It is not uncommon to find someone nodding off during a church service. It is possible to have such a broad range of responses to the same teaching. Today on Truth for Life, Alistair Begg explains why it is vital to engage your mind when God's Word is being preached.
We are looking at Psalm 22, but Alistair begins today in John's Gospel with Jesus' instruction concerning the nature where he has another encounter, this time not under darkness but in the blazing sun of the midday. And this lady is a no-name lady. This lady is about as far on the other side of the social spectrum as could possibly be in comparison to Nicodemus. She's looking for love in all the wrong places. She has worshiped idols. She has worshiped the idol of herself. She has worshiped substitute gods. The substitute gods have depleted her life. She lives in isolation. Nobody comes with her to the well.
None of the other women want anything to do with her. How would a Jew, how would a man speak to her in this way? What man is this? I can see that you are a prophet. People say this, people say that. What do you say? He says, Let me tell you what I say.
And then, you see, you have this great instruction. I suppose, if nothing else, it's a reminder to us that as we seek to speak concerning these things, the confusion that is represented, if you like, between Gerizim and Jerusalem is not an unknown confusion in our day. In Gerizim, they had enthusiasm, but they were devoid of knowledge.
In Jerusalem, they had all the knowledge that the prophets had proclaimed, but they were devoid of reality. Jesus says in Matthew 15, These people draw near to me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. Now, all of that's simply to say that when we're going to think in terms of unpacking the notion of the true and meaningful worship of God, it has to be grounded in the Scriptures. It is biblical. Secondly, it is rational insofar as it engages the mind.
It is rational insofar as it engages the mind. And I think this is a truth that needs to be sounded out always when there is the temptation to establish some form of unity on the basis of sensation or of feeling or of similarity or of sentimentality. Now, the Scriptures encourage us—Paul encourages the Corinthians, remember, he says to them, Now in your thinking, he says, I would like you to be mature. I want you to be mature in your thinking. Don't be gormless. Don't just settle for every wind and notion that comes blowing through your community.
Learn to think properly. In other words, worship is an act of understanding. Worship actually involves applying myself to the knowledge of God that is revealed within the Scriptures. Therefore, when Jesus says, God is Spirit, what is he saying there? Well, he's saying all kinds of things. But he's saying, for example, God is immortal, and we are mortal. God is invisible, and purposefully so. God is invisible, and we are visible.
In other words, God is not like us. He is God. He is Spirit. He is life-giving.
He is, in his essential being, unknowable unless he chooses to reveal himself. We'll come back to that in just a moment. Now, when you think about the rationality of it, it has all kinds of pressing implications, and practical implications.
And I don't want to delay on this, but I'll just say a couple in passing. If then understanding is involved, if our minds are involved as they are, then we have to concentrate. Concentrate. Isn't it amazing when you try and pray you can't concentrate? That when you come into the gathered assembly of God's people, the distractions seem to be multiplied exponentially, we could almost believe that we're in a continual and irreconcilable war, and that the evil one would rather that we did not concentrate.
Which of course is actually true. We can't worship without thinking. Therefore, our preparation for worship is important—a preparation that begins long before we arrive. The reason that it is often fairly stultifying praise that we experience on the Lord's Day morning is because we've not arrived as worshippers. We have not been worshiping in prospect of worshiping together.
I don't say that to chide you. But if you think about the transitions into something like this, you think about all the preparation that's involved. For example, if you take the last hour and a half before somebody stands up and takes the first swing in a golf tournament, the fellow is not just chewing the cud.
He's not involved in phoning all of his friends. He's absolutely focused, because the thing that happens next is absolutely crucial. So it affects what we read, it affects what we play in our cars, it affects all of these things. And it affects the moments that precede worship. Our participation in worship is the same thing—learning, then, to leave what is transient out in the lobby, not bringing it in with us, learning to concentrate on the words of the hymns and the prayers, learning to view the offering—if there is an offering, not as half-time, somewhere to just chew things for a little while, but rather to face these things carefully. And when it comes to exposition, the priority of the expounding of Scriptures has to be viewed with concentration.
