The National Center for Family Integrated Churches welcomes Marcus Servin with the following message entitled, Regulative Principle. Thanks very much. I believe that there are three or maybe even four talks on the Regulative Principle. And amongst the speakers who are giving those talks, we all conversed a little bit prior to this conference. We were anxious about stepping on each other's toes and all of that and saying the same things over and over and over again.

But we realized that we all had some slight variances, but we also realized we all had our own unique experiences. So here again, I'm gonna give a talk about the regulative principle, define it, and then also defend it. Now, I want to say that when it comes to this question of worship, it's a central question. We have to ask ourselves, how does God want us to worship him? So take a passage like this from Leviticus 10.

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. The fire came out from before the Lord and consumed them, and they died before the Lord. Then Moses said to Aaron, this is what the Lord has said, among those who are near me I will be sanctified. And before all the people, I will be glorified. And Aaron held his peace.

And so an interesting passage like that shows us that this question of worship is an important one. God was so offended by the strange fire that was offered up to him that he brought immediate and permanent judgment on Nadab and Abihu. And so that kind of sets the tone here that this is an important issue, that the whole issue of worshipping God is important for us to consider. And the whole question of how we relate to him through public worship has to be ferreted out. In other words, we have to do some careful thinking, and we have to work through the various passages and come up with some answers to the question.

Here's one of the assumptions I'd like you to keep in your mind from the very beginning of this lecture or talk today. And that is that God is God, and you are his creature. That may sound like a simple thing. How can you be saying this in a lecture like this? Well, because this whole, what I would call, creator creature distinction must be maintained.

It must be maintained especially in the area of worship. That God is the creator, we are the creatures, and so the creatures ought to be then considering what is the best way or the scripturally mandated way that God would have us worship him. Rather than us considering instead what pleases me in worship, what ministers to me in worship, what makes me emotionally moved in worship. What helps me in worship, Or I was pleased with this worship, or I wasn't pleased with that aspect of worship. We shouldn't be asking those kind of questions.

Instead, it should be paramount in our mind, was God pleased with our worship? And that really is at the heart of this whole issue of the regulative principle. And it's simply acknowledging the fact that God has told us throughout his word, and it's not inappropriate for him to tell us how he wants us to approach him, how he wants us to worship him. Now at the time of the Protestant Reformation, There were a lot of things going on. God was, as it were, raising up a group of men who we call the reformers and helping them to rediscover the gospel.

And part of that rediscovering the gospel, not only the personal transformation that took place, but all the transformation that took place in terms of the Church of Jesus Christ. That was happening. So people were thinking differently about worship, and they were thinking differently about what the Church really looked like. And so the Protestant Reformation is just such a key time for us to see this whole doctrine, as it were, retaught or rediscovered that it's important to worship God in his prescribed way. Now, two men really stand out in this discussion and I think we owe a debt to them and I'm going to tell you a few stories about them and some of the things they've said And these two men have done the work.

They've listed the heavy water, so to speak, in detailing this whole doctrine. And they are John Calvin and John Knox, two Johns. John Calvin, John Knox. They knew each other. They were friends.

John Knox came and sat at the feet of Calvin in Geneva. And they both worked in shaping the worship of God. So if you go to any Protestant Christian church today, my basic thesis is this. You will find in that service, no matter how different it might be from yours or mine, you will find evidences of the work of Calvin and Knox, who did the hard work of writing and thinking and moving the church forward and stripping away all the inventive things that people had come up with in the previous 1500 years or so as the New Testament church got rolling and then all the various different aspects or variations of the church in different places. And so God used these men as well as others, but these two in particular, and we owe them a great debt.

Now I'm saying, in essence, that the theology of the worship that flows out of the Bible and was retaught at the time of the Reformation is in contrast and is distinct and different from that theology of worship that would be what we know as Roman Catholicism. Most in this room would probably agree with that. It's very distinct and different from that theology of worship that we would find in Eastern orthodoxy. And this may be a stretch for some of you, But it also is distinctly different from some of the theology of worship that we find in the modern contemporary worship styles. And so when we evaluate worship styles in our modern scene by the scriptures, then we start running into a lot of problems and questions.

It leads us to that old phrase that comes from the Reformation and that is semper reformanda. Those that are of that stripe, of that way of thinking, they're from the Reformation, whether they're Presbyterians or Baptists or whatever, they're thinking in terms of always reforming their worship and their life and their beliefs by Holy Scripture. That's our template. That's our foundation right there. What does the Bible say about this?

