I Went to Church Yesterday

The third of an undetermined number in a series on the character and need for corporate worship.

Preaching is a difficult task. Contrary to lighthearted cultural braggadocio, all Black guys can’t preach, inasmuch as some White guys can indeed jump. Regrettably, throughout the land, preaching has been reduced to the pattern and practice of providing hearers with principles of success; steps to live a better life; techniques for improving self-esteem; processes for debt cancellation, wealth accumulation and health preservation; tips for overcoming fear, being better friends, becoming more sensitive employers and more faithful employees; and other similar banalities. One doesn't have to listen intently to a "sermon" from today's popular pulpit in order to detect unmistakable strands of legalism, moralism and humanism adorning current religious speech. I once attended a service in Clarkston, Georgia in which the minister spent over twenty minutes encouraging his members to invest in Coca-Cola stocks. What's worse, the people loved to have it so. Equally terrible is that I stayed all that time.

As ministers of the gospel, as those charged with the sole responsibility of preaching Christ and Christ crucified, our overall pastoral responsibility is to ensure that the gospel of Jesus Christ is central to every aspect of our ministry. It is this gospel, the good news about what God has done for sinners justly deserving his eternal wrath, in the saving Person and work of Jesus Christ, whom he graciously offers to condemned law-breakers, through faith alone in him alone, that is to be the foundation as well as the framework of our ministry. Faithful ministers must resist the temptation to "craft" their ministries by providing attractive choices and alternatives to their clients by offering different styles of worship that appeal to and attract different strata of society; by toning down the severity of sin in order to promote a user-friendly, inoffensive atmosphere in which one can be protected from the wrath of a holy God; by encouraging hearers to turn to Christ and to embrace him as their only help of achieving their personal goals and agenda in life; by incorporating forms and formats in ministry, especially in worship, that are influenced by today's consumerist society whose values are shaped by sitcoms and talk shows and whose attention span for robust truth is even shorter than the last commercial they just viewed. The faithful pastor is undoubtedly involved in a great test, a test of trusting God alone to define the direction and to determine the marks of "success" of the ministry over which the Lord God has placed him.

I believe that the temptation to cut theological corners by imbibing, even just a little bit, at the broken cisterns of this world reaches its highest levels in the realm of preaching. But it is also here that the faithful man of God receives his strength and encouragement for his task. How? It is the very Word of God that he is required to proclaim mainly through preaching and sacrament, that not only forms and sustains his congregation, God's covenant community over which the Lord has made him his under-shepherd, but that also strengthens him. If, in the words of magisterial Reformer Martin Luther, each Christian is to preach the gospel to himself every day, then how much more does this necessity devolve upon the shoulders of the minister in whose mouth lie the very words of God! God’s voice, said Calvin, resounds in “the mouths and the tongues” of preachers, so that hearing ministers preach is tantamount to hearing God himself speak. How much more should he regard his call with a gravity, sincerity and faithfulness, soberly recalling “ ..that we are [not] sufficient in ourselves to claim anything as coming from us, but our sufficiency is from God, who has made us competent to be ministers of a new covenant, not of the letter but of the Spirit...” 2 Cor 3:5-6, lest after we have preached to others, we find ourselves disqualified, 1 Cor 9:27. How much more should he cherish and claim this gospel, the mysteries of God's treasures in Christ, with which he has been entrusted, as the very epicenter of his life and ministry?

This is the perspective that I am so feverishly trying to adopt. These are the lofty, enduring truths that I am so carefully striving to apply. Such teaching forces me to do the unnatural – to look outside of myself unto the risen, resurrected, reigning and returning Christ alone as my only hope and strength, not only in the discharge of my pastoral responsibilities but also in all of life.

From this broader panorama of thought and armed with these comforting and challenging verities, I approached my task yesterday, still tainted with instability and insincerity and still troubled with nagging uncertainty and above all, with sin, still preaching with a limp, really, with the full handicap of a quadriplegic.
Thus I tried to preach the gospel of Christ to his sheep; thus I strove to present Christ to his people. Lord, help my preaching! Thus I tried to be faithful. Lord help my unfaithfulness! Thus I tried to be focused. Lord forgive my negligence!

I went to church yesterday… and all soli Deo Gloria. Yes, I, even I,, went to church yesterday.

I Went to Church Yesterday

The second of an undetermined number in a series on the character and need for corporate worship.

I went to church yesterday. Why not? I had no choice! I'm the preacher/pastor. In addition, I went to church because the other believers and I are the church. In this case the church is a noun and not a verb– we do not do church, as some reconstructionists shamelessly declare, we are the church, the body of Christ, the covenant collective, the communion of saints, inseparably connected to one another by the eternal bond of the Holy Spirit. Our communion is a necessary derivative of our in union with Christ our Head and it is preeminently expressed and experienced when the saints gather together in corporate worship.

