This week, we're really kind of entering Reformation month, and I wanted to take a break from Acts to begin a short series on the means of grace. And I'm going to give you a sermonized version of a paper that I did at the end of my time in Denver Seminary back in 2001, today, that I think is still relevant. to us even 20 years later, and I do this to set the stage in helping you understand a bit about why we do here what we do at Reformed Baptist Church of Northern Colorado. I perused library books on worship, and I found the following titles, Innovative Worship, Creative Worship, The New Worship, Diverse Worship, Blended Worship, and Contemporary Worship. I was able to find one book published in the last three years dealing with all the seemingly antiquated notions of biblical worship. The scene has changed little in the time since I did that study, so let me continue. I then took a look at the most recent editions of cutting edge periodicals to see what they had to say about worship, and I found the following. Group Magazine's cover article was called The Cool Church. Your church magazine had articles called Lighting and Video, How Lighting Can Work for You, and The Immediate Bible, and A Primer on Choosing the Right Church for You, and Now Playing at a Church Near You, Creatively Reinforce Your Message by Integrating Audio, Video, and Lighting. Christianity today had an entire issue devoted to the benefits of technology for all areas of Christian influence, including worship. In Denver Seminary's Focal Point magazine, then President Craig Williford said this, quote, reaching this generation for Christ includes the use of video PowerPoint presentations and graphic arts to enhance the effectiveness of sermons, worship times and Bible study methods. These sorts of sentiments are now the norm rather than the exception as it pertains to worship today. And like the titles of the books, things have only multiplied exponentially in the last 20 years on this front. You'll notice that there's not a lot of those things happening in our worship service. Innovation, creativity, and being cutting edge are the thing in contemporary worship. Pathways Church of Denver, a self-proclaimed evangelical church, was mentioned in Leonard Sweet's book called Soul Tsunami as an exemplary post-modern church on the cutting edge of contemporary worship. One woman described Pathways as, quote, a church that's not a church. That's what people want, so let's give it to them. A church that's not a church. I received a brochure from them advertising a service that they called Volcanic Mass. On the back of this brochure was a mock quiz meant to entice the reader into trying out this new worship experience. As well as an obvious attempt at humor, the quiz explained to us different aspects of this service. They do, quote, visual worship, which is multi-dimensional art stimulating reflection on God in fresh new ways. They had electronic music, which is welcoming God's presence through experimental technology-enabled sound. They had divine dialogue, which is exposing the word of your heart about life and God. They had interactive art, which is encouraging creativity in worship, where the process is the product, and then prayer is conversation with God. That's what made up that worship service. Now in Pathways, we had an evangelical Protestant church calling its worship service mass. More sympathies with medieval Roman worship were easily seen when I attended one of these worship services. There were burning candles, the smell of incense, as well as pictures of the rosary godly glorified on PowerPoint, of course. Though the emergent stuff has kind of died down, giving way to ever newer movements, the philosophies and attitudes that cause pathways to do these things is the norm in evangelicalism today. Not coincidentally, just a couple of years after the old Bethany Baptist Church building on 55th and Baseline in Boulder went the way of the dodo bird, after a short experiment with this kind of stuff, and our church was fortunate enough to have rented that building from the school that it was gifted to, and you should have seen some of the blasphemous things that we cleaned out that came out of their worship services in the aftermath that they had left in the closets. Pathways then went under as well. It no longer exists. On their kind of, I guess, obituary to this church, the website still says this, Pathways, quote, offered people in the city a safe place to deconstruct and reconstruct their beliefs about God. And that about says it all. Because of this innovation and creativity in worship today, what one sees can be as different from church to church as one finds when going into a fast food joint or a fine steakhouse. Most people think that this is great. Music ranges anywhere from hymns, although rarely, to old style gospel songs, to Neil Diamond-like ditties, to grunge metal, to just straight up singing Taylor Swift songs, to mixtures of any and all of these. A friend of mine told me that a contemporary church she attended actually sang the theme song to Scooby-Doo, the 70s cartoon, in their worship service. She had no idea why they did this. There can be a music leader, a worship team, a band, or a choir, but God forbid that you just have congregational singing. You can sing songs at the projector, sophisticated PowerPoint presentations of flowing fonts and lively picture scenes, or full-fledged MTV-style videos, but don't bring out that dusty old hymnal. Scripture may be read, but usually not. Sermons can be topical, evangelistic, political, social, environmental, practical, pragmatic, sentimental, and almost always self-help, but rarely expositional. Communion will probably not be done for seeker services, but it is in other settings. Some churches do takeout communion. Here, the Eucharist comes in individually wrapped packages, like you might find your ketchup at a drive-thru. You can eat it at home. Another church I heard of had pizza and Coke replacing the traditional wafer and wine juice. One is likely to see drama, puppets, clowns, jugglers, mimes, dance, movies, chatty-like talks, expensive lighting, huge sound systems, massive jumbotrons, smoke machines, theatrical productions, candles, or a plethora of different things going on in any worship service these days. Worship is so eclectic that most likely a Christian from any other time in history would not believe that this is really happening in God's church. This is American evangelical worship at the beginning of the third millennium. For all its diversity, there is one unifying theme that if we have eyes to see, dominates our worship like nothing else. It needs to be explored and labeled what it is. It's the worship equivalent to the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And what it produces is necessarily