Now let me just give you an illustration for a minute that might help you think about what happened at the Reformation. Think of the Church of Jesus Christ as a giant ship plowing through the water. Huge battleship or something like that. Well, any of you guys who are in the Navy, you know what happens to any ship, no matter how large or small. Over time, seawater has an ability to corrode.

So you gotta scrape the hull of that ship, and you gotta get all the barnacles and all the sea crustaceans that have attached themselves to the ship, and all the seaweed and all the other stuff that slows that ship down in the water. You've got to take it into the dry dock and scrape the sides off and you repaint it, and then you put it back out in the water. And it goes like it was intended to go. Instead of getting slower and slower and slower and more encrusted with all this stuff from the sea, then that ship is now nice and clean and can plow forward at 30 knots or whatever the speed of that ship is. I would submit to you that the Church of Jesus Christ, all through the medieval period leading up to the time of the Reformation became encrustated with the barnacles of the human traditions of man.

Those different practices, those ways of doing things, all became attached to the Church of Jesus Christ, so much so that the church was almost dead in the water. And God, through his providence, brought about a number of means to, as it were, strip the side of the hull and to repaint it and put it back fresh and ready to go through the Protestant Reformation. For in many respects the gospel which had become hidden was rediscovered and What did it bring? Liberty is what it brought. Faith is what it brought.

And so through the changes that took place at that time, there had been some fundamental changes in worship. Now, Another aspect of the Reformation was what might be called iconoclasm. Maybe you've never heard that word before. You know the word icon. And icon would be those various Portraits, pictures, statuary, those kind of things which are from a Roman Catholic point of view or even an Eastern Orthodox point of view an aid to worship.

In the Reformation there was an iconoclastic cleansing that took place. In other words, a lot of the different efforts of reformation in little towns all throughout Europe then went and cleansed those churches of all the idolatrous practices and paraphernalia that had been brought about in those churches or built in those churches. And so the whole effort was an iconoclasmic cleansing. And this took place under Ulrich Zwingli in Switzerland, under William Farrell, in France, in Switzerland, under Martin Luther, and others in Germany, under John Knox, in England, and in Scotland, and Ireland. So God used a number of different people in different places to bring about this purging of the practices of the Romanist church and to bring back in its place a very simple scripturally warranted and appointed worship of God.

And that was the goal of the reformers, to recover that God-appointed worship. And so let me just bring you now to what I would consider the essential aspects of the worship of God built upon Holy Scripture. And this may look slightly different in different congregations, because different congregations may agree on some of the essential elements, but they may have different forms of how they carry that out or different circumstances of how they also make these things happen. So I'll give some examples of that as we go along here. Consider the passage in Hebrews 12, verse 28 and 29.

This passage has been on my mind over this whole last year for perhaps some different reasons. I've been thinking about it in terms of how we are members by God's grace of a kingdom that cannot be shaken. And even though the rest of the world may be falling into disarray, or we may be losing some of the liberties we've enjoyed in the past, or various things like that, still by God's grace we're members of that unshakable kingdom. And even if our nation goes down, the kingdom of God goes forward. But it also says some important words about worship.

Therefore, let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken. Amen? Amen. Amen. And thus, let us offer to God acceptable worship with reverence and awe, For our God is a consuming fire.

This should get your attention. Our God wants to be worshipped, the Bible tells us here, in an acceptable manner, an acceptable way. Not acceptable to you, acceptable to him. That's what it's saying. Let us offer to God acceptable worship.

Worship that he's pleased with, worship that he's thankful for, worship that he receives, and to do so with reverence and awe, that we have a sense of respect, sobriety, carefulness when it comes to worship. Things are not loose. Things are not irreverent in worship. Things are thoughtful, planned, orchestrated, and with awe, a sense of wonder, appreciation, thanksgiving, being awestruck by the power and the authority of God. And so as we worship, we need to be conscious of those two things, as well as being aware that God is a consuming fire.

That when we offer worship to God that's not acceptable, that's not in his word, That's inventive, that's creative, that's imaginative, that strays outside the boundaries of what would be acceptable, then our God is under no obligation to receive it, for he is a consuming fire. And of course that's a reference back to the Leviticus 10 passage with Nadab and Abihu and the strange fire that they offered. Now here's the first principle when it comes to essential worship. What do we need to be thinking about? The first is this.

Worship is for the glory of God and therefore it is instituted by God. Worship is for the glory of God and therefore it is instituted by God. There are lots of passages we could go to. We already looked at the Hebrews passage, but consider This passage from Deuteronomy 12, and we'll look at this again in more detail, Deuteronomy 12, 31 and 32. You shall not worship the Lord your God in that way, For every abominable thing that the Lord hates they have done for their gods, for they have even burnt their sons and daughters in the fire to their gods.

