Leviticus chapter nine is the primary text we'll be looking at this morning. We've said many times that our desire as a church is to know God and to make him known. And so we want to love the Lord our God with all of our heart, our soul, our mind and our strength, and then love our neighbor as ourselves. We really want to live that out in our homes and our church and our lives that we build a culture of faithfulness to Jesus Christ, our Lord. And so to that end, what we've been doing is, you might say, enrolling ourselves in a little schooling from the old covenant. The way God taught His people to worship Him, to draw near to Him in the old covenant, which we can then build on, recognizing the changes that have taken place through Jesus Christ, but again, building on that for our new covenant worship. You see, just as the essence of salvation is the same throughout God's history of dealing with mankind. It's always by grace, always through faith, Old Testament, New Testament, all the time. So really, the heart of our worship is the same all the time. Yes, there are changes that come about because of the way God is dealing with mankind, but at its heart, it is the same. So, worship, that is our response of adoration and action to God's gracious revelation of Himself, It's really the same kind of thing now that it was then. And so if we want to faithfully enjoy, I believe, the increased blessings that we have, the increased access to God that we have, the increased experience of God's presence that we have in our new covenant time now, if we want to do that faithfully, then we need to understand well what God revealed in the old covenant. And today in particular, we need to see from the Scriptures that true worship, and particularly in its dimension of corporate worship, true corporate worship has a specific nature. It is something that God designs, if you will, and gives to us. And we need to treat it as such. We need to understand that. And I think that nature can be seen in the structure or the order that God gave to Israel in their approach to Him. The way that God taught Israel to approach Him, to draw near to Him, teaches us much. about how we draw near to God. And we've been looking at the book of Leviticus. And the book of Leviticus deals with how a holy God can dwell with sinful men, how His presence can be with sinful men. God had redeemed Israel from Egypt. He had brought them to Himself and entered into a covenant with them at Mount Sinai. He gave Moses the instructions to build a tabernacle, the dwelling place of God, with men. That's all in Exodus. And now in Leviticus, God begins to unpack what that relationship is going to look like, how this is actually going to work that a holy God can dwell with sinful men. In the first seven chapters of Leviticus, we see God lay out for Israel, explain to them five major sacrifices, offerings that they were to give in their relationship with God. It was by means of these that they would draw near to God. It was this offering, this gift, by which they would draw near to God. And so we've looked at those in order to understand them, and we've gained great wisdom, I trust, from looking at those. However, just like in life it's helpful if you really want to understand something, you need to see it in action, right? You need to see it actually put into practice and see how it works. So it is with these sacrifices and offerings. We've looked at them in a kind of a static way. Okay, here's the burnt offering. Here's the brain offering. Here's the peace offering. And so on and so forth through the first several chapters of Leviticus. But now we want to actually see how did they work in practice? What happened when they were actually offered? In what way were they given? And what we see by looking at this is through the very order that God gave to how these sacrifices would be practiced, we again see much more about what it means for sinful men to approach a holy God, or really gain great wisdom about our worship. In chapters 8-10 of Leviticus, we see these sacrifices put into practice, because in these chapters we have the institution of the priesthood. Aaron and his sons are consecrated to the role that God has given to them as priests, and they begin to put into practice in action We're going to look specifically at Leviticus chapter 9 to understand that a little bit more today. We're going to see the old covenant order of worship. We've already seen Leviticus 1-2 that drawing near to the Lord is effected by offerings, but now it's time to see these in action. Look with me at Leviticus chapter 9. I'm going to just begin reading through verse 6 to kind of introduce this for us. It says, On the eighth day, Moses called Aaron and his sons and the elders of Israel and said to Aaron, Take for yourself a bull calf for a sin offering and a ram for a burnt offering, both without blemish, and offer them before the Lord. And say to the people of Israel, Take a male goat for a sin offering and a calf and a lamb, both a year old without blemish, for a burnt offering, and an ox and a ram for peace offerings to sacrifice before the Lord and the grain offering mixed with oil. For today, the Lord will appear to you. And they brought what Moses commanded in front of the tent of meeting, and all the congregation drew near and stood before the Lord. And Moses said, This is the thing the Lord commanded you to do, that the glory of the Lord may appear to you. Let me just stop right there. We see Moses, God giving instructions through Moses, as to a little bit how this was