dubious, dangerous, and deadly to the church. Evangelical worship in the past few decades must, like the shifting shadows of the day, change continually. There's a theological root behind the near-infinite tentacles of evangelical styles of worship. It's rarely, if ever, discussed. Because of its extremely serious nature, I'm compelled to tell you about it, knowing that the worship of God is at the very heart and soul of individual and corporate Christianity. If I'm correct, then we are in truly perilous times in our American evangelical churches, much to the disbelief and bewilderment of the movement as a whole. I contend that this constant need to change our worship is not a good thing and it is not biblical. It is caused by the modern Christian fascination with glorifying man and the innate felt need that goes hand in hand with it for humans to control their environment through their choices. R.C. Sproul wrote an article for Modern Reformation where he argued that it is not Arminianism that dominates the evangelical landscape, rather it is the centuries-old heresy Pelagianism that has captured the heart of the church in our day. Pelagianism is that repugnant theology condemned over and over again in church history that teaches that the sin of Adam affected no one but himself. It teaches that those who have been born since Adam have been born into the condition Adam possessed before his fall. It teaches that there will always remain the possibility and the real reality of sinless people. It teaches a human will utterly free from the bondage of sin. It teaches that salvation is not by grace alone. It teaches that the chief work of Christ is to provide us with an example to follow. Pelagianism is especially relevant to look at in worship in the means of grace because it attacks the fallen nature of humanity as it replaces the substitutionary work of Christ with that of just a really good teacher. Surveys show that Americans believe that man is quote, basically good. In fact, while 83% of the general population of America believes this, 77% of born-again Christians, 74% of evangelicals, 88% of Catholics, and 90% of Protestants in the main line agree with that statement. Furthermore, 82% of Americans believe God helps those who helps themselves, while 84% of those attending an evangelical church, 83% of 87% of those who are aligned with the main church agree. When considering these facts, Sproul is correct in his assessment. Neither of these positions is semi-Pelagian, to say man is basically good, to say that God helps those who help themselves. No, they're both Pelagian. The Rosy Pelagian view of human goodness combined with this optimistic view of human free will and choice simply dominates every corner of the evangelical subculture, especially our worship. It seems logical to conclude that what Christians do and how they act usually says more about what they really believe than do their actual confessions. Not many today even know what Pelagianism is, let alone confess that this is what they believe. Yet if Pelagianism is truly rampant in our churches, then we would not be surprised to find it affecting our worship in many different areas. And I tell you this to demonstrate how this Pelagian impulse, this human sovereignty is fueling worship today and to offer a loud alarm that we must repent or this heresy which has been condemned over and over again in church history will have captured our heart that evangelicalism will be irretrievably silenced as a voice of true Christian. 20 years after I wrote this is more true than ever before. Leonard Payton begins his wonderful little booklet on worship music with these words. He says, Westerners demand a choice. We must have the right to choose. Truth be told, we're far more concerned that we be allowed to choose than we are about making the right choice. But what does choice have to do with worship today? Well, Elmer Townes explains, historically, when Protestant church members moved their home from one location to the next, they usually chose a new local church on the basis of doctrine, not on the basis of worship style. Now they choose the church primarily by its style of worship. America's Protestants choose churches on the basis of what entertains us, satisfies us, or makes us feel good about God and ourselves. In our day, descriptive has become prescriptive. What people do in worship, without thought and without question, becomes what people should do in worship. Townes' descriptive comment is not given in order to evaluate the goodness of these actions, but is rather given as a jumping off point for how we can use our appetite for choice in creative new ways. The very fact that worship has become nearly inseparable with style seems to demonstrate my point. Ascribing worth to an unchanging God who has condescended to tell us how he wants us to worship him is now completely turned on its head as we decide how we want him to be worshiped by us. We worship God our way. Today, personal preference and choice dominate worship. In a consumer culture, choice is omnipresent. Think about that, right? That's what it means to be consumers. In a market-driven society, the nature of style is one of subjective taste, fad, and personal preference. Worship styles have no more meaning than does the latest marketing on a cereal box. Towne says, if we recognize church worshipers as consumers, now think about this. If we recognize worshipers as consumers, we'll recognize church programs as menus and types of worship as the main entree in a restaurant. Consumers go where the menu fits their taste. And he's not saying this is a bad thing. Much like we expect to get what we want when we want it at a mall, the same holds true of our worship today. George Barna shows clearly that Christians are flitting and fleeting from one church to the next, quite comfortable with not committing to any given congregation, or in some cases committing to more than one congregation, because they like the parts of one church here and parts of other churches there. Our preference is for variety in the church experiences rather than getting the most out of all that a single church has to offer. The key words in this are preference, variety, and experiences. We go to church to get out of it what we can. Now regretfully, I can speak from my own experience in this. In college, I attended a prominent church in Minneapolis because it had great doctrinally strong preaching. Yet I attended another church just as frequently because I enjoyed the music and had several friends who went there. And finally, I was involved in yet a third church because my old youth pastor from Harvest Baptist Church had moved there and he wanted me to help him out. Three churches gave me three different experiences and I consumed the parts of each that I wanted