The idea of the communion of the saints is fundamentally contra mundum. That is, it maintains a militant stand against this fallen world that cherishes confusion, celebrates chaos, criticizes continuity, condemns coherence and chides community. This communion of saints with its sense of orderliness, system of cohesion, standing in continuity with all the saints of the past and the future, maintains a defiant posture against the very character and claims of a lost and dying world. Though always tempted and in varying degrees impacted by worldly homogenizing tendencies to be relevant and "practical," this communion continues to maintain its distinctiveness from the world by clinging to the symbols of transcendence, by proclaiming the good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ and by serving as God's instrument by which he ushers in his kingdom. As a living, spiritual organism, the church, the communion of saints maintains its identity and preserves its integrity by resolutely holding fast to its head and King, Jesus Christ, whose agenda it joyfully incorporates as its own. The church gladly acknowledges that it belongs to God who creates and then re-creates his fallen creatures and then, more than placing them in the body of his Son Jesus Christ, he sovereignly constitutes them as Christ’s body. It is there, in the communio sanctorum as the gospel message is faithfully declared and as the sacraments are properly administered, that the people of God are continually transformed by his Spirit from glory to glory.

It is there as these divinely ordained means of grace are offered and received by God's people that they receive his help to inspire and energize them along the way. It is there as this worshiping community mimics the activities in heaven, that its real needs for forgiveness of sins, assurance of salvation, guidance and sustenance for the days ahead, reaffirmation as God's own, peculiar covenant people and for eternal hope, are declared and received. It is there the eternal verities of the character of God, the Person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ and the ongoing ministry of the Holy Spirit who applies the great truths of Christ's accomplished salvation to the heart's of God's elect, are confidently extolled and consolingly embraced.

With such a perspective and with such principles in hand and heart, this communion is being taught more and more to be what it really is, an other-worldly people proclaiming to a fallen world God's secret wisdom that was once hidden but that is now revealed. It boldly declares to the world that its only hope rests in the true King, the very Lord of glory whom it does not know and indeed, whom it cannot know, for if it could, it and its leaders would not have crucified him, the very Lord of glory, 1 Cor 2:8. But where did I learn all of this? And where did I proclaim all of this? In church, where I went yesterday, where else?

I Went to Church Yesterday

The first of an undetermined number in a series on the character and need for corporate worship.

I went to church yesterday. Monday through Saturday is a long time to be away from the members of the body of Christ. I sorely wanted to see my brothers and sisters again. Particularly, I wanted to see our ailing sister who has been recently diagnosed with a serious malignancy and for whom we have been praying intensely. I wanted to see her face, to know how she passed the last week, to encourage her and her family members by affirming to them what they already know – our faithful Triune God is with them; that in Christ Jesus our Lord we have a great High Priest who is more than able to sympathize with our weaknesses, temptations and illnesses and that because of him, we are to hold firmly to the faith we profess, Heb 4:14-15.
I wanted to be with the young persons, some of whose parents are faithfully catechizing them with a view that, upon successful examination, they would be received into our church as communicant members.
I attended service yesterday because I wanted to meet in person the husband of one of our members who lives in another state and for whom we have been praying feverishly to return to and be reunited with his wife. Unbeknownst to him, the Lord has answered our prayers and we are rejoicing with humble thanksgiving to our merciful God who moved in the heart of this man and motivated him to come back to his wife. What an awesome God! I went to church yesterday.

However, as sound and as laudable as these motives are, they are not the major reason for my attending service yesterday. I attended service mainly because I needed to hear from heaven, to hear from God. The Scripture declares that I'm standing in covenant unity and continuity with the redeemed community of Israel whom Lord God had monergistically saved from Egyptian slavery and brought unto himself for his own glory. Then, he commanded them to stand at the foot of Mt. Sinai in order that he would speak to them from on high. There he reminded him of his Person, who he is and of his work, his redemptive work of purchasing them from captivity. Within that redemptive context and from the perspective of that introductory reminder, he gave them the plans and commands he had for their lives, the stipulations which were to govern their lives as his own treasured possession, his own holy nation that he separated from all the nations of the world, which belonged to him, but from which he was pleased to choose in an unbreakable covenant that he sovereignly instituted, a small part which he created and constituted by his word as his own people.

Like the church of the old covenant, elect Israel, the church today is a creatura verbi, a creation of the word of God. Like the church of the old covenant, today's church is the recipient of God's lavish saving mercies that he mediates through his son, Jesus Christ. So, I went to church yesterday to hear from this very God who spoke at Sinai and who now speaks to his people now assembled on Mt. Zion. To hear what? To hear the law and the gospel repeated in my heart; to hear the wonderful story of God's particular redemption of sinners through his gracious, sovereign regeneration of the Holy Spirit unto faith in Christ alone and all soli Deo gloria, to the glory of God alone; to hear this word by which we are saved, justified, sanctified and renewed; to hear this word by which we live, and move and have our being, for in like manner as it creates the church, this word also creates faith in Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit, and it is this faith by which we live, 2 Cor 5:7. It is by the hearing of God's word, ex auditu, by which the church lives. I went to church yesterday to hear the word of God that I may live. I went to church yesterday.