to work in practice. Here Aaron, here's what you're supposed to do. We see two focal points of these sacrifices taking place. First of all, for Aaron himself, because he had to have sacrifice made for himself, which is why we rejoice in the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, who doesn't have to do that, and therefore he can offer himself on our behalf. But Aaron, typifying that, had to still offer a sacrifice for himself as a sinful man, and then he could offer offerings on behalf of the people of Israel. But in both cases, the order was similar to the sacrifices that would be offered. First, the sin offering would be offered, then the burnt offering would be offered. In the case of the people, a grain offering would be added with that, and then a peace offering. But what was the objective? I want us to notice first of all, as we dig into this a little bit here, what is the God-given objective of offering these things? Why does Moses say, here's what the Lord has said to do? Well, Moses put it this way in verse 4, For today the Lord will appear to you. He says it this way in verse 6, This is the thing that the Lord has commanded you to do, that the glory of the Lord may appear to you. What was the whole objective of doing this? Of going through this this ritual that God had given to them. They wanted to see the glory of God. And right there, I think immediately we should sense a kinship with what's going on here. Just like Moses had prayed back in the book of Leviticus, show me your glory. So now we have God graciously giving to his people a means whereby they might behold his glory. where they might actually see his holy presence manifested in their midst. That's what the objective of these offerings was. What we see then played out here, the order of the offerings toward that objective, and this is brought out in verses 8 and following in verses 8, 9, 10 and 11. We see Aaron offering first the sin offering for himself. using the blood in appropriate ways and burning the fat and the kidneys, the long lobe of the liver for that, for himself. Then, verses 12, 13 and 14, we see Aaron offering the burnt offering for himself. Then, verse 15, he presented the people's offering and he took the goat of the sin offering that was for the people and killed it and offered it as a sin offering like the first one. So the very first thing Aaron does on behalf of the people, just like he had done for himself, was to offer the sin offering. You'll notice right away this isn't the same order that we've seen these laid out for us in Leviticus. Because now God is not so much concerned with just explaining what this offering is and how it's to be done. Now we're actually incorporating their meaning into an order of approaching God. And what had to be offered first? The sin offering. What was the sin offering for? You remember the sin offering was for cleansing. It took care of the defilement of sin. On the great day of atonement, which will be coming up in Leviticus chapter 16, the very first one, really the whole focal point of that day and the atonement that was made on that day was a sin kind of offering to remove the defilement of the tabernacle itself and all of its utensils because it came in contact with sinful people. but also then to remove away from the camp even the defilement of the people themselves through the ritual of the goats. In order for men to approach to God, to see His glory, there has to be cleansing from sin. There has to be defilement removed before anything else really takes place. And then Aaron moves on to the next offering. In verse 16, he presented the burnt offering, and offered it according to the rule. And of course, with that, as we saw earlier, goes the grain offering. He took a handful of it and burned it on the altar besides the burnt offerings of the morning. The next offering that Aaron gives on behalf of the people is the whole burnt offering, or sometimes even called, remember, the ascension offering. Because the entire animal, except for its skin, its hide, is put onto the altar and consumed, and it ascends up to the Lord in smoke. Of course, it's very closely related even to the grain offering, which could be offered and often was offered with it, which was a token offering, a gift to the Lord of the best of what we have as a dedication to Him. And so, again, the sin offering and the burnt offering both dealing with atonement, that is, both dealing with these aspects of sin that have to be taken care of in order for man to have a right relationship with God. But the sin offering, first of all, offering that cleansing and then the whole burnt offering, pleasing the Lord through that aroma, providing propitiation through the sacrifice of a substitute, a whole consecration to the Lord. That's what was intended by this. And then And only then came the last offering, verse 18. Then Aaron killed the ox and the ram, the sacrifice of peace offerings for the people. And Aaron's sons handed him the blood and he threw it against the sides of the altar and so on as they appropriately handled it the way God told them to handle it. What was the peace offering for? The peace offering was one offering which was unique from all the others and that it was not designed to make atonement. That wasn't His purpose. In fact, it wasn't designed to make peace with God. It was designed to celebrate peace with God. Because what was unique about the peace offering, or what's sometimes called the fellowship offering, that was the one sacrifice of which not only it all went to God or