Has to be viewed in this way. Because preaching the Word of God is worship. In fact, that's why I read from Psalm 22. Because Jesus there—the words are put in Jesus' mouth. In Hebrews chapter 8, he is described as the minister, the leiturgos. That word leiturgos gives us our word—it's the same word as liturgy or liturgist. And what the writer is saying is that Jesus Christ himself is the one who proclaims God's Word and who leads God's people.
You must check this for yourself, but you can read it through, and you will understand it. So that in actual fact, what is happening when we come together and the Word of God is opened up, where the Word of God is truly preached, Jesus preaches. I declared in the assembly of the congregation. I proclaimed my word, he said, in the assembly of the congregation, when Paul, in writing to the Ephesians, says, Jesus came and preached to those who were far away and to those who were near.
What? Jesus came and preached in Ephesus? We didn't know that. Well, he did, but he didn't. He didn't physically come and preach in Ephesus. But Paul says, and he came and he preached to those of you who were far away to the Gentiles and to those of you who were the Jews who were close up. In what way did Jesus come and preach? He preached through Paul and his companions.
When Paul preached, Jesus preached. And he says, I will sing your praise in the assembly of the righteous. This is a staggering thought—that when we assemble, we assemble in the presence of Jesus. Everybody loves to sing, Before the throne of God above I have a strong and perfect plea. I love to sing it too.
It's terrific. It's a wonderful thought that there Jesus intercedes on my behalf. But equally wonderful is this thought—that he who is there is here. When someone says, Let us sing together, Jesus sings. Jesus leads the praise. We are in the presence of Christ, who is our liturgos.
Therefore, I think we would want to make sure that we are engaged in what we're doing. What a privilege to sing along with Jesus. Jesus declares the great truths of God in and of himself. And so, when we gather, as we gather, it is important that the knowledge of God is present. For as Calvin says, unless there is this knowledge present, it is not God we worship but a specter or a ghost.
All right. Thirdly and finally, as to the manner of our worship, it is not only biblical insofar as it must be grounded in Scripture and rational insofar as it engages our minds, but it is also clearly spiritual. Spiritual. And it engages our hearts. And when we say hearts, of course, we're not talking just in terms of emotion. We are talking in biblical terminology.
The heart is, if you like, the essential us, the center of us. When the Bible speaks about it, it speaks in terms of our mind and of our will and of our emotions. So in other words, the true worship of God is not something that is simply outward and external and functional. Indeed, all of that is only of significance insofar as it is an expression outwardly of a reality that is there inwardly.
Let me quote Sharnock again for you. He says, "'Diligence in outward worship is not to be rested in. Men may attend all their days on worship with a juiceless heart and unquickened frame, and think to compensate the neglect of the manner with abundance of the matter of service.'
So, as long as I do a lot of it, then that will compensate for the fact that my manner is not as it should be. What do a thousand services avail without cutting the throat of our carnal affections? What are loud prayers but a sounding brass and tinkling cymbals without divine charity? A Pharisaical diligence in outward forms without inward spirit had no better a title vouchsafed by our Savior than that of hypocritical. God desires not sacrifices nor delights in burnt offerings. Shadows are not to be offered instead of substance. God required the heart of man for itself, but commanded outward ceremonies as subservient to inward worship and gods and spurs unto it. They were never appointed as the substance of religion but auxiliaries to it.'" And that, I think, speaks again to this question of mode.
As soon as we begin to say that the external framework is the key to this, Sharnock says, you might want to just think about that for a minute or two. Because it is possible to come up with all kinds of liturgical structures, or non-liturgical structures for that matter, and for people who think that because they, for example, raise their hands way, way high in the air, or they sit on their hands to cut off the circulation from the rest of their body, whatever they do, that this is the great key to it all. No, it's not. No, it's not.
