Bully's Blog

Present Your Bodies as Spiritual Worship

Over the years we have emphasized the importance of ritual. Rituals are significant in the Bible, and they ought to be significant to us. We have also emphasized the importance of worshipping God with our bodies and not just with our minds. We have sought to resist the temptation that many Reformed Christians deal with, which is the idea that God gave us bodies as carrying cases to get our brains to church.

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 In the New Testament and in the early church, preaching (heralding) was something done to outsiders, persuading them to repent and believe the gospel.

“…we face a situation today in most evangelical and Reformed churches in which the reading and preaching of Scripture is the only way in which the Word is made manifest in the lives of the saints. This is a real loss for the people of God. The result is the primacy of the preacher. The preacher not only does the only really important thing in the service (preach), he also composes (if he even does that) the prayers that are prayed, and he prays them by himself. It boils down very often to worship by proxy, exactly what the Reformation fought against. Only in the Lutheran and Episcopal churches is there more than a minimum of congregational participation, because of the use of prayer books.

Since all that is left is preaching, the act of preaching takes on dimensions foreign to the Bible.  Continue reading

In his lectures on worship, James Jordan comments:

The church is the first form of the kingdom. The church is also the nursery of the kingdom. It’s within the institutional church that the fundamental principles of the kingdom are taught and learned. Christians learn government through the church government of elders. Having learned that, Christians are then ready to govern in more broad circumstances. We learn finances in the church, through the administration of the tithe. We learn charity in the church because we are starving and God feeds us bread and wine.

We learn music in the church. All of western music flows out of the music of the church. All of western theatre flows out of the liturgy of the church. All of western literature flows out of the literature of the church.

The church creates civilisation. The church is the nursery of culture.1

Western culture, then, is at the stage of Solomon with his idolatrous wives. The church is now just mimicking the corrupted culture of the world instead of being the pioneer. And we know what happened to Solomon’s kingdom.

1 Ten Principles of Worship, Lecture 1. Available from www.wordmp3.com

The great argument advanced today in favor of such seeker sensitive worship is that we have to present the gospel to today’s unbeliever in a way that is relevant to him. But the word relevance, though it has a fine dictionary definition, really has to be understood as the battle cry of modern unbelief. This is not because the word itself is objectionable, but because liberals and their modern evangelical cousins have freighted it with a hidden system of weights and measures—in which the world, and not Scripture, determines the content of our faith and practice.

There are at least two kinds of irrelevance. One is the irrelevance of offering a bicycle to an oyster. But there is another kind of irrelevance entirely, and that is the practice of setting forth the gospel of light and righteousness to those who love their darkness and iniquity. We are commanded to be irrelevant in this second sense. We are called to worship God in a way that is pleasing to Him, and to which unbelievers will be attracted only if God moves them in a sovereign and mysterious way.

Read chapter 1, They Will Know We Are Christians By Our Schlock, here.

The New Testament knows of no Christians who are not accountable members of local churches in the sense that we have just seen. “Lone-Ranger Christians” are a contradiction because becoming a Christian means being united to Christ, and union with Christ expresses itself in union with a local body of believers. It seems to us that in the New Testament, to be excluded from the local church was to be excluded from Christ. This is why the issue of membership is so important.

Are you an accountable member of a local church? Not just: Is your name somewhere? But, are you committed to discipline and being disciplined according to biblical standards? Have you publicly declared your willingness to be shepherded and to be led by the leaders of a local church? Do you see yourself and your gifts as part of an organic ministering body? Do you show by your firm attachment to Christ’s body that you are attached to Christ?

Church membership is a blood-bought gift of God’s grace. More than most of us realize, it is a life-sustaining, faith-strengthening, joy-preserving means of God’s mercy to us. I urge you not to cut yourself off from this blessing.

John Piper, How Important Is Church Membership?
Sermon July 13, 2008
Read or listen at www.desiringgod.org

The western church’s capitulation to feminism is part of the reason it suffers a creeping rigor. Why would there be any life in something that carries its own disaffected head (ie. the disconnected men) around like so much luggage? No wonder the men stay away from this freak.

“…the Church is our mother, and the law of God requires us to honour our mothers.”

– Douglas Wilson, Mother Kirk, p. 23.

The solution is to get more men in church. Mark Driscoll’s strategy of specifically targeting men is the way to go.

“A study from Hartford Seminary found that the presence of involved men was statistically correlated with church growth, health, and harmony. Meanwhile, a lack of male participation is strongly associated with congregational decline.”*

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Regarding churches claiming apostolic authority, particularly the Catholic/Protestant divide, something that is overlooked is that worship was centralised on earth but this ended in AD70. It was possible for Satan to roll the political power of Rome into bed with the religious authority of Judaism, and bring both systems down upon all true worship as persecution.

Since that time, the centre of true worship is in heaven. It is now impossible for Satan to corrupt or attack its centre because the new Jerusalem is above. We see this in Revelation 2-3. Not only is the menora now split into seven separate lampstands, the lampstands are in the holy place, seated with Christ.

So, when the Roman church became corrupt, God’s people came out. When protestantism becomes corrupt, God’s people come out. As Christianity declines in the west, it is booming in the southern hemisphere. Satan is bound from mounting an all-out worldwide attack on the church until he is released for a short time, and then only so he can be drawn out of Egypt like Pharaoh to be destroyed.

There is an institutional church, but in her visible form she is only ever local assemblies. The ‘city of God’ is in heaven, incorruptible, unassailable. If her earthly ‘branches’ leave the vine, they wither up. When they have only darkness to share, Jesus snuffs them out. They are no longer ‘the church’ regardless of whether the physical institutions remain.

Magisterially, the church governs from heaven. The new Jerusalem will descend at the end of history, but any attempt at a centralised, earthly city of God before then is doomed to failure, Roman Catholic or otherwise.