while discarding the rest. This is unbridled choice allowed to freely roam the countryside and this mentality is causing churches to have to adopt continually in order to meet the flavor of the day for the consumer that they are producing. Of course, many people today think there's absolutely nothing wrong with flavors of the day as they pertain to worship styles. Rick Warren said, quote, the truth is there isn't a biblical style of worship. Each Sunday, true believers around the world give glory to Jesus Christ using 1,000 equally valid expressions and styles. Paul Basden remarks, what the New Testament never does is identify one particular style of worship as more Christian, more biblical, or more holy than another. And by style, they certainly mean more than Baroque or folk styles of music. As another person has said, it's not how you worship, it's who you worship. Part of the Pelagian impulse of our day is its unwillingness to critically evaluate anything churches do that are novel. This comes from the fact that at least in practice, our pastors and leaders presuppose that whatever they do must be just fine with God. And this seems to stem, whether implicitly or explicitly, it doesn't matter, from a positive view of mankind's innate goodness and our unwillingness to admit our own depravity and sinful nature. Could it be that the assumption is that our basically good human natures are simply incapable of worshiping God improperly? You wanna know why I read Isaiah 1 today? You're starting to get a hint. The Bible makes it clear that one can be a believer and still worship God the wrong way. Look at Cain and his offering. Look at Nadab and Abihu, Uzzah and the ark, Ananias and Sapphira. It's funny, we kind of want to turn them all into unbelievers, right? What if all of them or most of them were Christians or believers? All the reformational confessions are unanimous on this point. The second commandment clearly teaches us that we should not represent God or worship him in a way, in any manner other than what he has commanded us in his word. This is based off scriptures like Deuteronomy 12, the beginning and end of that chapter, which teaches you must not worship the Lord your God in the nation's way. Everything that I command you, you shall be careful to do and you shall not add to it or take from it. This is a transcultural truth because the worship of God is towards the God who is unchanging. You see that? It is for him first, not us. That doesn't mean God doesn't do things for us and to us through worship, but it does mean that he only does this when we are worshiping him rather than ourselves. If that's not happening, then what is the real source of what people are getting out of their worship? Maybe it's not God at all. Since his worship is for him, he gets to choose how it is performed and what is required. Paradoxically, when we think that worship is for us, we end up worshiping ourselves, and God doesn't actually do anything to us or for us in the worship. We do it to ourselves, or some other entity does. But when we worship God, a mysterious occurrence takes place. He changes us because we have encountered him through the means he chooses, because he knows that these are what we need. And he chooses to bless those means, more on that in a little bit. But first, this idea is exactly the opposite view taken by Protestant churches today, whose criterion for inventions in worship is not explicit positive commands, but rather prohibitions only. This is ironically the view of Roman Catholicism that Protestants reformed and yet are returning to with near reckless abandon. And we know what gross abuses and havoc medieval worship caused by the time the reformers came around and even long before that. An example may help here. It appears that Nadab and Nebihu, the sons of Aaron, had the Roman principle in mind in Leviticus 10, one through three, when it says they offered strange fire to God and he incinerated them for it. Jeremiah Burroughs points out, their sin was offering strange fire, yet there is no text of scripture that you can find from the beginning of Genesis to this place where God has said in so many words expressly, you shall not offer any fire but just this one. And yet here they are consumed by fire from God for offering strange fire. They had been told that they should constantly keep the fire on the altar burning and never let it go out. It was God's intention that they should make use of that fire and that fire only. The text does not say that they were insincere, by the way, but simply that they brought fire, quote, which the Lord had not commanded them. I need to point out that in each of these above quotes from Warren and Bazin and Townes, there is no critical thinking or justification at all for their statements. Instead, being consistent with their hermeneutic of worship, it's simply assumed that the Bible says nothing about how they are, nothing about that they are doing because it is forbidden. How do we know that the thousands of methods and means and measures that Christians express themselves in are valid? Israel and Judah, the very people of God expressed themselves in many ways that the prophets condemned as dubious and invalid. Corrupt worship was perhaps the primary thrust of the prophets. The books of the kings are perhaps the clearest examples of how God views proper biblical worship as each king is held up to the standard of David and Jeroboam and how they worshiped God either properly or improperly. But the thinking continues. Well, this is simply the way our society is, and in order to win the loss, we must reach them where they are. If this means offering choices in worship or creating new forms of worship, then so be it. In order to examine this, I want to look at the infatuation American Christianity has with being culturally relevant in worship. Let's understand that this was the highly liberal and Pelagian world council of churches that had the slogan, the world sets the agenda for the church. What the God of choice is doing to our worship is forcing it to become exactly like the culture. In the Bible, this is never a good thing. Rather, it's repeatedly condemned as syncretism. From the secular side of things, we have a society that loves to choose and consume everything in its path. Fads are the popular thing in America, created by clever marketing and slick advertising. Nothing stays the same anymore in our culture at large. When we add this to the new mentality that the church is a business that supplies the customer, the pagan, with the product, relationships, as Barna puts it, it's easy to see why the church must constantly change its worship. The larger culture loves change, and change and new shiny things is what they live for. I remember back when King Soopers built a new store on the southeast