That's the point. It's not only that we think deeply but also that we feel these things. And in order that that would be the case, we must worship in spirit and in truth. The two things go hand in hand.
It's not you can do one or you can do the other or you can have a crack at both. And what is Jesus saying when he says, Listen, eventually, sooner than you think, man… That's not gonna be the question. Because the Father is seeking worshipers, and those who worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth. That does not mean—Jesus is not saying there—that anyone can worship God anywhere as long as they're genuine and sincere. When you hear people tackling this passage, that's usually what they say. They say, Nothing really matters. Sincerity is all that matters. He said it doesn't matter about Gerizim, it doesn't matter about Jerusalem.
All that matters is that it doesn't really matter. That's nobody saying at all. What he is actually saying is the only way we can truly worship God is by the power of the Holy Spirit, that it is in the Spirit of God. To worship in the Spirit is not to worship with the capacities of human flesh.
Anybody can sing songs. You have the same thing, for example, if you've ever thought about it. No one can say, Jesus is Lord, except by the Holy Spirit. You've read that verse, right? Well, I could go to a man in the street and tell him, say, I have something written on a page here.
Say it! And he could take it and read it and say, Jesus is Lord. And you could then say, Oh, look at that, we just disproved the Bible.
No, we didn't. The reality of it is that nobody can declare Christ as Lord, King, Savior, Friend, and so on, except by the enabling of the Spirit of God. Because the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit, they're foolishness to him, so that even when there is even an inclination of it, it is because God is at work. I heard the voice of Jesus say, Come unto me and rest. What do you mean you heard the voice of Jesus say? Where did you hear the voice of Jesus? My pastor, my Sunday school teacher, she read to me. She read the Bible to me, and I heard the voice of Jesus. At first I didn't realize it was the voice of Jesus. It was like when I waken up in the morning, and it's just like there's a voice.
Somebody is talking in here or what, and then suddenly you realize somebody's using your name, and then you realize they're actually calling me, Get up! That's what happens, you see, in the preaching of the Word. The Word of God goes out, people sit and listen, nothing's happening. Fourteen Sundays later, the fellow goes out, and he says to his wife, You know, it was almost as if I could hear that this morning. Two Sundays later, he says, You know, I've got a feeling that God is calling me. And finally, he says, I get it.
I get it. You see, the wonder of these things is on account of God's enabling. The flesh, the world—organized, autonomous man—does not have the Spirit of God, does not accept the Spirit of truth. Jesus says, Because he neither sees him nor knows him.
Doesn't. So as soon as the Spirit of God enters a man or a woman, they then cease to be part of that autonomous, self-ordered world. Nobody who has not the Spirit of God sees a jot of what is in the Scripture.
Only God opens blind eyes, and only God softens hard hearts. Therefore, if there is going to be authentic praise in the gathered assembly, it involves the heart. Therefore—and with this I will close—number one, and I've said it, we'll just reinforce it—one has to be spiritually alive. Spiritually alive.
We have to first drink of the living water before the streams of living water will flow from our hearts. I've done a lot of funerals over the last forty-plus years, and none of the people in the funeral home, when I was left in there by myself with the undertaker, none of them ever spoke to me. They never spoke to me. I made an amazing discovery—I'm really quite clever on this stuff—that dead men don't sing. Dead men don't sing. I never sat beside a corpse in a funeral home and found that he all of a sudden burst into song. Never happened.
Can't happen. Dead men don't sing. So when I look out on the congregation and I see a number of men, and they're just standing there, jingling their chains, it may be that they have a bad cold, they may have laryngitis, they may have had a fight with their wife, I don't know, but it may well be that they're just dead men. They're dead men. We had a joke last night—I won't go back down, it was peripheral—but I was pointing out that the way they do that stuff in the baseball games here, they have that fellow go, and then you respond, Charge!
And then everyone goes back to sleep again for another fourteen hours, and then, Charge! So what's up with these people? Is that what it takes?
