Tis the Season Tomorrow will be the end of October, which has become in the last several years the official (or unofficial) Pastor Appreciation month. Sunday will begin the month of November which is typically a time when we are reminded of our need to be thankful with the inclusion of the Thanksgiving Day celebration and our entry into the holiday season. This is a festive time of year! Something about the cooler weather, warmer foods, and autumn activities just seems to draw out a sense of peace and thankfulness. It is probably partly nostalgia and partly dependent on your own worldview. Thank You I want to take this opportunity to express my thankfulness to God for His great grace in allowing me the privilege of being a part of Marshall First Baptist Church. I am also thankful to all of you for allowing me to serve as your Pastor. There are several personal reasons why I am thankful to be the pastor of Marshall First Baptist that I am not going to include in this post. However, one is that God seems to fit us for certain places, times, and most importantly relationships. I feel as if our church just fits! I remember before I even became the pastor, telling Laura that if I were not called here, we would just join here because this is where we knew we ought to be and you are who we knew we ought to be with. I am thankful for all of you as brothers and sisters in Christ. I have mentioned this before, but being an only child, I think I take more seriously than most our siblingship in the body of Christ. When we sing, “I’m so glad I’m a part of the family of God,” my heart is overwhelmed in the rock solid spiritual fact that we are united in the bonds of Christ, which will never and can never be ultimately broken. I am also thankful for your generosity. You take care of my family and I so well. But even beyond that, I am so free to do the things that God has given me to do. Every place I am able to teach, ministry that I am able to be involved in (in our community and in our association), and mission even beyond is made possible because of your generosity as a church. What’s Missing It’s nobody’s fault, but I have to say that I miss much of our fellowship. This disease is real and those who are taking special precautions should take them. But I still miss you guys! Shannon posted a quote from The Lord of the Rings a while back expressing the sentiment, “I wish none of this had ever happened.” Yeah, I feel that way. But I also want to encourage you to hang on! Look to Christ! For our God will bring us through all of this and He will bring us through this together! I have hope that on the other side of this we will be an even stronger fellowship after this than we were before. In 1 Thessalonians 5:13-18, Paul says this to these noble believers, “Be at peace among yourselves. And we urge you, brothers, admonish the idle, encourage the fainthearted, help the weak, be patient with them all. See that no one repays anyone evil for evil, but always seek to do good to one another and to everyone. Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.” Brothers and Sisters, let us take the call, challenge, and comfort of this text and apply it vigorously to our attitudes and actions. The world is full of division and enmity, but let us be at peace. Let us graciously admonish, encourage, and help one another with long-suffering patience. This also means we must be receptive to this from each other. And let us do this all with great joy, constant prayer, and true gratitude because this is God’s will for all of us in Christ Jesus!
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Styles So who remembers the worship wars? Several years ago, many churches were divided over which styles (hymns, choruses, etc.) of music were acceptable in the church service. However, when we think about worship it's much more than just the style of the music that we sing. Worship includes preaching the Word, taking up the offering, participating in the Lord's Supper, fellowshipping with each other, taking prayer requests, joining together in prayer, and the way that we greet one another. All of these elements are a part of the worship of God by His redeemed people. All of these things constitute a part of what it means to worship. When we define worship simply as the time of singing before the preacher gets up, we've misunderstood the true nature of worship. Worship is the whole of our lives as we devote ourselves to God. Worship is about what we believe and about how we act. In all of this, we are seeking to bring glory and honor to God. Worship is about God receiving the praise that he deserves! We want to give thanks to God when we worship, we want to submit to God when we worship, and we want to obey God when we worship. As believers, our whole lives ought to be a testimony of worship to our God and our King. All of these things are opportunities for us to glorify and honor our King, to demonstrate that we love Him and that we follow Him. But, how do we know how God wants us to worship Him? How do we conclude the practical elements that should be a part of our assemblies? Is it just according to what we like? Can I worship God my way, and you worship God your way? Or, are there certain things that ought to be true of how we all worship God and certain things that should be unacceptable for any of us who would worship God? These are the things that we are going to talk about in today's blog. Principles In Christian theology, there is a concept called the regulative principle of worship. The regulative principle of worship teaches that only those practices or elements which are specifically commanded or modeled in Scripture, are to be permitted in worship services. Contrasted with this is the normative principle of worship. The normative principle is the opposite of the regulative principle, meaning that those things that are not expressly forbidden in Scripture are acceptable to God. So which one of these is right? Is it okay for us to use anything that we might see in our culture