side of 104th and Federal. Safeway then built one on the west side. Then a few years later, maybe 10 years later is all, King Soopers tore down the store to build one bigger on the west side next to the Safeway, and then Safeway tore down its store to build a new one right where the old King Soopers was on the southeast side. The idea is we want to reach the larger culture. Therefore, we must change and provide choice in our worship that's just like this. Worship becomes a fad, something new, popular, shiny, exciting, and big. The popular bumper sticker, win the lost at any cost, fits this with all-consuming mentality perfectly. The church growth movement's emphasis on evangelism has done us a service to the church as it has helped us right the wrongs of the church's fortress mentality, but it has also hurt the church tremendously by making evangelism the most important purpose of the church. This is not the Bible's main purpose for church, friends. In the great commission of Matthew 24, the command is not to go as these proof texters having evangelism as the main purpose would tell you. Rather, the command is to make disciples. If we're going to use this as our proof text for the purpose of the church and worship, then at least we should get the grammar correct. Indeed, it's worse because the church growth movement actually turned the audience of worship into seekers, and they then become the people who make up the church. Where are all the Christians to go to church now? How do they get discipled? In this way, the entire definition of what church is changed at its core. Nevertheless, the thinking seems to go like this. Winning the lost is the most important thing the church can do, since it's our responsibility to save as many people as we can, and because we do not want anyone to go to hell if we can prevent it, because what, their eternal souls are in our hands or something? Then we need to be as pragmatic about the approach as possible. Let's use whatever methods will work in our worship services to make sure that as many people as possible get saved. This inevitably leads up, ends up meaning that we must emulate the style of the culture while supposedly not compromising the message in our worship, which is naively and profoundly wrong. We must give the people what they want, they say. And thus for evangelicals, in order to win the culture, the methods and measures and styles of the culture set the agenda for the evangelical church. But this strategy can never work and it is not working today. Churches are simply not seeing more conversions now than in the past. In fact, the overall numbers in the new paradigm churches are actually shrinking. I just gave you Pathways Church, it doesn't even exist anymore, nor do most of those churches that started that whole thing. How foolish it is to believe that we must become like the world in order to win the world. In the end, if a church looks exactly like the world in its worship, what exactly do we think we're going to convert this same world to? Becoming culturally relevant can be a perfectly acceptable thing to do. Leith Anderson comments on meeting at different times for worship services when he says this. The shift away from farming and the popularity of football are examples of the changes that are affecting the times when Americans worship God. Some may say that the sacred should not be subject to the secular, and often that is true. However, we cannot view the church as an island isolated from the rest of society. It cannot be isolated. As the culture changes, the church changes. Now, no one is going to argue that meeting at 7 a.m. on Sunday is theologically better or worse than meeting at noon on Sunday. I would not call those considerations culturally relevant as much as I would call them prudent and wise. These are simply circumstances of worship as our confession teaches and we're able to change those. However, we can quickly see where his slogan, as the culture changes, the church changes, leads when churches begin having worship services, not on what the Bible calls the Lord's Day, that is the day on which worship was regulated in the New Testament and it has been kept for 2,000 years. but on any and every other day of the week except Sunday because people watch football on that day. This changes in days of worship where it's argued not on biblical grounds but pragmatic grounds. The potential problems with cultural relevance are that it introduces things in worship that have not been commanded by God. This in turn easily lends itself towards a flippant view of worship. If God no longer controls through specific commands what belongs in his worship, his commands become background material, left in the dust by our own introductions and innovations and idolatrous hearts. This is what happened to the church at Corinth. After mocking God's foolish method, that is preaching, in chapters 1 and 2, the church at Corinth became corrupt to the point that we find gross disobedience, frivolousness, and innovations throughout her worship. For example, 1 Corinthians 11 discusses communion. Improper treatment of the supper meant many of the Corinthians were weak and sick, and a number of them had fallen asleep. That is, they died. In this example, we see God taking judgment out upon believers for abusing this biblical method style of proclaiming the gospel. Communion. Communion has a biblical method, believe it or not. Communion, like preaching, is in fact a style of proclaiming the message of the gospel. The Corinthians were treating communion as any other meal. They were showing favoritism and being culturally relevant, acting in church as they would at home or in a bar. They were making their friends feel comfortable and welcome at the table while inevitably abusing others who were not in on their particular culture. Not much differently than we sometimes treat the elderly by denying their cultural heritage when we force our contemporary styles in their face in our worship music that nobody seems to care about. That obviously opens up a huge can of worms in terms of worship wars over styles, but this is precisely why the Reformation set to make styles of singing, for instance, something that was transcultural, precisely because it was being influenced by theology rather than culture. And yes, I'm talking about style of worship being influenced by theology, not just the message, the method. That's really, for example, what Bach was trying to do in his music that he created. Furthermore, when they were treating as common that which is sacred. Paul says, for as you eat, each of you goes ahead without waiting for anybody else. One remains hungry, the other gets drunk. Don't you have homes to eat and drink in? Or do you despise the church of God and humiliate those who have nothing? Not only is communion