You gotta have somebody doing this for you? Have you ever been to England? Have you ever been to a soccer game? What is it with those people? What is it? I'll tell you what it is. It's a religion. It's a religion. That's church. Look at the banners. Look at the declarations on the banners. And these men sing. Nobody knows how it starts. Twenty-five thousand men singing—they're doing it right now while I speak to you, all across England, I guarantee it—singing all kinds of songs, unashamed, completely unashamed, holding up banners, singing, some of them with tears running down their faces for the sake of chasing a football.
It's amazing. So when those men get converted in England, they sing. When the average American who's been the diddle-a-doo-doo-doo, he don't sing, because he never sang before. All that happens in England is you just change the melody and you change the words.
Over here you've got a much harder job. "'Cause I'm a man. I don't sing. Jesus gets a hold of your heart, I guarantee you'll sing. You may not sing well, but you will sing.
You will sing. Because if you can go through a lyric like, And when I think that God his Son not sparing, Send him to die, I scarce can take it in, That on the cross my burden gladly bearing, He bled and died to bear away my sin, And you cannot then go, Then sings my soul, My Savior God to thee, how great thou art." You see, it is theology which gives rise to doxology—which is to take me to my second talk, to which we need to get to very quickly. Spiritually alive, spiritually assisted. Spiritually assisted. We need the assistance of the Spirit of God. Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it.
We sang it already this morning. Prone to get coldhearted. Prone to be distracted. All those things. 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. Colossians 3, the same thing.
It's really a synonym. Spiritually alive, spiritually assisted, and spiritually active. Spiritually active. In other words, making a commitment, thinking as we attend the congregation and say, What will I be able to contribute this morning?
What shall I render unto the Lord for all his benefits towards me? In my life's quote from Charnock, he says, We are logs, unable to move ourselves till he raise our faculties to a pitch agreeable to God. In other words, we need the fire that comes from heaven to kindle our affections. There are seasons in our souls. Not all of us are in the springtime. Therefore, we can be encouraged by the person who's enjoying the flush of summer. We can be sensitive to the person who sees that it looks as though there's nothing going on in their life at all.
It looks like the winter has come and there will never be a spring. But you see, it again is in our company with one another. So that we're able to say, Well, let's make sure that our approach is biblical and that it is grounded in the Scriptures, that it is rational, so that it's not that we take our brains out and put them under the seat in order that we might enter into this experience. It engages our minds. And also, that it is spiritual insofar as it is not an exercise that we are able to get to in our own unaided ability, but only as God by his Spirit quickens us. Well, Father, we thank you that we have our Bibles so that we can go and read them and see if these things are so, that we can think things out, that you have given us the faculty of mind, that you've given us the gift of praise and worship and music. And so bless your Word, too, as we pray. Help us as we go through this day and this weekend that we might live to the praise of your glorious grace.
For Christ's sake. Amen. You're listening to Truth for Life.
That is Alistair Begg with a message he's titled Congregational Worship. Well, we hope the teaching that you hear on Truth for Life gives you an opportunity to reflect on God's Word, to take a break from the busyness of the day, to remember God's promises and to rest in his care. And we believe that should be your experience in your local church, as well.
But sadly, that's not always the case. Today we're recommending to you a book called Sighing on Sunday. It's a book that takes a compassionate look at the painful reality that there are many men and women who have had hurtful experiences in the local church. Role models throughout the Old and New Testament to illustrate how to deal with these types of circumstances. And this book will encourage you if you've had painful experiences. It will help you refocus on Christ. Ask for your copy of the book Sighing on Sunday today when you donate to support the ministry of Truth for Life.
Go to truthforlife.org slash donate. Thanks for listening today. Throughout scripture, God's people are encouraged to sing to the Lord. Tomorrow we'll find out why the church choir and worship team shouldn't be singing for our entertainment. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life, where the Learning is for Living.