not just the priest could eat of it, but now everybody would enjoy it together. A meal from the sacrificed animal, signifying that God and man are now at peace And God invites you to sit down at His table and eat. He provides from His holy things for His people. It's interesting, we see throughout the Old Testament this basic order of sacrifices consistently maintained. We can go all the way, say, toward the end of the Old Testament, at least in the Hebrew order of books in 2 Chronicles. Chapter 29. And we see Hezekiah the king there restoring the worship of the holy God which had been abandoned and desecrated. And we see them entering into their worship again, and what is the order of sacrifices they offer? A sin offering, and then a burnt offering, and then a peace offering. You see, this wasn't just an arbitrary order that God gave to His people. This was important for understanding how a relationship with a holy God works with sinful men. It works in this way. God was giving that to his people through this. I want you to notice before we move on, just the result of this. As Aaron obeys what God has said through Moses and offers the offerings and the sacrifices in the way that God has told him to. We see this in verse 22. Then Aaron lifted up his hands toward the people and blessed them. And he came down from offering the sin offering and the burnt offering and the peace offerings. And Moses and Aaron went into the tent of meeting, and when they came out, they blessed the people and the glory of the Lord appeared to all the people and fire came out from before the Lord and consumed the burnt offering and the pieces of fat on the altar. And when all the people saw it, they shouted and fell on their faces. The result of these offerings, which were a gift from God to His people by which they might have a relationship with Him, was God's blessing on His people and His glorious presence with them. That's what happened when they obeyed Him in this way. And I would say to you today that in our new covenant worship, this is what we want. Although, of course, now in Jesus Christ by the Spirit. We want to know God. We want to be in that life-giving relationship with Him. We want Him to manifest His presence in blessing, that is, accepting us for Jesus' sake and bringing us into His eternal triune life. That's what we want. We want to respond to Him with our entire being, body and soul, just like these people did here before God. They shouted and fell on their faces in the presence of a holy God. We want to become living sacrifices, wholly acceptable to God to do His will. That's true life and that's true worship. So how can we apply that old covenant order to our new covenant worship today? I think this basic structure that we've just seen is how a holy God dwells with sinful men, and it's true in the new covenant just as much as it is in the old. This is the basic order that guides how we must approach the Lord and carry out our relationship with him. It's important that we recognize that today. We look to Jesus Christ, of course, as the one who all this pointed toward and the one who fulfilled it all in himself. Jesus Christ is today our new temple. He is our great high priest, and he is himself our sacrifice, our sin offering that bears our sins for us. But Far from eliminating these things we've just been talking about now from our worship, actually what that does in Jesus is brings them from their shadowy form, as Hebrews describes the old covenant worship, to the substance, to the reality, the spiritual reality we experience now in Jesus Christ. In union with Him, we become the temple of the living God. In union with Him, we become a priesthood offering sacrifices to God. In union with Jesus Christ, then, we offer up our lives as living sacrifices to God, offering to Him a sacrifice of praise, offering to Him our service, which before Him is a sacrifice that is acceptable and pleasing to Him. And when we do that, then, we see God's glory revealed. I think amazingly, and this is truly amazing, when we pay attention to the inner framework, if you will, of worship, both old and new covenants, what we're really observing is the gospel. The gospel worked out for us, shown to us about how a holy God can relate to sinful men. And what's truly neat to see, too, is how this has been worked out in Christian worship over the centuries, how Christians sometimes not even explicitly aiming at this, but I think in a genuine response to what we see in the Word of God, have tended to structure their corporate worship in ways that reflect this very order. And I would even submit to you today that it's important that we do structure our corporate worship in ways that reflect this order, because otherwise we're taking the nature of worship, and we're taking what God has given to us as the nature of worship, and we're substituting a man-made invention. It's important that we understand worship and practice it according to the nature of how God gave it. How has that shown up in our worship, or even in historic Christian worship? Well, first of all, God draws near to us and invites us to worship Him. That is represented in our worship through a call to worship and an invocation, as it's commonly called, a prayer, where we invoke God and His presence. What do we do when we have a call to worship? Well, we read God's words, we hear God's words speaking to us, saying, I want you to come. I want you to come to me and to worship me. Folks, when you hear that, that's not just a man saying that. This is God's Word. This is God