to be part of the service, a notion being challenged from all sides in modern worship, but it is to be done biblically. As Paul also says, if you do not do it biblically, then, quote, it is not the Lord's supper that you eat. If it's not the Lord's supper that you eat, then it's not the Lord's worship that you give. Here we see style, how communion is done, directly impacting the very meaning of the sacrament. Robert Godfrey rightly says, the Bible reminds us that neither our instincts nor our traditions nor our experiments are reliable guides to worship. The Bible itself is our only reliable guide. For the church at Corinth, people had to die in order to figure out this point. I wonder what it's going to take for evangelicals. Another more serious example of choice leading to non-critical adoption of cultural tactics can be seen in how our worship service has shifted from having God as the audience to the consumer or the customer as the audience. George Barna makes this clear when he tells us, quote, a fundamental principle of Christian communication is this, the audience, not the message, is sovereign. And just who is the audience in worship? Paul Basden is unmistakable. For traditional services, he says, believers are the target audience. For seeker churches, unbelievers are the target audience. In all cases, according to these new paradigm thinkers, it's always people and never God who is the true audience of worship. Here you can see Pelagianism in all its glory, sinisterly replacing God himself as the object of worship with human beings. This is perhaps the most fundamental point of worship. Friends, worship is for God. We are worshiping God. Lest someone at this point accuse me of going too far, I quickly point out that the language used to describe our sanctuaries. First off, they're no longer called sanctuaries but auditoriums or gymnasiums. In the front we have the stage. Then there's the motivational speaker who's replaced the preacher. He roams around either amongst the people or all over the stage talking to them as if it was a fireside chat rather than a sermon, a message from God to them. Bands play, singers perform, pastors make you laugh. It sounds an awful lot like Mount Sinai with Aaron and the golden calf. How are we to take such a drastic replacement of our church terminology theologically? The obvious way to take it is at face value, I think. Worship no longer centers upon God. The focus is the audience. The purpose is to please and excite people. As further proof, let's move for a moment to the music sung throughout the contemporary evangelical worship. In a chapter that Donald Miller calls Beyond Rationality, democratizing access to the sacred, we're given the following sympathetic understanding behind contemporary worship music. Quote, we direct more of our songs to God as opposed to singing about God. Now, there's nothing wrong with singing songs to God. Make no mistake, of course, that's fine. The Psalter has many such songs and parts of songs. While it's certainly biblical to sing songs to God, we must realize that this emphasis is a significant departure from songs written in much less consumeristic, narcissistic cultures. Think of the song's amazing grace. or a mighty fortress, or the church's one foundation. These are hymns that dominated worship music from the time of the Reformation until the middle of the Second Great Awakening. It was understood up until this time that songs were extremely important in the worship of God for singing with thankfulness in one's heart, and also for teaching and admonishing one another. Leonard Payton did a study over 400 modern praise choruses and gospel songs. Quote, I found that most of them fit within singing with thankfulness, about 30 out of 400 fit teaching, and fewer than 10 out of 400 songs admonished the congregation. Much church music today is over the top on sentimental feelings and has forgotten the other biblical purposes of singing. It's not possible that this has happened. Is it not possible that this has happened again because we've replaced God throughout the worship service with ourselves? And could this not be a reflection of the fact that we no longer believe that we need God's continual grace through the completed work of Christ as Christians? Because his example, what would Jesus do, is something we can do and follow perfectly fine on our own, according to the Neo-Pelagian impulses. During the second Great Awakening, now this is the early 1800s, a dramatic shift took place theologically in Protestant churches. God-centered theology of Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, and even to a degree John Wesley, especially through his brother Charles, from the first Great Awakening was dealt a heavy blow by the likes of a Pelagian named Charles Finney through his use of what he called new measures. Phineas' theology of church came from his theology of salvation. He said, we are not saved from God's just wrath and engrafted in Christ's church by a supernatural work of God's spirit working through the ordinary means of grace. We are not saved by a supernatural work of God's spirit working through the ordinary means of grace, that is preaching the gospel and the sacraments. Rather, conversion is, quote, not a miracle or dependent on a miracle in any sense, but is the philosophical result of the right use of means, end quote. Therefore, the job of the evangelist or revivalist or even pastor is to find, quote, excitement sufficient to induce repentance. The whole point of making the worship exciting comes from bad theology. God has given to his church means of grace. These are not musical styles, rock bands, incense and altars, anxious benches, altar calls, praying the sinner's prayer every week to get resaved, fancy stage lighting, and every other kind of overload of the sensory experience. None of that. They are ordinary, common means that God has told us that He is pleased to use for our salvation and sanctification, for everything that we need to live godly, quiet lives that are pleasing to Him and fulfilling to us. Traditionally, these have been understood as the preached word, although I will include in this, when we look at it, also the sung and read word, and the visible word. That is, the two sacraments, baptism and the Lord's Supper. Some have included church discipline, and others have included prayer and fellowship. And really, that's it. It isn't complicated. It doesn't need new inventions. What it needs, friends, is faith. We need to believe God on this. One of the things I am proudest of in my 20 plus years at this church is that this is a church that loves the means of grace and has always had leadership who wants to put them front and center. This is a church that teaches and believes strongly that God uses ordinary, boring, common, mundane