Everything that I command you, you shall be careful to do. You shall not add to it, and you shall not take away from it." Or the words of our Lord in John 4 when he speaks with the Samaritan woman. But the hour is coming and is now here when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth. For the Father is seeking such people to worship him. God is spirit and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.

Again we'll talk more about that but those verses really set the tone here that God's interested in having worship that is worship that's been instituted by him. The in terms of the essential elements and how it looks and feels. Now there was a time in John Calvin's life where he had gone to Geneva. He was a young man. He was a very zealous preacher.

He did a number of things along with some of the other preachers who were there, William Farrell and Pierre Verret, that offended the city leaders. And so the city leaders all got together and they threw them out. This is when Calvin was just a young preacher. This is in 1538. So Calvin went to Strasburg, not sure what he was going to do, and he came under the tutelage of an older man, Martin Busser.

And Busser began to pour into his life. And one of the things that Busser did, besides helping him and encouraging him to find a wife, because he was unmarried at that time, was to reconsider worship and to think through the elements of worship. And so Calvin did that at that time and he spent about two and a half years in Strasbourg and adopted many of the different forms of worship that were being practiced there. Now He figured he would probably always be in Strasbourg, but he kept getting these letters from the city council in Geneva saying, yes, we know that we sent you out. We know that we sent you away as persona non grata, but we want you to come back.

Please come back. We didn't realize how many gifts you had. Calvin was really reluctant to do that. I mean, are you going to go back to a place where you got burned once? Are you going to go back there again?

And he decided, after a lot of thinking and praying and seeking counsel to go back. During that time that he was away, one of the Roman Catholic bishops named Cardinal Sattiletto from Carpentus wrote a letter to the people of Geneva. They decided for the Reformation in 1535. He wrote this letter to persuade them to come back to Roman Catholicism. They couldn't find anybody in Geneva to reply to that letter.

And that's one of the reasons why they kept thinking of Calvin, because they knew that he could reply. And so during that time he was away, he wrote on behalf of the city of Geneva, their exiled minister, he wrote this letter saying, sorry, we're not coming back to Roman Catholicism. But here's some of his reasoning in the letter. He said, I have no difficulty in conceding to you that there is nothing more perilous in our salvation than a preposterous and perverse worship of God. The primary rudiments by which we are want to train to piety those whom we wish to gain as disciples to Christ are these.

First of all, not to frame any new worship of God for themselves at random and after their own pleasure, but to know that the only legitimate worship is that which God himself approved from the beginning. For we maintain that the sacred Oracle declared that obedience is more excellent than sacrifice, First Samuel 15 22. In short, we train them by every means to be contented with the one rule of worship that they have received from his mouth. And we bid adieu to all fictitious worship." Now, that's what Calvin was saying to this Roman Catholic cardinal. We're not going to allow Geneva to go back to Roman Catholicism.

And by the way, Calvin returned to Geneva. He was invited back. And eventually, he agreed to come back. And he brought his wife this time, because he was newly married, in 1541. And he had a lengthy 23-year ministry there that God uniquely blessed until the time of his death in 1564.

So the point that I want to make in bringing that up is, here you see a man beginning to do some of this fine-tuning for the church that needs to be done, stripping away the accretions that have accumulated, all the traditions of men, and all the ways that are very much self-centered and focused around our pleasure when it comes to worship, rather than concerning this one inviolable rule, and that is that we should get rid of fictitious worship and only do what God has said. That's his point. Now, John Knox writes later, near the end of his life, in his book, The History of the Reformation in Scotland. He says, man may neither make nor devise a religion that is acceptable to God, but man is bound to observe and keep the religion from God that is received without chopping it or changing it thereof. So Knox is making the point here, we just wouldn't be able to even devise a religion that would be acceptable to God in the first place.

Our responsibility is to do or to receive from God that faith or that religion that he has given to us. And so we receive that religion and keep it, without chopping it, without changing it. That was Knox's way of saying it. Another quote from John Knox, answering the question, how do men presume to add to the worship of God? He writes in his vindication of the doctrine that the mass is idolatry, little treatise that he wrote.

He said, oh God eternal, hast thou laid none under burden upon our backs than Jesus Christ laid by his word? Then who hath burdened us with all these ceremonies, prescribed fastings, compelled chastity, unlawful vows, invocation of saints, and with the idolatry of the mass. The devil, the devil brethren, invented all these burdens to depress impotent men to perdition." Well, Knox is not one for mincing words, as you can see. I mean, he goes right for the throat. It's the devil who's come up with all of these invented forms of religion.