to worship God, as long as it's not forbidden? Or has God given us certain parameters and instructions for how worship ought to be conducted? This is obviously highly practical as we seek to honor God as a part of His unified body. So let's start with the normative principle. If we take the normative principle as our rule for how we ought to conduct our gatherings, this would mean that anything is allowed that we cannot find a specific prohibition for in Scripture. Adopting the normative principle would mean that anything we find possible would be an option. The normative principle means that things that we don't see the early church doing would be allowed, because they are not prohibited by Scripture. So, is there any danger in the normative principle? I think that there would have to be some danger, because the New Testament was not written primarily to tell the churches how not to worship, but rather how they ought to worship. The normative principle must at least provide the opportunity for us to admit something sinful or irreverent into the worship meeting. This would mean that we must be on our guard if we're going to accept the normative principle. Secondly, I think the normative principle does make us especially susceptible to our own traditions. We are susceptible to what seems familiar. This could, and probably does, lead us to conclude that many practices in our churches are biblical when they really aren’t. So the normative principle could be helpful for us to think about innovative ways for us to conduct our gatherings, but it could be dangerous in opening us up to being shackled by our own traditions or to being blasphemous because of our novelty. But what about the regulative principle? If we adopt the regulative principle as our standard for worship, what would our worship services look like? The Scripture teaches us that we ought to speak to one another in Psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs. The elders would be teaching sound doctrine, the whole church would be using their various spiritual gifts to minister to one another in the gathering, and we would share together the fellowship meal – the Lord’s Supper! A church meeting this way would be able to truly experience the “one another” commands of the New Testament. All of these would be examples of ways that we're able to enjoy the beauty of the gathered church, building one another up in our faith. We might also find that the regulative principle would require that our services be much more simple than formal, much more relational than transactional. At any rate the regulative principle would mean that our activities and actions in the local church would be connected to specific passages in the Bible. We would be looking for places in the Bible where the Lord Jesus and His Apostles give us instructions about how things like the teaching of the word, the practice of the Lord's Supper, and the practice of church discipline are supposed to be conducted. No doubt, there would also be things that would have to be cut out of our worship meetings, things that the Bible simply does not affirm, things that might seem like modern conveniences, but they are not ancient instructions. Our Practice So what about us at Marshall First Baptist Church? How should we conduct our services? I believe that we should be very careful that we are not seeking simply to be innovative or creative, but first and foremost honoring and glorifying to God by worshiping Him in obedience. This doesn’t mean boring! I'm afraid that oftentimes in our effort to be novel and to be attractive to the world we've abandoned the things that God has told us to do. With this being said, I think we have freedom to worship with passion, even using our creative gifts within the parameters of God’s instructions. The Apostle Paul told the Galatians that “where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom,” but we must not use that freedom as a license for sin. Rather we ought to be willing to reform. We ought to be willing to transform our gatherings to be more in line with the gatherings that we see in the first century. We ought to be seeking to have gatherings that allow us to operate in such a way as to share the benefits of all the “one another” passages in Scripture. We ought to be doing this in such a way that we glorify and honor our God and our King, because that is what worship is truly all about! Liturgy Last week, I addressed our language. In the course of that article, I referred to the nature of worship and adoration. Today, let's think some more about worship. The term “liturgy” refers to the form or formula of religious worship (particularly Christian worship). Now, many believers in our day would like to disregard this term because we often romanticize the idea that real devotion and genuine worship must be spontaneous and sensational. There certainly is nothing wrong with spontaneous moments of worship! How could you be a student of the Bible with real love for God and not be brought to the point of joyous celebration when reading God's word? However, even the most laid back, open, free form of public worship is going to have some kind of form or structure, and this is still 'liturgy' regardless of if it is recognized by the participants. I believe that in most cases those seeking this kind of 'freedom' in worship are doing so because they believe it will be the most honest and glorifying to God. On the other hand, many people never give a thought to how they are worshiping. They are just doing what they have always done. Whether their practices were picked up as a result of tradition or experience this is just what worship is. Maybe there is another perspective we could take to determine the best way to worship our God. Since worship is so fundamental to everything in our lives (by the way, this is true for both believers and unbelievers because everyone is a worshipper!), we should expect God to give us guidance, even commands, in His word for how He is to be worshipped. Remember, He