things to extraordinary, incredible, and even miraculous ends. Thank you. These things bring peace, contentment, fulfillment, rest, deep satisfaction, and hope. And I think most people sitting here could say, yeah, that's right. I know that. They fill us with all these things that all these Christians don't seem to care about them or in all the wrong places and are trying to achieve by their own means. If you will indulge me a little longer, in the 19th century and basically ever since, worship changed dramatically. One might say change has been the DNA of American Christianity since the founding of our nation or just barely after. Unlike the first Great Awakening, revivals became the work of people rather than God. You manufacture a revival. Goodness, look at the TV stations and what they do. The music of the day reflected these changes greatly. Gone were hymns rich in doctrinal content. In their place came familiar gospel songs of which the modern praise chorus is an error. When we sing songs like In the Garden or I Surrender All or Pass It On, we see just how dramatic the shift really was. Godfrey says again, whereas traditionally music was an important part of the dialogue between God and his people, for many it has become the heart of worship, even called the praise and worship part of the service. Music seems to have become, for some, the new sacrament. Grammatically, when we sing songs about God, he becomes the direct object. Take, for example, the short sentence, I love you, Lord. Lord is the direct object, I is the subject of the song. When we add to this highly experiential and non-rational nature of so much contemporary worship music, we end up with a doubly subjective worship service. We, the subject, sing about our subjective feelings and emotions about God. Again, the Pelagian impulse is remarkable. Pelagianism's disdain for forensic justification, original sin, and substitutionary atonement means we don't need to sing songs about these things either. In fact, not only do we not sing about things like these, many pastors won't even mention them because the words are too big and people just can't understand the concepts. I was actually taught that at Denver Seminary. With the heart of the gospel cut out, what is left to sing about is either our feelings about God, or how we're going to obey him in our own strength, or manipulate him to do our bidding. Godfrey closes out this thought nicely when he says, when doctrine teaches that man is good and God is benevolent, worship will be upbeat, the children's playroom, and life will be oriented to self-fulfillment. Where worship focuses on human needs and entertainment, the doctrine of God, sin and grace will wither and life will become self-centered. Where life is self-indulgent, doctrine and worship will also be self-indulgent. It should come as no surprise, therefore, to find worship, that word, being synonymously used with music and singing. Today, music time is actually called praise and worship, while we often see nothing else in the worship service being called worship at all. Have you ever noticed this? Be late for the call to worship? Meh, not really a big deal. That's not really worship after all. Leave early from the benediction? No biggie. But you better be there when the band starts. When people replace God as the audience of worship, the very meaning of worship must be changed. This is how it works. First, worship. Worship implies that God is the object. Worship is reduced to music. In reality, music is an aspect of worship, but it's not the sum total of worship. But music does not have to have God as the object of worship as worship does, does it? One can sing about people, animals, events, food, whatever. Next, because worship is seen as merely music, especially music as defined by the pop culture, it quickly, and I would argue necessarily due to the message of the very style of the music, becomes intensely subjective and centered around the singer rather than objectively centered around God. That is, the entire worship, the entire service of worship that used to point to Jesus Christ through music and preaching and the ordinances and prayer is now only relegated to one aspect of the service, which is music. And this is why music absolutely dominates most of the time in evangelical worship today. Because worship is now only music, and music is not necessarily about and for God. Worship is no longer about and for God at all. This drastic reorientation from God being the object of worship to the seeker being the focus of worship has been maybe the central organizing force behind the dramatic changes that we have seen in contemporary worship. It has changed the object of worship songs from an objective message to subjective human experiences. It's led to a reversion to medieval worship use of drama and images because these things are more user-friendly to the worshiper. How many times have I heard people say, well, I'm not an audio learner, I'm a visual learner. And that's why we need to have TV in our worship service. It has seemed a dramatic reinterpretation of the very purpose of scripture from a book chronicling the historic redemptive purposes of God's saving action, culminating in Jesus Christ, to a book of mostly helpful tidbits of good advice, to a happier, healthier life. When God ceases to be the object of worship, then the biblical elements of worship must all be reevaluated for their pragmatic ability to meet human felt needs. And the end result is to look exactly like the larger culture. Worship can no longer change our thoughts, hearts, and actions. Instead, it must merely make me happy for the moment. The Pelagian impulse has truly inculcated every facet of today's music, lyrics, and style. I love when we sing hymns about like dirges and the destruction of Israel because nobody ever sings songs like that and it freaks people out. Why? Because that's not the culture that we have. But that's the God that we worship. The most common remarks anyone who questions the validity of new methods to worship is to brand them old-fashioned or say that they're simply unwilling to change and throw them into a stereotype of people who are horribly fearful of change and have their head in the sand. Elmer Towns has identified that oftentimes traditionalists, that's his word, use worship to control people. Robert Weber says, there are traditionalists who want worship to be as it was. These are the people who resist change or are so deeply committed to a particular historical model of worship, the talk of incorporating new styles of worship is intolerable. Paul Bazner remarks, why are some people so offended by the idea of worship styles? Because they have naively decided that all churches everywhere should worship the same way that they do. You hear the disdain in their