And so right away, we see here that the worship of God is for the glory of God, and therefore, it was instituted by God. It's not from us. We didn't come up with it. Only God did. Okay, here's the second point in terms of the essential principles of worship.

Worship is distinctly God-centered and God-directed, and therefore it should be truly spiritual in nature. It's God-centered and God-directed, and therefore it must be truly spiritual in nature. In Isaiah chapter 2, we come across a very sobering prophecy in that passage. Isaiah is writing, and he talks about the haughtiness of man. Verse 17 through 19.

Isaiah 2, 17 to 19. And the haughtiness of man shall be humbled, and the lofty pride of men shall be brought low. And the Lord alone will be exalted in that day and the idols shall utterly pass away and the people shall enter the caves of the rocks and the holes of the ground before the terror of the Lord and from the splendor of his majesty when he rises to terrify the earth. What is inventive religion but the haughtiness of man, the lofty pride of man that we know better than you, Lord, of how we should worship you. We know better than you, Lord, of how we should go about constructing this.

Rather than humbling ourself before you and trembling at your word, we're going to lift ourselves up and exalt ourselves so that we worship you in the way we prefer. John Calvin had something to say about this in his Institutes. He says in Book 1 Chapter 11 Article 8, For it appears from Moses that idols were in use before this eagerness to consecrate images of the dead prevailed, which is frequently mentioned by secular writers, when he relates that Rachel stole her father's idols. In Genesis 31, 19, he is speaking of a vice that was common, and from this we may gather that man's nature, so to speak, is a perpetual factory of idols. That's the part I want you to get.

Calvin's teaching boldly here that the human heart is a perpetual factory of idols we're always coming up with different preferences and ideas we're always coming up with well let's try this and let's try that in worship Let's do all these various things we think that we might like, that minister to us, rather than doing the very thing God has prescribed. The problem is man's nature is a perpetual factory of idols. The third point, worship is to be performed in Spirit and truth, which implies that it is conducted in any other manner than what God has specified, than it is in great error and liable to bring great judgment. Worship is to be performed in spirit and truth, which implies that it is conducted in any other manner than that which God has specified, it is in great error and liable to bring great judgment." Now, I already spoke about the judgment upon Nadab and Abihu, where you get that. But it's interesting to study the passage in John 4 between our Lord and the woman at the well.

She was, after all, a Samaritan, was she not? And Jewish men never talked with Samaritan women. In fact, the typical route for anyone in the northern part of Israel was to go out to the Sea of Galilee, down the Jordan River Valley, down to Jericho, take a right-hand turn and go up to Jerusalem. Nobody wanted to go through Samaria. And the reason why was that the Samaritans were the people of the land that were left following the destruction of Samaria.

And they were the people that the Assyrians didn't even want to bother with. They were the poorest and the most desperate people. And then the Assyrians then moved a bunch of their people in there following that great time of judgment. And they intermarried with these people who were left over and those are the Samaritans. So for any self-respecting Jewish person, they're going to look down on the Samaritan people.

But what does Jesus do when he's on his way to Jerusalem? He goes right through Samaria. And when his disciples are in the town finding some food and something else to refresh them on their trip, he takes up this conversation that he initiates with this Samaritan woman in the middle of the day, a time when most women would not come out. And you know the story, of course. Jesus confronts her in her sin on several different fronts.

One is the fact that she's had five husbands, and now the one she is with is not her husband at all. And this is the greatest understatement in the whole New Testament when she says, sir, I perceive that you are a prophet. Well, more than that, more than that, it's going to become evident in short time. But then, interestingly enough, the woman, as it were, takes a little detour and begins to talk about worship. She says in verse 20, our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you say that in Jerusalem is the place where people ought to worship." And Jesus said to her, "'Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain, " Mount Gerizim, by the way, that's what he's referring to.

On this mountain, nor in Jerusalem, will you worship the Father. You worship what you do not know. The Samaritans had their worship, it all kind of came from the heretical worships of some of those in the northern tribes of Israel who have fallen into idolatry mixed with the Assyrians. So they had created their own worship and their own gods. You do not know what you worship.

We worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews, but the hour is coming, Jesus tells here, and is now here when the true worshippers will worship the Father in what prescribed ways? In spirit and truth. For the Father is seeking such people to worship Him. The implication being that He rejects those that are coming in a different manner. They're not coming by the spirit or in spirit or in truth.

They're coming in terms of their own ideas of how they believe God would want to be worshipped. He is seeking such people to worship in. God is spirit and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth. Now, right after this, then Jesus reveals to the woman that He is the Messiah. And excitedly, she goes to tell everybody.