saying this to you. Come. Worship Me. I want you to do that. You realize we can't do that if He won't invite us? If He says, stay away from Me? But we come. And in response to that, we actually ask God to meet with us by His Spirit. One of the things that shows, and this is so important in our worship, is a deep recognition of God's grace, that all of this is only possible and only takes place by the favor of Almighty God, His unmerited favor. We don't deserve this, but God shows us His favor and ministers to us in this time. You see, just as the sacrifices of Israel were not their works, It wasn't designed to be their works, their good works by which they achieved a right relationship with God. If we read the Old Testament that way, we've missed it out. We've missed it entirely. Just as Israel's sacrifices were not designed for them to be a way to achieve a relationship with God, they were God's gift to them to experience and express this relationship with God. So it is in our worship. Our church worship is all a work of God's grace. And then we move on. God draws near to us and invites us to Himself. Next, it's important that we are cleansed from our sins, as Israel had to be through the sin offering before she was fit to be in the presence of a holy God in this way. We represent that in our confession of sin, in calling upon Jesus Christ to cleanse us from our sins, According to his promise, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. And because we believe that promise, we call on him. We confess our sins. We ask him to do what he has said he will do. We are cleansed from our sins, and then we are fit, having been cleansed, to be consecrated for his holy service, which we see represented in the old covenant worship, of course, through the burnt or the ascension offering in the grain offering. We today are consecrated not through that kind of a offering of an animal because Jesus Christ has already come. We are consecrated for holy service today by the application of that to us by his Holy Spirit through the word. And in a real sense, we ascend into the heavenlies as a sweet aroma to God, pleasing to Him, an aroma of Jesus Christ. And we meet with Him there. And we are consecrated to Him there. We hear His Word. We hear God speak to us. That's why we meet. We want God to speak to us. We need His Word. We need Him to teach and instruct, to cleanse, to change, fit us for all righteousness by His Word. And that's why we have Scripture reading and preaching. When we have these things, God is feeding us. God is teaching us. God is equipping us to glorify and enjoy Him in this world. By the way, that's why Peter would say things that if any man speaks, when he's speaking in church, he has to speak as the oracles of God. We are to hear this today. We come together to hear the Word read and preached because this is God speaking to us. This is an amazing thing. This is to be received as God speaking to us, accomplishing His good purposes in our lives. taking us as His holy people and equipping us and fitting us to be that. And we respond to Him in this. This isn't just a one-way street, so to speak. This is like a dialogue. We respond to Him in prayer. We respond to Him in singing. We respond to Him in our giving, which is an offering to the Lord. That's how we show this in our worship. And then comes, of course, in the old covenant worship, the peace offering. That fellowship with God that we enjoy having been cleansed, having been consecrated, we can now commune with God and his people. And of course, the means by which God has given for us to do that today is the Lord's Supper. We no longer have the sacrifices. We don't need to. But we do participate with God in a meal, and that is the Lord's Supper that He has given to us. Jesus Christ died on our behalf, rose, ascended to heaven, and now gives us this in remembrance of Him. And then God dismisses us with His blessing to be His priests, His ambassadors, to be His holy people in the world. He commissions us, if you will, which, as we saw in Leviticus chapter 9, Aaron, after he had offered these sacrifices, lifted up his hands toward the people and blessed them. And he came down from offering the sin offering, the burnt offering, the peace offering, to Moses and Aaron, went into the tent of meeting, and when they came out, they blessed the people. They were bringing, if you will, God's word of blessing to the people. They were saying, God accepts you. God now imparts his life to you. That's what blessing is, folks. It's God imparting His life to us. And that's why we have those kinds of things. You see, a blessing is a public declaration from God of His favor, which gives us life. Again, I don't think it's an accident that when we look at, say, the New Testament epistles that the Apostle Paul wrote to be read in churches, how does he start and how does he end? He starts with a declaration of God's favor. And then he ends consistently with some kind of a blessing in that way, some kind of declaration of God's grace and God's goodness toward his people. That is God speaking to his people. When we read those folks, we have to remember that's the Holy Spirit inspired word. That is what the Spirit is saying to the churches. This is what God's thoughts are toward you right now. Here it is. That's what Aaron did in the old covenant. That's what we do in the new. Now, even as I lay this out for us today, you notice here that we're not talking about a rigid set of rules for ordering a church service. As if God said in the New Testament, which he never