voices for this? One looks in vain to find a new paradigm for opponent mentioning how some who are suspicious of innovation and change in worship are suspicious for biblical and exegetical reasons. Rather, all who are suspicious are either naive, traditional, or just incalcitrantly stubborn. I don't doubt at all that there is indeed some truth in these statements, though. I have experienced more than one church that refuses to change merely because the tradition has become comfortable. Frankly, traditionalists are as likely to defend their style by personal preference as our contemporary worshipers. Traditionalists are not justified in doing something because it is old any more than contemporary people are justified in doing something because it is new. The problem with these statements is not the truth that they contain, but rather that ad hominems are offered as proof for why it's perfectly fine to change our worship. Traditionalist is too often just name-calling. I believe, however, that innovation and change is a relatively new way of thinking within the historic Protestant faith, and strangely, in some ways, even Rome and orthodoxy. There was a time when worship was strongly defended and justified by churches, ministers, and statements of faith on biblical grounds alone. All one has to do is read John Calvin, or Knox, or Owens, or George Gillespie, or Jeremiah Burroughs, or Francis Church, or one of the Westminster divines, or a number of other defenders of biblical worship. Certainly there were minor differences in styles even at that time. The differences between then and now was, these people all tried to give biblical justification for their styles. Remarkably, the services turned out to be, guess what? Pretty similar from country to country. The reason one could go to a church in Scotland, Holland, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, or America and feel like you were in a familiar setting was not because these countries were identical in culture or tradition. People of those nations would utterly resent that kind of a comment. Rather, it was because they cared enough to search the scripture to find out what it said about style and form. And worship actually created a fairly transcendent culture. Quite contrary to pundits of our day, their conclusions were remarkably similar. I believe this is because scripture is clear on the issue if one will just look with an open mind. Today, there's no biblical justification given for different styles of worship. No one even cares. We've effectively eviscerated scripture alone in favor of pragmatism and personal preference in this most important of matters, which is worship. In philosophy, we come to learn that there are such things as truth, beauty, and goodness. Christian contemporary worship has failed to grasp that these last two, beauty and goodness, are just as objectively real as is propositional truth. Sadly, they are quickly jettisoning even truth itself. For contemporary worship, Bach is not more beautiful than Bachmann Turner Overdrive. Come on, I like that one. Bach and Bachman Turner Overdrive. Only people in the 70s would know Bachman Turner Overdrive. Coke and pizza are no less good in representing the sacrifice of the Lamb of God than are bread and wine. The failure to acknowledge the difference is a failure to realize that methods, techniques, and styles have been given intrinsic meaning by God, quite apart from the message that may accompany them with words. For contemporary worship, a movie clip will suffice just as nicely for worshiping God, the consuming fire, perhaps even more than preaching. The meanings are all the same. The styles communicate nothing. Donald Miller unwittingly makes my point when he says young people could imagine Jesus playing a guitar in a way that they could not picture him at a pipe organ or leading a choir. Well, in Miller's mind, my categories of goodness and beauty don't even come up. Rather, worship music is done away with because people find it has an audience and a culturally current rhythm. We see that today we do music. This is what we can imagine Jesus might do if he were here today. And so that's why we do it as we create God in our image. Rice and Huff Stutler make the true observation. Many worshipers used to a particular style feel they have not worshiped unless they have been accorded their favorite style. What leads people to think this way is exactly why we need to conclude that style is not neutral. If we cannot worship God unless we get our fill of a particular genre of music that makes us happy, then we demonstrate a bias in who it really is that is the object of worship in our minds. Feeling like I have worshiped if and only if I get to sing those songs that I like with those styles that excite me quite simply means I am the true subject of this worship experience. Rather than asking what about if God is happy with the service, it seems much more likely that we choose our worship experiences according to this philosophy. If mama's not happy, nobody's happy. Today, it's our imagination and feelings that end up dictating how our worship experience is crafted instead of the Holy Scripture. And Paul calls this will worship. Jesus calls it the traditions of men, and Peter calls it a yoke that we're not able to bear. For contemporary worship, preaching is boring and does not work as well as do plays or mime or dances. John Calvin was of the opinion that this was the very same thing the Corinthians were thinking, when they used clever speech and persuasive words. Here's what Calvin says. Hence, I conclude that they were persons who did not openly take away from anything of the substance of the gospel. In other words, they didn't change the message. But as they burned with a misdirected eagerness for distinction, I am of the opinion that with the view of making themselves admired, they contrived a new method of teaching at variance with the simplicity of Christ. Paul's defense of preaching was that it did not need humans to improve upon it to make it work better. It may not feel that way, but that's the truth if we believe it. Even the most boring and ill-equipped preacher, so long as he is being faithful to God's word to preach it, has a power that the greatest orators in human history do not possess. Preaching is a method designed by God to effectively mediate the gospel message. New styles, contrary to popular opinion, actually end up making a mockery of the power of God to save sinners, for implicit in their message is the notion that the style itself is needed to supplement the power of the gospel message. How often do we hear things like this? Well, we need video or drama in our day because people are visual learners. People really do come into worship service and notice that we don't have those things in here. That's