And it makes quite a sensation. Well, the point of this passage here, and it is a very startling passage, is that Jesus here is showing us the requirements for true worship. It is to be, first of all, in spirit, meaning that those who come before God are to be regenerate. They're to have been altered and changed and transformed by the gospel so that they are members who have received a new birth in spirit. But it also means not only beyond that, that one's regenerate, But one comes in a manner that is spiritual, that they come in a manner that takes cognizant awareness of what the Holy Spirit has said about worship.

And so they're, again, trying to think, well, what would the way God would want us to worship Him? How would you want to be worshiped, Lord? We're coming in that way because we're concerned with honoring you as our Heavenly Father. And in truth, that there's an awareness and a conscious determination to come before God and approach him in the prescribed manner which he has given to us. Well, where else do we find it?

But in the Bible. And so we come in spirit and in truth. Calvin comments on this passage. And some of his comments are very interesting. Listen to this one.

Moreover, the rule which distinguishes between pure and vitiated worship is of universal application in order that we may not adopt any device which seems fit to ourselves. But look to the injunctions of him who alone is entitled to prescribe. Therefore, if we would have him to approve of our worship, this rule, which he everywhere enforces with the utmost strictness, must be carefully observed. For there is a twofold reason why the Lord, in condemning and prohibiting all fictitious worship, requires us to give obedience only to His own voice. First, it tends greatly to establish His authority that we do not follow our own pleasure, but depend entirely on his sovereignty.

And secondly, such is our folly that when we are left at liberty, all we are able to do is to go astray. You know, kind of referring back to that, our heart is a factory of idols. We'll go astray if left at liberty. All we are able to do is to go astray. And then when once we have turned aside from the right path, there is no end to our wanderings until we get buried under a multitude of superstitions." So Calvin is exhorting his readers, and in particular, those who are reading his booklet, which at that point is called The Necessity of Reforming the Church, a real jewel if you can get a copy of that little treatise, the necessity of reforming the church.

He's exhorting people to, again, bring their worship back into the conformity of in spirit and in truth, and making sure that we're worshipping God in the right way. A fourth point, worship is regulated by Scripture. In essence, it is regulated by God himself, for all worship should be according to Scripture, not according to our preferences, but according to what Scripture says. So Deuteronomy 12, verses 31 and 32, Moses' words, You shall not worship the Lord your God in that way, like the heathenists do. For every abominable thing that the Lord hates they have done with their gods.

For they have even birthed their sons and daughters in the fire to their gods. Everything that I command you, you shall be careful to do, and you shall not add to it or take away from it." Another related passage would be Deuteronomy 4, 2, a more general statement, but the same basic idea. You shall not add to the word that I command you, nor take from it that you may keep the commandments of the Lord your God that I command you. So passages like those are teaching us that the worship of God ought to be according to scripture. It ought to be something that we do very conscientiously.

It ought to be a sobering thing for elders, pastors, ministers, those who are worship leaders. It ought to be sobering to us to very carefully craft our worship with this one thought in mind, Lord does this please you? Is this what you want, Lord? Calvin again from the necessity of reforming the church, he says, God rejects, condemns, abominates all fictitious worship, and employs his word as a bridle to keep us in unqualified obedience. When shaking off this yoke, we wander after our own fictions and offer to him a worship, a work of human rashness.

How much so ever it may delight ourselves in this sight, it is a vain trifling, nay, vilest and even pollution." Strong words. But again, getting us to reorient our compass. After all, in 1 Samuel 15, 22, Doesn't it say, behold, to obey is better than sacrifice? We need to be thoughtful to obey the Lord in these matters and not just come up with our own ideas all the time. Another quote from Calvin from the Necessity of Reforming the Church, the advocates of human traditions paint them in fair and gaudy colors and Paul certainly admits that they carry with them a show of wisdom But as God values obedience more than all sacrifices, it ought to be sufficient for the rejection of any mode of worship that is not sanctioned by the command of God.

And that's really the bottom line. We're looking for those elements of worship that have been sanctioned by the command of God. Let me tell you a story for a minute about John Knox. Most people don't realize that John Knox, when he first started his adult life as a young man. He was a Roman Catholic priest.

And in time, he began to see the difficulties with the theology of Roman Catholicism and also the worship practices. At one point, he took up a sword, a big sword, a double-edged sword. And he was using it to guard George Wissert, one of the popular Scottish preachers who was preaching the gospel in his age. And Knox gave up his Roman Catholicism and became his guard, his bodyguard. Well, at one point, in avenging the death of Wissert, a number of young Scottish lords took over a castle, and Knox fled into this castle with them at St.