did, do this, do this, do this, do this, then do that. And if you do those things and don't do these things, then you've worshipped me rightly. That's not really even the objective. There always has been, there always will be, there can and will be great variety over time in the details of church services. Across the world even, there will be differences in those things. But what I want us to get today, that was true in the Old Covenant and that is true in the New, is that there is an inner logic to how we approach God. And that all of our church worship ought to reflect that. Yes, there will be variety. But it always goes back to this basic truth of how God relates to man. And if we ignore that, we're actually starting to depart from a biblical kind of worship. You see, the beauty of this logic that God has built into his worship is that it gives the framework to rightly respond to the gospel. In our worship, we basically reenact the gospel all the time. That's what we do every Lord's Day when we come here. We reenact the gospel. Now, what I want us to say, move on to that as we understand this old covenant order reflected even in our new covenant order, that the inner logic, the inner structure, the nature of worship is to proclaim the gospel, the work of Jesus Christ now applied to his people. I would like to submit to you and just talk a minute about showing the glory of God through our gospel ordered worship. We want God, the glory of the Lord, to appear to His people. How are we going to do that today? I think the worship that changes the world, that glorifies God, is going to come from people who know how the Gospel orders their entire life before God. And the focal point of that is going to be expressed in their corporate worship. You see, what we do right here speaks volumes about who our God is and how we relate to Him. If what we do right here can either point to the true glory of God, or it can point away from it. It can distort who the true God is and how we relate to Him, or it can make it clear who the true God is and how we relate to Him. You see, when we meet here together today, we want to see the glory of God. Where are we going to see that today? Today, in the New Covenant era, we see the glory of God appear to us in the glory of Jesus Christ revealed in His work. That is so crucial that we look there to see the glory of God in our worship. If we miss that point, as we'll talk about in just a minute, we'll go on to start making all kinds of deviations in our worship, looking for the wrong thing and not looking for the right glory of God. We'll miss the inner nature and inner logic of worship. Jesus Christ talked about this in so many places in the New Testament. But let me just look at one of them briefly. In John chapter 17, we say we want to see the glory of God revealed. How are we going to see that? Jesus, the word made flesh, shows us the glory of God. And as he prayed in his high priestly prayer in John 17, he said, Father, the hour has come. Glorify your son. The son may glorify you since you have given him authority over all flesh to give eternal life. to all whom you have given him, and this is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent. I glorified you on earth, having accomplished the work that you gave me to do, and now, Father, Glorify Me in your own presence with the glory that I had with you before the world existed. He says, I have manifested your name to the people whom you gave Me out of the world. You want to see the glory of God, you have to look at the person and work of Jesus Christ. You have to see that clearly. You have to know that deeply. And you will see the glory of God revealed in the world today. That's how it works. Even as Jesus closed this prayer in verse 26, He says, I made known to them your name. and I will continue to make it known." Jesus, this very day, is continuing to make known the name of God, the glory of God. It's being shown through Jesus Christ right now in this moment. And it's to us to see that, to participate in that. He says, "...I will continue to make it known, and here's why, that the love with which you have loved Me may be in them, and I in them." We are to be brought into the very inner life of the Triune God, sharing in His love. And when we see that, we are seeing the glory of God. And that is what our worship ought to drive us to see. There was a great Puritan pastor named Richard Sibbes who wrote this, The very beholding of Christ is a transforming sight. The spirit that makes us new creatures and stirs us up to behold this servant, it is a transforming beholding. A man cannot look upon the love of God and of Christ in the gospel, but it will change him to be like God in Christ. For how can we see Christ and God in Christ? But we shall see how God hates sin, and this will transform us to hate it as God does, who hated it so that it could not be expiated, but with the blood of Christ, God, man. So seeing the holiness of God in it, it will transform us to be holy. When we see the love of God in the Gospel and the love of Christ giving Himself for us, this will transform us to love God. He's just expounding, folks, on exactly what true worship is and what it does. It causes us to see God for who He is. And when we see Him for who He is, we see His holiness. And when we see Him for who He is, we see His love. And when we know these things, it transforms our lives. That's why the Apostle Paul wrote in 2 Corinthians 3, that beholding the glory of Jesus Christ, we are changed, we're transformed