes, I wish we had been, but the fact of the matter is many of our feet are soiled by the walking of our days, and we would do well to have paused at the entryway and hose them off before we came in.
And the metaphor, I think, is perfectly applicable. That's why if you go back to the early days of the Scottish church at the time, for example, of Murray-McShane, you will discover that they had two services. They had a gathering service, which preceded the service. And in the gathering service, which many times the teaching pastor was not even present, ironically, but they would gather, and they would sing together, and they would sing the psalms together. So they would come together, and they'd take the introduction to the psalms, Blessed is the man. It's interesting, isn't it, that a whole book that is about blessing God begins with the phrase, Blessed is the man. That's such a God-centered book of praise. It begins with God's attendant blessing on the man. Blessed is the man who walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful. But his delight is on the law of the LORD, and on his law he meditates day and night.
They would sing that metrically. Now, you see, this is very different from, Hey! Nice to see you! Glad you're here! Come on in, you know.
Welcome to my party. My name's Alistair, and this is the stage. And here we all are, and we're ready to go, you know. For myself, it wouldn't cost me a great thought to go back to the free church of Scotland and to sing only the metrical psalms, and without any accompaniment at all. Because at least then, I would have complete clarity, and I wouldn't have to answer any of the dumb questions that I get fifty-two weeks out of the year.
However, of all the changes that I have envisaged for this place, I'm not sure that even I, with God's help, could pull that one off. But why did they have a gathering service? To refocus the hearts and minds of the people. To get their minds on God and on his Word.
Because they're not there. And that, you see, is why in some of your traditions—and I've been in a variety of your churches here, and I know them, and I've benefited from them all—but I know that some of the places you come out of, the pattern is real clear. You have about forty-five minutes of singing, and then you have preaching. And what you're doing in that forty-five minutes of singing is essentially the gathering service.
Because you're trying to get the people out of where they've just lived their lives. And into the context of an encounter with God, that makes perfect sense. Because if there's going to be rationality in our worship, then it demands concentration, which demands preparation, which demands participation. If it's going to be rational, there needs to be the necessity of concentration. There needs to be also the priority of exposition.
The priority of exposition. People ask me all the time, Can we just have an evening service where we sing? No.
No. Why? For the same reason that we're not going to have just a communion service by itself.
Why? Because the Reformers made it really clear that the symbols of the gospel should never be isolated from the proclaiming of the gospel. As soon as you start and make your emphasis on a table with symbols, what happens to your people? They start to apply it in fifty different ways.
What is the corrective? The preaching of the Bible. So it is the exposition of Scripture which gives to us the framework of understanding for the celebration of the ordinances. And in the same way, our praise part of worship, if it is to be grounded in the Scriptures and rational in its approach, needs at the same time to be set within the priority of the exposition of the Bible. Paul, to the folks in Athens in Acts 17, says, Now what you worship is something unknown I am going to proclaim to you.
That's the place of expository preaching. Declaring the truth about God and his glory and Christ and his work, because people come with all kinds of ideas about who God is and what it might mean to worship him. And so it is within the framework of the teaching of the Bible. It provides a necessary corrective to worship which begins with man and his need. And points us to worship that begins with God and his glory. You are worthy, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power. So that what we may get is the byproduct of acceptable worship, like flowers that we pick along the line of duty.
So what are we saying simply this? That true worship results from learning the great truths about God as they are expounded to us by those of God's appointing and as they are discovered by us in the private place. It says, Calvin, unless there is knowledge present, it is not God we worship, but a specter or a ghost. You see how congregations are very susceptible to being led away by every kind of wind of doctrine. Unless the worship that they offer and the praise that they sing is, first of all, biblical, grounded in the Scriptures, secondly, rational in as much as it is focused in our thinking. And finally, thirdly, that acceptable worship is to be spiritual in that it involves the heart.
It involves the heart. It seems to me that one of the great problems of the current debate is the way in which it is posited in terms of an antithesis between rationality and emotion. So you go someplace and they're emphasizing very, very much the rational aspect of things.
It must be through our minds and to our hearts. We agree with that. But what you have, and you can see this in some presentations of the gospel, is that you end up with congregations and individuals that look like tadpoles. They have these phenomenally big heads and tiny little bodies that hang off the back of them.
So they just have big heads. And you look for their hearts, and they're somewhere in there, but they're completely overwhelmed by the size of their heads. So that's why I think it's important for us to recognize that a Christian mind without a Christian heart is nothing. And the Scripture makes it plain that we're not only to think clearly, but we're also at the same time to feel deeply. We do not have simply a rational Christ.