Andrews, and in time, sadly, the castle fell to the French, who were all Roman Catholics. And they took all the men who were in that castle and they incarcerated them, And for those who were nobles, they went off to prisons and lived a life of some ease. But for those who were commoners like Knox, they were thrown into the slave ships. And John Knox rode in a slave ship all around France and England and Scotland doing the biddings of his masters. It just about killed him.

At one point, When they were wintering in France, they were in a river seaport they had gone into. They were still living on the ship. And the Catholic priests came down to perform mass for all the Protestant prisoners. And the captain of the ship and the lieutenant insisted that the different prisoners would take the painted lady, as Knox called to it, that statuary made of wood that was all painted up of the Virgin Mary, and to take it in their hands and to reverently kiss the statue. Well Knox refused to do this.

Well they kept impressing upon him with blows and words and all the rest that he was going to do it whether he liked it or not. And so at one point he got an idea in his head and he decided, okay, I'll take it. And he took it in his arms and, but before he kissed it, he pitched it overboard into the drink or into the water. And he said, let her swim. She is light enough.

Well, it just shows you John Knox's attitude toward the mass and all those inventive issues that come with crafting worship in the way that God is not prescribed. That we're to be very careful to regulate our worship by scripture. Here the words of Knox, all worshiping, honoring, or service invented by the brain of man is a false religion. It is idolatry. The mass is invented by the brain of man without any commandment of God and therefore it is idolatry.

Or about 150 years later after the time of Knox, the Westminster Confession of Faith, similar statements in the Second London Confession of 1689. The whole counsel of God concerning all things necessary for his own glory and man's salvation, faith, and life is either expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture, unto which nothing at any time is to be added, whether by new revelations of the Spirit or the traditions of men. Nevertheless, we acknowledge the inward illumination of the Spirit of God to be necessary for the saving understanding of such things as are revealed in the Word, and that there are some circumstances concerning the worship of God and government of the Church common to human actions in societies which are to be ordered by the light of nature and Christian prudence according to the general rules of the word which are always to be observed. Now you heard me mention the word circumstances. When we think of regulating the worship that we have by the word of God, it's helpful for us to think in terms of three categories.

Elements, those essential elements that must be in the worship that are prescribed by scripture. We think of forms, the ways in which they are carried out, and then we think of the various circumstances that they may arise in. A few examples. An element of scripturally prescribed worship would be prayer. The form of prayer may be that it may be written or it may be extemporaneous.

We have both in our service. And the circumstances might be that that prayer, can't read my own writing here. Well, the circumstances might be, just to think on my feet here, would be that that prayer would be something where you're either sitting or you're kneeling or you're standing. And that would be the circumstance of it. When it comes to preaching, Preaching is an element which is prescribed in the Word of God.

The form might be, well, I'm preaching from the book of Mark, or I'm preaching from the book of Romans, or I'm preaching a few verses, or I'm preaching a whole chapter because I'm taking a narrative portion of scripture. That would be the form. The circumstance would be that it's recorded, or perhaps it's not recorded. That there might be electric lights illuminating the place of worship, or maybe there are oil lamps because you're in a more remote location where there's no electricity. And so this whole idea of elements that are prescribed and forms that extend from that, the way in which we then follow that, and circumstances which are just simply related issues, has some bearing on this matter.

One of the helpful writers in the subject of the regulative principle is Joe Moorcraft. In his book, How God Wants Us to Worship Him, a defense of the Bible as the only standard for modern worship is one you should have. If you're going to be thinking soberly about this, get this book. Here's a second one. The Worship of God, which is a collection of a bunch of writers, but there are certain writers in here that stand out above others.

And one in particular, a man by the name of Terry Johnson, has written some very carefully and thoughtful comments on the worship of God. And I would highly recommend both Joe Moricraft and Terry Johnson as men to consult on this. Johnson writes in this way, the Catholic, Lutheran, and Anglican way of understanding of worship may be called a normative principle. General norms for worship are given, but whatever is not expressly forbidden by scripture is permitted. And what Terry Johnson is trying to say there is that in various different religious organizations, whether they be Catholic, Lutheran, Anglican, They understand the whole idea that when certain things are forbidden in scripture, we don't do those things, but anything else is okay to do.

And that's called the normative principle. But Johnson goes on. He says, the reform practice, though, is much more rigorous. It is stated that whatever is not enjoined by scripture by command, example, or by deduction from broader principles is forbidden. And What he means by that is not only are those things which were expressly stated that we're not to do, we don't do those, but we also don't get inventive and bring in all sorts of other things which are never ever spoken of in the Bible.