from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit, who is the Lord. You see, gospel-ordered worship, worship that grasps the inner nature and logic of what it means for men to approach a holy God, is crucial for us in our day. It's crucial for our church. Let me just submit this. It's crucial. Gospel-ordered worship is crucial for you to keep your life centered on Christ and not on yourself. You know how life goes throughout the week. All the things of this life whirl around you. And they start running, oh, I'm supposed to take care of this about the house. Oh, my kids need this. And I forgot about that. But I've got to get this done and this done and this done. Let's see. Oh, and guess what? The car's about out of gas. I've got to remember this. And we're going, and I've got to do, and I've got to do, and I've got to do. And when you come to church, it is so freeing to break out of that self-imposed prison and turn your attention to Jesus. And everything around you stops, or everything stops whirling around you and begins to fall into place in order in your life at the foot of the cross. The Gospel begins to order your life and teach you what matters most, and how to love things, and how to respond. And Christ fills your life with His love, joy, and peace, and patience, and kindness, and gentleness, and goodness, and self-control. All these things that are the fruit of the Spirit. come when we order our lives according to our worship, which is according to the gospel. It's a wonderful thing. You see, gospel-ordered worship doesn't, first of all, demand that you be something. No, it says, come to me and I will make you something. It doesn't demand that you do business with God by making another decision, and another decision, and another thing, and I've got to get right with God, and I've got to do this, and I've got to do that. No, it inspires you to love the Lord with all your heart. And then it reorders your affections according to the things that are above. And it instructs you in the ways of the Lord. And then you are equipped for holy service, instructed in righteousness, to the glory and praise of God. And you begin to see that flow in your life. I think gospel-ordered worship is not only crucial for us personally, but it's crucial, for instance, for the discipleship of our children. You know, as parents, you labor to see that your children know God. And our worship as a church can train their hearts to grasp the gospel in its strength and its beauty, or it can work against their understanding of the gospel. You see, worship wrongly done can teach our children that a relationship with God really doesn't require sacrifice worked out in history. God's love is merely a matter of entertainment. Believing is something that it's really no more than just saying yes to God's invitation to a party. Grace is something that helps you be a good person. Our worship can communicate that and train us to think that way. And thus we have moralistic therapeutic deism as the religion of so many young people has been called in America today. We have a nice God up there in heaven who helps people out when they ask him to and helps them be good people. You know, you can say all the right words for the gospel, and yet undermine it by disordered worship. And it happens all the time. The same thing is true in our relationship to the unbelieving world. I think gospel ordered worship is crucial for our witness to the world. You see, by our worship, we are teaching the world, we are showing the world who our God is and how we ought to approach him, how we relate to him. And if we imagine worship as primarily a mystical experience, well, We're going to teach the world that faith really is something different from knowledge. It's just some kind of a mystical leap out there somewhere. It doesn't have anything to do with science or the facts of life or politics or all the important stuff of life. It's just about having a mystical experience with God. Or at the other end of the spectrum, if we imagine worship is primarily and only a teaching time, as if it's a transfer of information, downloading data from the preacher or something like that, then we teach the world that a relationship with God is a set of facts to be mastered. That's what you need. Get these facts? Okay, I got them. You're good to go. I think perhaps one of the worst ways we can misrepresent God in our worship is when we treat worship as a technique, that is, as a tool to be used towards some other end. Even if that end is ostensibly good, like, say, evangelism or whatever else we as God's people say we need to be doing in this world. If it becomes merely a tool toward that end, then in fact what we're saying about God is that God can be used for our ends. Our relationship with God is primarily about getting what we want. And if you really worship that way, that is actually anti-gospel worship. I would submit to you today to beware. Beware of any offer of a relationship with God which circumvents the hard reality of sacrifice worked out in history. Any worship which offers you a relationship with God apart from that is not God's kind of worship. It's a worship which is departed from the true nature of worship. And I say that the logic of much contemporary worship, when I say contemporary worship, I'm just talking about worship of our day and age, not any particular movement, is the logic of show business. That's really how it works. You start out by getting people with some kind of a hook. You've got to get their attention. You've got to get their interest. And so