is omniscient and eternal, we cannot surprise Him! There is no reason to think that He is eagerly anticipating our creativity or innovation. What He wants is our obedience because this is how we show our love for Him (John 14:15). Law God’s law is clear that we are to have no other gods, formed with tools of the hands or tools of the mind, that would elicit our worshipful response. In truth, nothing we could ever make would stir our religious affections, if not for the fact that our desire is so fallen to be satisfied by such refuse as temporal achievement and human advancement. These things simply should not be able to stir us if we were already rightly oriented to our true object of worship: Almighty God! The law of God was not given to us as some sort of arbitrary list of random requirements or hoops that God thought it would be fun to watch humanity struggle to navigate. The law was the expression of God’s own righteousness. The idea was that as people obeyed the law, the goodness and beauty of what God was like would be clearly seen. However, the law was always intended to reveal not only God’s greatness but our weakness. The reality is that the law did not have a mechanism to make us holy but only the ability to show when we were not holy, while demonstrating that someone else was truly holy. So we must not view God’s law as this cold dreary dungeon of despair and drudgery, but rather as what David calls it in Psalm 19 – perfect. The law is good and beautiful and sweet as honey David says. The problem with the law is not the law but us. First, our problem begins with the fact that we break it every day. Our proclivity and propensity to sin is so pervasive. The second problem is when we attempt to use the law to do what it cannot do. The law is excellent at identifying sin but horrible at cleansing it away. When we attempt to use the law to become right with God we become legalists. However, when we use the law to guide and direct us in our walk with God we become obedient. So the law, in a way, serves to point our worship in the proper direction even while we have not achieved perfection. In the law, the Lord also instructs to give heed to the use of His name. Obviously, we ought to speak of God and of holy things with reverence and purity, but I believe in this commandment to not take His name in vain, we are also being taught to take seriously the title identifying us with Christ. If we are to call ourselves “Christians” or “Christ followers,” as some prefer, then we must truly follow Him and not bear His name falsely. Our Worship This blog is starting to get longer than intended and much remains to be said. So next week we will continue on this theme with a discussion of the regulative and normative principles of worship. But I want to close this article with a clear point. If we are to worship the true God we must do so in obedience! Our worship must be directed by the Scriptures which then drives and defines our experiences, expressions, and emotions! Language We have become a people that constantly exhaust our vocabulary for the sake of emphasis. My generation (X’ers) called everything “awesome,” even though, contrary to the Lego movie worldview, everything is not awesome. Actually, few things really bring about a sense of awe. Few things are so genuinely amazing and wonderful that they bring about a sense of transcendent enchantment. I think that it is on this basis that we seek to create so many counterfeits. We are looking for that thing that will call from within us the adoration, dare I say worship, that we long to express. We also do this with negative words. We say that every trivial matter is “the worst,” when it really isn’t. Because of this misuse of both positive and negative language, our culture has become verbally handicapped. The normal use of language doesn’t support the weight of thoughtful discussion or promote real understanding. This breakdown in communication is seen in the fruitless, often divisive, nature of what passes for argument on social media. As well as, in the political discourse of our day. The first presidential debate is a case in point of our cultural inability to communicate well. Vulgar The Latin translation that served as the primary biblical text in use for almost a thousand years in the middle ages was known as the Vulgate. To our ears that sounds like the word “vulgar.” We tend to associate the word vulgar with dirty or bad language. But the Latin word, where we get the word vulgar from, simply meant “common.” The vulgar tongue was referring to the way folks actually spoke, as opposed to official language. It is like the difference in the way we speak and legal language. The Latin translation of the Bible was known as the Vulgate because the original Hebrew, and especially Greek, was written in the common tongue. The Greek used to compose the books of the New Testament, wasn't the Greek of the academy. It was the Greek of the streets. I believe this is because God was making His revelation accessible. Greek was the unifying language of the Roman world and the trade language. It was the language in which the most important things in life were communicated. And now, through writings of the Apostles, it carried the most important message ever. No Bad Words In Colossians 3:8, Paul says that believers are to put away certain ways of speaking. Including slander and the use of “obscene” or “abusive” language. Also, in Ephesians, he tells us to not let “corrupting” or “unwholesome” talk come out of our mouths. So God chose to speak to us in the common language, and we know the common language then and now often has some spicy wording, but Paul tells us not to use these abusive or unwholesome words. What are we supposed to do? What words should we use and what words should we not use? I am actually really glad that Paul did not just give us a list of the bad words, for two reasons. First, then we would just invent other foul language, yet think we were fine because we kept the letter and not the