The Bible is our fundamental guide. And we do what it says and we don't bring in other things. That's the regulating aspect of the Word of God when it comes to worship. Again, Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 21. 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 worshipped according to the imaginations and devices of men or the suggestions of Satan under any visible representation or any way not prescribed in the Holy Scripture.

So you're going to find some worship services that are deficient in the sense that they don't have what God has said should be in the worship service. They don't have it. They're deficient. They're going to find other worship services that are imaginative and they have all sorts of extra things in their worship that God has never prescribed. And that is an offense to God.

Now let's talk a little bit about the different aspects of worship and I'm gonna give you what I would call the essential elements of public worship, what needs to be there. And by the way, if you want to look at one of the bulletins from my own church, I've got a stack of them up here. You're free to take them and it gives you the elements of worship that we use. I'm not putting us up as the ideal model because frankly there are changes we have made over the last eight years I've been at our church where we worship God in a certain way, as we study scripture more, we realize, you know, we need to make a change here. And that just involved a lot of careful teaching and preaching so that when we made those changes, and we've made two very significant changes, that we didn't lose anybody.

And thankfully, in both situations, we lost no one. So from a pastor's point of view, I was very grateful for that, making these changes. But the first essential element of the worship service is a call to worship and an invocation. They both go together. The call to worship is something like this from Psalm 96.

O sing to the Lord a new song, sing to the Lord all the earth, declare to the Lord, bless his name, tell of his salvation from day to day, declare his glory among the nations, his marvelous works among all the peoples for great is the Lord and greatly to be praised." Maybe you're thinking to yourself, well Pastor Servin, you just tell us about Presbyterian worship. No, I'm telling you about biblical worship. The Bible has example after example after example of calls to worship. If you email me and you say, send me your list of calls to worship, I've got several hundred of them that I've called out of scripture. And the invocation is nothing more than a prayer asking God to receive our worship.

Lord, we pray that you would be so pleased to receive our worship from fallen yet redeemed creatures that we would be obedient to you and worship you, Lord, in a way that you require. A second element of worship we find in the Bible is the singing of psalms and hymns and spiritual songs. We find those passages in Ephesians 5 and Colossians 3 where it just simply lists out those three different parts or three different types of musical terms, somnois, hymnois, and odis pneumotikis, which would be spiritual songs. And these are simply talking about different ways of singing or worshipping God with using the human voice. Now I do not hold to an exclusive Psalm singing way of thinking.

There are some brothers and sisters in Christ who do. That's fine. I understand that. That's not my understanding of these verses. These verses, I believe, allow us and encourage us and even prescribe us to sing psalms, which ought to be a part of our worship service.

This is God's songbook that is given to us. We ought to be singing those words. Also, I believe it's acceptable before God to sing hymns, those words which have been generated by human beings, not under the inspiration of scripture, just by wanting out of the fullness of their heart to worship God. And so we sing appropriate hymns. And we also sing spiritual songs, those songs which take a portion of scripture and then set it to music, just a part of the New Testament or some other part of scripture that we want to set to music.

Now in Geneva, how did they teach people to sing? Because remember, as they're stripping away all these forms of the Roman Catholic Church, the adults in Geneva, they have no clue how to sing. The only thing they've sung are songs at the local bar or something like that. So how do they teach them to begin singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs? Well, there was a man, a Frenchman by the name of Clement Marot, who under the leadership of the elders and John Calvin began to teach people to sing psalms.

He took the text of the Psalms, he put it in meter, he came up with tunes. And in that way, he then taught the people to sing through a children's choir, that he would bring up to the front of church. They would all sing the psalm, and the people would recite it back and forth. So they would sing a line, they would sing a line, back and forth, until the adults finally learned to sing. So singing of psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs would be a key element.

A third key element would be a confession of faith and creeds. There needs to be some place in the service where you are affirming your belief in the living God, either through the recitation of a scripture passage or through the recitation of a confession or catechism or creed. In Jude 3, it says, I found it necessary to write appealing to you to contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints. Well, you and I are heirs of that faith, which has been passed down from generation to generation. We ought to be affirming it somewhere in the service.

We ought to be then declaring our faith in God and standing before him and saying, Lord we believe this about you. And so we do that through a confession of faith and through creeds. A fourth element would be a confession of sin and assurance of pardon. A lot of churches don't have any time for confession of sins. It's all very much focused around just receiving, receiving, receiving, rather than humbling yourself and presenting yourself before a holy God and saying, Lord, please receive me a sinner, a sinner saved by grace.