we start out our service with a hook. and people invent all kinds of hooks to get people's interest, to get them interested. Things like praying confessions of sin. Okay, that doesn't really hook people a lot. We've got to come up with something that's more interesting than that. Because if you're going to get people to do what you want, you've got to get their attention, right? Obviously, the logic of much worship service is actually Pelagian. That is, we think of mankind as being basically good and having the ability to do what it takes to have a relationship with God. It's not grace-based, recognizing our entire inability, and that it's all based on God approaching us and inviting us to himself. And you say, the words that are spoken in the service might not be Pelagian, but the shape of the service, the medium of the message, so to speak, reinforces that kind of a mindset. The service really is all about you, and not all about God. How does the Holy God relate to sinful men? Well, by creating a very moving experience, then you know God was with us. Or by making a decision. If you made a decision in some area of your life today, if you came forward and made a decision, then God was with us. I would submit to you that it's that kind of worship that has created the culture we have. Worship drives culture. At thousands of churches across America today, people are saying that we have to see our culture change. We're looking at Sodomy, rampant, we're looking at abortion. I mean, just genocide on a massive scale. We're saying our culture has to change. And then we engage in worship that is humanistic, narcissistic, consumer-driven. That is inner logic. It defines the things of God in man's terms. It has no place for the earth-shattering holiness of God, and therefore, it cannot know that God's love are right. It turns it into some kind of a sentimental soup. I can feel His presence in this place, as the song puts it. And because it does that, it's always seeking for some kind of a substitute for experiencing the love and knowledge of God. We've got to gin up something to experience the love and knowledge of God. Because we have banished God's objective work on our behalf, the given nature of worship, we try to conjure Him up in all sorts of of subjective ways, inventing new ways of feeling or experiencing God. And since we do not understand the nature of what it is that we're working with in our worship, we keep trying to impose our will upon it in order to get something out of it. Rather, if we will submit to the nature of what it is we are dealing with, gospel ordered worship, I think we will come to see and know God's blessing. A couple years ago, as I was studying worship, I came across a poem that expresses this truth about the nature of something very well, and how we have to submit ourselves to it if we're actually going to see its beauty and power unfold in our lives. This poem isn't a poem about worship, but it applies very much. This is a poem called The Makers by Dorothy Sayers. The architect stood forth and said, I am the master of the art. I have a thought within my head. I have a dream within my heart. Come now, good craftsman, ply your trade with tool and stone obediently. Behold the plan that I have made. I am the master. Serve you me." The craftsman answered, Sir, I will, yet look to it that this your draft be of a sort to serve my skill. You are not the master of the craft. It is by me the towers grow tall, I lay the course, I shape and hue. You make a little inky scrawl, and that is all that you can do. Account me then, the master man. Lay my rigid rule upon the plan, and that which serves the plan, the uncomplaining, helpless stone. The stone made answer. Master's mind, know this. that I can bless or damn the thing that both of you designed by being but the thing I am. For I am granite and not gold. For I am marble and not clay. You may not hammer me or mold. I am the master of the way. Yet, once that mastery bestowed, then I will suffer patiently the cleaving steel, the crushing loathe that make a calvary of me. And you may carve me with your hands to arch and buttress, roof and wall, until the dream rise up and stand, serve but the stone, the stone serves all. Let each do well what each knows best, nothing refused, nothing shirked, since none is the master of the rest, but all are servants of the work. The work no master may subject, save he to whom the whole is known, being himself the architect, the craftsman, and the cornerstone. Then, when the greatest and the least have finished all their laboring, and sit together at the feast, You shall behold a wonder thing, the maker of the men that will stoop between the cherubim, the towel in the basin take and serve the servants who serve him. The architect and the craftsman both agreed the stone had spoken well, bound them to service by an oath and each to his own labor fell. We want to see the glory of God in all of life, God serving us, manifesting his glory in our worship. It's going to begin with getting the inner logic of worship right. Understanding what it is, the thing we're dealing with here, and how do we go about doing it. The inner structure of true worship is gospel ordered. There is cleansing from sin, there is consecration to holy service, and there is communion with the Lord. That's the way it works. And when we have that kind of worship, we all, with unveiled face, behold the glory of the Lord, and are transformed into the same image from glory to glory. This comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.