We have an emotional Christ. If we don't know that from any other place than in looking over Jerusalem, we know it from there. Jerusalem, Jerusalem. How often would I have gathered you as a hen gathers her chicks?
Well, you wouldn't come to me. Lazarus. Now, if it's going to be spiritually involving the heart, then there are three things that follow, and I'll mention these and I'm done. First of all, that men and women are spiritually alive. Spiritually alive. We've got to first drink of the streams of living water before they can flow from our hearts.
John 7, right? On the last and great day of the feast, he stands up and says, You listen to me and follow me and do what I'm telling you, and out of your heart will flow streams of living water. One of the reasons that some of us have such difficulty in letting the streams of living water flow from our congregations is simply that a significant number of the people in our congregations have never drunk from the stream. So you ask the question, Why is it that these truths do not stir some as they do others? And one of the answers is, You need to be quickened from heaven. I'm come that you might have life and that you might have it more abundantly. Dead men don't sing.
Dead men don't sing. Because to express ourselves in worship involves the crushing of our egos. It involves the splintering of our pride.
It involves a complete reorientation of ourselves. And this is a great evangelistic tool, incidentally. Instead of using our approach to the musical dimensions of our worship as a mechanism for making unchurched Harry feel uncomfortable when he comes, at that level—and I want to say this guardedly and carefully—at that level, I don't care how unchurched Harry feels. In fact, I think of the two options, comfortable or uncomfortable, I would like for him to feel uncomfortable. The uncomfortableness of it coming when this gentleman, having for whatever reason, by invitation of a friend or a neighbor or a wife or a son or a daughter, come into the gathered worshiping congregation of the people of God, and the folks stand up, and they sing, Praise my soul, the King of heaven, to his feet thy tribute bring. Ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven, who like thee his praise should sing? And he's simply staring up at the screens, or staring down at the book, he's doing nothing at all. Maybe his only contribution is jingling the change in his pocket. Because he's a sensible man, and he's a thinking man, and he looks at these words, and he said, I don't know anything about being ransomed, healed, restored, and forgiven. And he looks across, and he sees his bank manager, and his bank manager is giving it big licks.
He's got a horrible voice, but he's singing like a crazy person. Ransomed, healed, restored. And his first thought is, What a dork.
And then he said, What does he know that I don't know? Maybe I'm dead. Now, we've all been in those funeral homes as part of our job. I frankly hate it in there. That's my least favorite place to go. Especially when they leave you in there with a room full of dead bodies, and just you.
That is a bad deal. I'm like, woohoo, you know, whistling to myself and stuff, trying to whistle it. I'm trying to go to the toilet, because I don't know if the door owns a door to a toilet or if it owns a door to a dead body. I'm just like, no, I'll just stay right here. I'll stand here. I'm not going to move. I just wait here, and someone will come back soon. This is okay. We're okay here. You're not dead.
Apparently, I don't think I am. Now, they tell me these guys move and things happen and stuff, but I never heard anybody singing. I never heard anyone singing. Because dead men don't sing. So don't be so silly as to think that what we're going to do is create a context where dead men can sing. Because maybe if what we're going to try and do is get dead men singing, then we should sing dead men's songs.
Because dead men maybe can sing dead men's songs, but they can't sing living people's songs, except they're singing them just out of coercion or out of obligation or out of whatever else it is. So if you want to turn your service into the Joni Carson show, that's fine. Start your service with, start leaving today. You know. The guy's going, I want to be a part of it.
Yeah. Man, that was great. That was great. What was that? I don't know. But it was great. What did he say? I don't know. But I love that thing, that New York thing, man.
I love New York, New York. May God help us. We need to be spiritually alive.
We need to be spiritually assisted. Be filled with the Spirit. Ephesians 5 18, Colossians 3 16, let the Word of Christ dwell in you richly.
It's interesting that it produces the same impact, doesn't it? Be filled with the Spirit and speak to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs. Let the Word of Christ dwell in you richly, and let that then be the overflow of praise in your lives. It's a reminder to us, isn't it, of the place of the Spirit of God and the Word of God working together to the glorifying of the Son of God. All word and no spirit and people dry up. All spirit and no word and people blow up. Both spirit and word and people grow up. We need to be spiritually assisted. Spiritual worship is impossible left to ourselves.
It's not something that we can do. It's a responsive thing. Response to what? External stimuli?