And so when we confess our sins, again, email me for a list. I have tons of these different portions of scripture that give confessions of sins and assurances of pardon. Here's an example of assurance of pardon from the Psalms. Psalm 103, the Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. He will not always chide you, nor will he keep his anger forever.

He does not deal with us according to our sins, nor repay us according to our iniquities. For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his steadfast love toward those who fear him. As far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us. Amen and amen. So the pardon of sin is not the the elder or or the pastor or the worship leader, they don't have the authority to forgive sins.

When I read my New Testament, I find that only God is the one who has the power to forgive sins. Only God. And so by affirming this word of assurance of pardon, we're stating that God has, in fact, forgiven the sins of those who have confessed their sins. So that would be a fourth prescribed element. A fifth would be the public reading of scripture, where scripture is read both from the Old Testament and the New Testament.

We find that both in the Bible and in many of the directories for Christian worship that come from the Reformation. Here's an example right out of the Bible. 1 Timothy 4.13. Paul says to Timothy, the young pastor, until I come, devote yourself to the public reading of scripture to exhortation to teaching. Not only just the preaching of it, but the public reading of it.

A sixth element is prayer, and there are many different forms of prayer. There are thanksgivings, praise, laments, intercessory, confession, repentance, a pastoral prayer, a recitation of the Lord's Prayer, all kinds of different forms of prayer, but the element of prayer must be present in a God-approved worship service. A seventh element, the preaching of the word. No surprise there. As Protestants or those heirs of the Reformation, we're all about preaching.

And that preaching should be there because Scripture prescribes it. Here's a passage from 2 Timothy 4, where Timothy is charged, I charge you in the presence of God and of Jesus Christ, who is the judge of the living and the dead by his appearing and his kingdom. Preach the word. Be ready in season and out of season. Reprove, rebuke, exhort with complete patience and teaching." So we preach the word.

An eighth element, baptism and the Lord's Supper, the two sacraments that have been given to us by our Lord. They ought to be a part of the service. And you might say, well we don't have a baptism every week. Well that's fine, neither do we. But when we do have them, we have them in our worship service as a way of again following what God has prescribed in the word.

And then in regard to communion, in our own church, we receive the Lord's Supper weekly. You may receive it monthly, maybe four times a year, or like the old Scottish church or Kirk At times, they would receive it once a year. And people would come. There would be a season of preaching. They'd come and be examined by the elders.

They'd get a communion token. And then when the day of communion would come, they would go and present that at the table, and they would be received the elements. In our church, we received the Lord's Supper weekly, however. And so I fenced the table so that only believers come. Or if they come up with their children, their children stand respectfully while Those who have been admitted to the table receive the elements.

But the sacraments are a part of worship. The ninth and the last element, the benediction. The benediction. Again, email me. I've got 25 benedictions All saved up on my computer.

Here's my favorite one from numbers six. May the Lord bless you and keep you. And by the way, as a ordained officer of the church, I raise my hand as a sign of blessing of God. May the Lord bless you and keep you. May the Lord cause his face to shine upon you and to be gracious to you.

May the Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace. Or from the New Testament, Ephesians 3. Now to him who is able to do exceedingly abundantly beyond all that we ask or think according to the power that works within us, to him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations forever and ever. Amen. Those are benedictions.

So again I'm not talking about Presbyterian liturgy here or Presbyterian worship. I'm talking about biblical worship. These are the elements I find in the word of God as essential elements, these nine. Now, you're gonna meet up with others who may say, well, I think there's one or two others. I think Dr.

Joe Moorcraft would labor long and hard for there to be an offering in the service as an essential element. That's not my understanding. We have an offering as people just come through the door. They put their gifts and offerings there. But nonetheless, there are good brothers who have some difference of opinion there.

But the fundamental is that we're committed. We are committed to worshipping God in the way he has prescribed. That's what we want to do. And so if you have questions later, I'll be glad to field them here after the lecture. But let's just pray together and thank God for this opportunity to study together.

Lord, thank you for the legacy of John Calvin. Thank you for the legacy of John Knox. We owe a great debt to them, Lord. And we publicly affirm that through their writings and through the pioneering work they did in Geneva, Switzerland, and in Edinburgh, Scotland. Thank you, Lord, for the impact they've made on all the different generations of Christians, the Protestants who have come after them.

And we thank you, Lord, as well for helping us to do some rigorous study on what the Bible says about worship, how you would want us to worship you. So help us, Lord, and teach us, keep us humble. To do that which we know would be pleasing to you and not to give way to being inventive, creative, coming up with things which are non-prescribed in the Word of God, so that we end up offering strange fire, which you do not receive and you judge. And so we pray it in the name of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

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