Sermon Tone Analysis

Turn your eyes upon Jesus…and the things of earth will grow strangely dim.

Worship is the regular and proper mode for God’s Creation—

Jesus, the eternal Son of God, said, “I will tell of your name to my brothers; in the midst of the congregation I will sing your praise” (Hebrews 2:12).

, Through him then let us continually offer up a sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of our lips.

Since we are to praise, we should meditate on how we should praise.

regulative principle.

A principle stating that Scripture prescribes or “regulates” the permissible elements of public *worship.

In contrast to the “normative principle” espoused within *Lutheranism and *Anglicanism, affirming that whatever Scripture does not prohibit is permissible, the regulative principle requires that elements of worship must be explicitly commanded, clearly exemplified or necessarily inferred from Scripture

In worship, that is to say, we should do only what God requires us to do, and we learn his requirements only from Scripture.

This principle begins WLC, 109, which I cited in the previous chapter: “The sins forbidden in the second commandment are, all devising, counseling, commanding, using, and anywise approving, any religious worship not instituted by God himself.”

Note also the following statement from WCF, 21.1:

But the acceptable way of worshiping the true God is instituted by himself, and so limited by his own revealed will, that he may not be worshiped according to the imaginations and devices of men, or the suggestions of Satan, under any visible representation, or any other way not prescribed in the Holy Scripture.

In these quotations, note the operative words “instituted” and “prescribed.”

In Reformed churches, worship is a command performance.

The popular summary is that whatever is not commanded is forbidden

The regulative principle is biblical in its insistence that worship is by divine warrant.

The purpose of worship, of course, is to acknowledge the greatness of God, to honor him for who he is and for what he has done.

We want first of all to please God.

There are in worship also benefits for the worshipers, which Paul sums up in 1 Corinthians 14:26 as “building up.”

But those benefits come when people are gathered together to glorify God.

“Building up,” or edification, is building up in the Word, in the grace of Christ, and in the Christian virtues.

How do we determine what glorifies God in worship?

No doubt we can obtain some knowledge of this from natural revelation, for Paul teaches that on the basis of natural revelation human beings should have engaged in true worship: their idolatry is culpable (Rom.

1:21–23).

But Paul also shows us clearly how sinners suppress that revelation apart from God’s saving grace and the knowledge of him given in the gospel that we have in Scripture.

So it is evident that Scripture must be our guide, in worship as in all of life.

Scripture is the only revelation of God given in words and sentences.

It is there that God tells us how he would like to be worshiped, and in Scripture he corrects our faulty understanding of natural revelation.

I might try to discover what would please God in worship by sitting in my easy chair and imagining what would please me if I were God.

But such a method would leave me with no assurance that I am worshiping rightly.

It is, indeed, important to be assured in this respect.

Contrary to our usual modern way of thinking, God is not always pleased when people decide to worship him.

God takes false worship very seriously.

In Genesis 4:5, we learn that “for Cain and his offering [God] had no regard.”

In Leviticus 10:1–2, we read, “Now Nadab and Abihu, the sons of Aaron, each took his censer and put fire in it and laid incense on it and offered unauthorized fire before the Lord, which he had not commanded them.

And fire came out from before the LORD and consumed them, and they died before the LORD.”

Note also the following passages in which people suffer severe penalties for defective worship: 1 Samuel 13:8–14; 2 Samuel 6:6–7; 1 Kings 12:32–33; 15:30; 2 Chronicles 26:16–23; 28:3; Jeremiah 7:31; 1 Corinthians 11:29–30.

So it is literally a life-and-death matter to worship God according to his command.

For us today, that means deriving our worship from the Bible.

God has given us regulations for worship.

We Sing—;

We Preach—

We Give—

We Pray .

We have Communion—

Are we looking to Jesus and ready to worship?