No. Ultimately, response to the magnificence of God's glory as revealed to us in God's Word. See, what our friends and neighbors need to realize is that God is great.
You know? So maybe we'd better start the service with five of our children standing up with their tiny little voices going, Our God is so big, so strong, and so mighty, there's nothing that he cannot do. Our God is so big. I love it when those wee kids do that.
They've got tiny little muscles like mine, and they're just going, big, so strong, and so mighty. I was just with Philip Johnson, who wrote Darwin on Trial and the Wedge of Truth. I asked him, I said, Tell me how you came to faith in Christ. Do you know what he told me? Do you know what the door of entry for him was?
Friday night meeting at a VBS in his area. His children went to a vacation Bible school, and he went to the service. Tenured professor of law at Berkeley at the age of 27, one of the brightest intellects in the legal profession, at least, in our generation, sits down and listens to all these little children coming across, declaring the grandeur and the might of God. Sits and listens to the pastor, and he said afterwards that the pastor never really made much sense at all, that he didn't have two logical sentences, but that he was struck by the fact, as he sat there, he said, This man believes this with all his heart, and I need to go and find out why he does.
What did the guy do? Well, he wasn't brilliant, but he made much of God. And this man, who knew much about himself and knew nothing about God, found it compellingly attractive.
You see, but our approach would have been, so now we've got Philip Johnson in this morning. He's a great intellectual. We're going to need to find somebody with a phenomenal intellect to preach the Bible, because after all, we don't really believe the Bible is inherently powerful. We believe that, you know, our intellects are necessary in order to get it, you know, to pour it out in the right way. God says, Shut up with that, and puts a succession of tiny little nose-picking children on the front of the platform and reaches into the soul of a Saul of Tarsus. To show what? To show how great and awesome he is, and to make the point that if then we are going to worship, it's because we're alive, and it's because we're assisted, and it's because we're active.
Because we're active. I need to be spiritually active. You go to a prayer meeting. Commit yourself to pray at the prayer meeting.
There's only a dozen of you in there for goodness sake. What are you in for? Meditation? Pray. Commit to pray.
Now, you may not get an opportunity to pray, but commit to pray. You go to a place where they're just singing. Commit to sing. I don't like this song.
I don't care whether you like this song. Commit to sing. I mean, unless you're singing heresy, commit to sing. I'm going to be active. I'm going to give myself wholeheartedly.
I'm going to Ephesians 5 it. I'm going to make the most of every opportunity. Our constant perspective and that of our congregation needs to be, What shall I render unto the Lord for all his benefits towards me? What can I do here?
What can I say here? And my public contribution and worship will be the overflow of my own personal commitment, as I find myself involved in biblical, rational, spiritual worship. It is too bad when we regard worship as a kind of glandular condition, you know.
So why were you not entering into the worship? Well, I didn't feel like it. When do you feel like it?
Oh, you know, sometimes I feel like it, other times I don't feel like it. Well, you remember Wesley tried that. He decided that he wouldn't witness to anyone until he felt like it. He went for about five weeks and he never told anybody about Christ. And he suddenly woke up and says, I better tell people because Jesus said I'm to tell people, not because I feel like telling people.
Simple, isn't it? Father, I do pray that out of all of these words, you will turn us again to the truth of your word and that you will guide our minds and hearts and congregations accordingly for Jesus' sake. Amen. That is Bible teacher Alistair Begg on Truth for Life. He's titled today's message, The Nature of Acceptable Worship. As we learn today, people need to realize just how awesome God is.
And that's why at Truth for Life, we aim to make much of God. In fact, our mission is to teach the scriptures with clarity and relevance every single day. We believe the local church is an essential part of every believer's Christian life. By teaching the Bible faithfully, we trust God will strengthen local churches, both those who lead and preach and those who attend. Now, whether you're new to your local church or maybe you've been a leader there for years, there's a book we'd like to recommend to you. It's titled Gathered, Loving Your Church As You Celebrate Christ Together. This book offers important reminders about all of the benefits that are made possible in our lives when we gather together with other believers at church week by week. The author provides practical advice to help you find renewed joy in corporate worship.
And each chapter includes action steps that will help you apply the lessons to your life right away. Look for your copy of the book Gather when you donate today. You can give a one-time gift at truthforlife.org slash donate. Or you can arrange to set up an automatic monthly donation when you visit truthforlife.org slash truthpartner. We're glad you've joined us today. Tomorrow, Alistair Begg provides practical guidelines for corporate worship from the Apostle Paul. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life, where the Learning is for Living.