spirit of the law. Second, I'm sure if Paul had laid out the bad words of the first century something would have been lost in culture and translation. There is a sense in which the words that Paul is prohibiting are defined culturally and naturally. This also means that some words a hundred years ago, or ten thousand miles away from here, may have been considered bad, but are not today. This also means that something we think of as bad today, may not be bad years down the road. I also think we need to be careful because the Apostles and our Lord Himself used strong language when dealing with sin, with the Pharisees, and with the false teachers. If these prohibitions by Paul serve to emasculate our speech, our proclamation of the gospel will be impotent and the church will be vulnerable. I want to leave you two, hopefully, helpful metrics for choosing your words. First, is your own motivation. Why do you want to use that word? Often this course of introspection will tell you all you need to know. If you constantly have to convince yourself it is ok to use some words then you probably don't need to use them. Secondly, does using this language build up God's people? If this language does not help to promote truth and build up the church or your family or others, what good is it? Stories Stories are fun and entertaining vehicles for information. This is partly because the story brings us into an experience and affects our emotions. For example, if I listed several abortions statistics and the rates of live births and survivals, the impact would not be as great as hearing the testimony of mother or survivor who had gone through that scenirio. Or imagine the daily coronavirus updates, those numbers are not as impactful as the real life people that you know who have had or died of the disease. Narratives, weather fictional or real, bring us into the joy or the pain of the human subjective experience. This is not only true now but in history and in the Bible. One of the problems that I believe we have in reading the Bible is that we have become so familiar with many of the individual accounts, that we treat them like statistical facts and not genuine encounters. Because of this we miss some of the hardiest and most beautiful truths communicated to us by our gracious God. A Hard Tale The book of Judges contains some of the hardiest stories in the Bible. You may recall the gruesome story of in chapter 19 of the levite’s concubine who is raped, killed, cut up and distributed throughout the country. But the story I would like for us to consider today is maybe the most tragic. Chapter 11 introduces us to Jephthah, who is called a valiant warrior. He was also unjustly treated by his brothers resulting in him becoming the leader of a criminal gang. While at the helm of this illegal enterprise, Jephthah was sought by the elders of Gilead to be their leader and deliver them from their enemies. Jephthah took this commission and began to use diplomatic means to attempt to broker peace with the Ammonites. Unfortunately, peaceful means didn't work. Before leading the campaign Jephthah made a vow to God committing to sacrifice, as a burnt offering, the first things that came out of the door of his home when he returned. No doubt he probably expected this to be some animal that was in the house. In the course of events, the Lord did allow Jephthah and his people a great victory and the beginning of a season of peace for Israel. When Jephthah returned home, exhilarated by his conquest, his only daughter came out of his house with joyous celebration. In this instant, the valiant and victorious warrior was brought to tears and weeping because of his vow. He then related to his beloved child the nature of his vow and the necessity of keeping his word before the Lord. The godly young woman understood and agreed, only asking that she would have 2 months to grieve with her friends. After this period, she was executed by her father and the vow was fulfilled. When thinking of the term tragedy, I can hardly imagine a more suitable word for this horrible story. But we must remember that it was included in the revelation of God. The Bible is not just an ancient record book but a book that really reveals who God is so that we can draw near to Him and know Him. So what should we learn from this story? First, God did not ask or demand Jephthah to make this vow or do this deed. There are no times when God ever had anyone actually sacrifice their children. The Lord did test Abraham in Genesis 22 but He also provided the substitute ram in the bush and ultimately His on Son on the cross. Second, since God is faithful, just, and true, we should take our vows, covenants and commitments to Him seriously. The Bible does not teach that people should bargain with God. I have personally known of many people who have considered God unfaithful because He did not keep up His end of a bargain they made. But remember, He never agreed to man's bargaining. The text does not even suggest that the Israelites would not have won the day without Jephthah's errant vow. However, Jephthah had made the vow and, while not ratified by God, this valiant warrior was honor bound to keep his word. Third, this daughter serves as a type of the Lord Jesus in at least three ways. She is Jephthah's one and only daughter. The Greek word used to translate the Hebrew is the same one used to speak of Jesus as the one and only or “only begotten,” so in this way we see the parallel. Also, when she was told about the vow she responded with faithfulness. She agreed that a commitment to God must be kept. And so she is like Jesus, a volunteer for the glory of God. In light of this sobering account, let us all be both careful and faithful in our commitments to the Lord. Let us remember the extreme cost and sacrifice that God took to save us through the cross of Christ. And let us faithfully volunteer our lives to be used for God ultimate glory! |
AuthorEddie Ragsdale Archives
May 2024
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