deliberate and I hope you're starting to understand why. It's not because I'm a curmudgeon. The assumed theology of this thinking is that it's not the gospel of Christ itself that reaches out to our stone hearts and regenerates us because we are dead and unable to understand it. Rather, the assumption is that we're good enough, wise enough, smart enough, and savvy enough to come to Christ on our own with just a little help from our inventions. This Pelagianism destroys the meaning of Romans 1.16, that the gospel, quite apart from our methods, is the power of God to the salvation of everyone who believes. This is why style and methods matter. God has chosen the foolish things, that is, methods included. to shame the wise in order that we may not boast in our works, including how we do church, or boast in our salvation. God's foolish methods actually demonstrate all the more His power to save sinners by an announcement of the person and work of Jesus Christ, precisely because His methods look to us like they should not work. That's why He wants to use them. He does things backwards from us. It's never methods, but the message that saves, the proclamation of our Savior. So when we add new styles to worship, we're in effect saying to God, the gospel can't work without our help. Communion, baptism, biblically contextual and theologically diverse songs, doctrinally correct prayers, scripture reading and biblical fellowship all stand in the way of our evangelizing seekers in our worship in the minds of today's pundits. Yet God commands that we do these methods and styles and that we do them biblically when we come together. These have always been understood as necessary aspects of worship until just very recently. For contemporary worship, the eye dominates the ear, thus faith no longer comes through hearing, as we learn in Romans. Instead, it comes through cleverly packaged and marketed videos or slick presentations from computers and soon from AI. For contemporary worship fun dominates while suffering, discipleship, and coming to Christ in weakness and repentance of sin has little or no place. It's my strong and sorrowful conclusion that current evangelical trends in worship fall tragically and dangerously short of true biblical worship. This is derived from a conviction that there actually is such a thing as biblical worship, something very few even believe anymore. The God who cared enough to tell us about himself and that he wants us to worship him in an order that we might enjoy him forever has not left us in the dark as how he would like us to do this. My contention is that current worship often looks more like pre-exilic Jewish prophets, a sickening blend of skeletal tradition given life by a syncretistic culture and pagan religious styles. Evangelicals are becoming notorious in their near wholesale abandonment of biblical doctrine in exchange for narcissistic experiences. We still say on paper that we believe the right things. The Pelagianism we've been considering is not found in statements of faith. That is, if they even have a statement of faith, which is increasingly a problem. Instead, it naturally occurs from the vacuum caused when doctrine is seen as a word that divides and creates necessary disunity. In the name of peace, we simply no longer teach, preach, or confess the robust and full-orbed faith of our fathers. And as we have created a God void of justice, anger, holiness, otherness, wrath, and power, because these attributes are just not seeker-sensitive. And we've taken biblical concepts of God's love, mercy, kindness, and tolerance and emphasized them to the exclusion of these others. We've created worship that's almost exclusively imminent, giving us a God who is near and not far off, as Jeremiah said, of those people. just as Judah did all those years ago. It is worship of subjective feelings to the detriment of objective truth, experiential at the expense of the rational, man-made to the expulsion of the biblical, and self-centered will worship to the absence of God-centered biblical worship. What are we to do? Leonard Payton makes a very astute observation when he says, My suggestion is that we must acknowledge that there are indeed problems. James Boyce said, many do not even perceive that there is a problem, which itself is a very large part of the problem. We cannot even begin to halt the slide, let alone make positive progress until this first move is made. I've chosen to preach this today in order to bring a little needed light to modern worship as preparation for the beginning of a biblical remedy to come in the following weeks. It's extremely serious and quite sobering if my conclusions are correct, and yet many know that they are correct, as the Holy Spirit has testified to us through the Holy Scripture. Like the prophets of old, one of our conclusions must be that we all, including those of us who agree, must acknowledge our own guilt and repent. None of us is perfect in our worship. We're all prone to self-deifying worship more than any of us will ever want to admit. It's why we get bored and tired even in biblical worship. We aren't here for the right reasons. Where there is no repentance, there can be no restoration. But where there is repentance, God openly calls us to the pure, refreshing, life-giving worship found only in the Son, Jesus Christ. Then and only then are we prepared to go forward in faith to look at the means of grace. but it takes faith to see these things. You must believe God about what he tells you about worship. And my question is, do you? Father, I would pray that you would help us to hear the word today. It's a kind of a sermon I don't preach often. It's one that's needed much in our day, and I think it's needed in even our own church, so that we remember why we do the things we do, so that we can remember that when we get tired or bored in even our own worship service, or things aren't, we're not thinking rightly, we come to understand that it's so easy for us to shift the object of worship to ourselves. We're here because of what you have done for us in Christ, our Holy Father. and we give you all the worship and glory for that. And we pray that you would help our worship, even as we want to be biblical, not to be dead because our hearts aren't in it, but also we pray that you would help us to want to be biblical because we know that you've told us what is good for us when we worship you and what you require of us. Father, I would pray that you would bless this message that we've heard today, use it in our midst, use it in the lives of people here, and also in the coming weeks to come as we turn then more positively to looking at the means of grace and why it is you give us these glorious, ordinary, common things for our salvation and sanctification. It's in Christ's name I pray, amen.