There is one memory of my earlier years as a Christian that I’ve never been able to shake. It’s a formative memory that I actually don’t think the Lord means for me to shake, for it has often reminded me that, when it comes to the local church’s worship, the stakes are sky high.

One Sunday we were worshipping at a church that was connected to a serious tradition but now dabbling in what some have labeled the attractional model. The leaders of that church had become convinced that to interest prospective attenders and grow the size of the congregation, they needed to make their services more appealing. They needed to remove some of the traditional elements of worship and replace them with ones they deemed fresh and attractive.

Sadly, what they deemed fresh and attractive proved to mostly just be unserious. By the time we attended, the prayers had become perfunctory, the preaching focused on felt needs, and the music relied on bad adaptations of modern hits. It wasn’t all bad: Bland coffee had given way to boutique coffee but, sadly, at the same time, sound principles of worship had given way to pragmatic ones.

After the preacher had told us how to be better people by trying harder and after the pastor baptized a man who told the congregation he was still co-habiting with his girlfriend, the band struck up yet another badly-rhymed and badly-performed adaptation of a pop song from the 80s—a song about partying and drunkenness that they had modified to ostensibly be about Jesus. By this time I was cringing with second-hand embarrassment and constraining what I was certain was righteous anger. I whispered to my family, “This is just so dumb. I’m never coming back here.” I didn’t know how else to describe it. It was just plain dumb. And we never did return.

It struck me that day and has struck me often ever since that to harm a church, Satan does not need to make the worship services heretical. He does not need to replace truth with damnable error. He just needs to make the worship services dumb. He just needs to make them trite and vapid. He just needs to make them unserious. And eventually, the church will diminish in strength and decline in power and lose the presence of the Holy Spirit.

It’s important to consider, then, that if Satan wants to harm your church, it is possible he will raise a heretic to the pulpit or introduce a wolf into the membership. But it is also possible he may cause the members to begin to feel embarrassed by what they consider old-fashioned patterns of worship and to ask for or demand something else. He may cause the pastors to begin to feel sheepish about lengthy prayers, to doubt the usefulness of reading substantial passages of Scripture, to wonder if it inhibits preaching to tie the point of a sermon to the point of a text. He may encourage the church to pursue what they deem fresh and attractive or what they think will draw the community around—perhaps especially in the area of music. He’ll slowly reshape the church from the instructions of Scripture to the whims of the people. He’ll slowly reshape the church’s worship so it slides from holy to worldly, from sacred to profane, from meaningful to dumb.

There is another church I remember from my childhood. My aunt and uncle attended a Presbyterian church that held to a strict interpretation of the Regulative Principle. The only elements the church permitted in worship were the elements the New Testament explicitly prescribes. The most obvious evidence of this was in their singing, for they sang only the Psalms and sang them without any musical accompaniment. I once asked my aunt why, when she visited our church, she would not sing the hymns. Her reply was, “In the Old Testament, God struck people dead for worshipping him the wrong way.” I can’t say that I ever agreed with all the convictions of those Presbyterians or the strictness of their understanding of the Regulative Principle, but I can most certainly say that I respected them. Whatever else was true of their worship, no one could say it was unserious. No one could say they took their instructions from anyone but God.

And this, I think, is the key. The great question each person and each church needs to ask is simply this: Do we believe God tells his people how to worship, or do we think God leaves that to us? Do we need to trust that God knows how we need to worship him and that he has given us specific instructions, or can we determine that God is glad to have us worship him however we see fit? Different answers to those questions will lead churches in very different directions.

The answer that was nearly universal until the rise of the attractional model and the answer that will serve us best in any age is this: God knows us better than we know ourselves and therefore tells us how we ought to worship. His instructions are not to be received with embarrassment or resentment and not with hesitancy or disobedience. Rather, they are to be received with humility, awe, and wonder that God would not only permit us to worship him but tell us how to worship him in the ways that are best. This means that instead of creating ways to worship we can simply receive ways to worship and instead of trusting ourselves, we can trust him. As always, it falls to us to search his Word and then obey his Word. It falls to us to worship him as he has commanded, for he knows best.

May the God of love and peace be with you today.

There’s a new Bible for young children on sale this week at Westminster Books. There are some other kids’ books discounted as well.
(Yesterday on the blog: The House Seems Large Today)
‘Christian Nation’ Puts the Bible on Trial
Joe Carter writes about that “member of Finland’s parliament [who] faces a second ‘hate speech’ trial over a Twitter post quoting the Bible.”
The Need for Precision When Quoting Scripture
I agree with David Kaywood about the need for precision when quoting Scripture (especially in the context of more scholarly works).
God’s Good Design of the Local Church
“My heart breaks for those who can’t see the beauty of the local church, or the ones who only focus on her flaws. Look at anyone long enough and you will find problems, especially if that’s your goal. No masterpiece is flawless, even God’s church bears the effects of sin . . . for now.”
Prayer Leaves An Eternal Legacy
Mothers and grandmothers may be especially encouraged by this article from Sylvia.
Tota Scriptura
This is an oldie but a goodie from R.C. Sproul. “The issue that we face in our day is not merely the question of sola Scriptura but also the question of tota Scriptura, which has to do with embracing the whole counsel of God as it is revealed in the entirety of sacred Scripture.”
Should we reject weaponized words?
Aaron writes of the importance of keeping words that have become weaponized (e.g. inerrancy).
Flashback: What Can God Do With Broken Hearts?
Where the world looks to those who are whole and strong, God looks to those who are weak and broken, for his specialty is bringing much from little, beauty from ashes, strength from weakness.

Our grip is that of a two-year-old amid the stormy waves of life. His sure grasp never falters. —Dane Ortlund

Today marks the third anniversary of the day Nick left us—the third anniversary of the day he arrived in heaven. It has been some time since I’ve paused with fingers on keyboard to collect my thoughts and deliberately think about him, about me, about my family, and about our grief. But the Lord, through the strange providence of having Aileen and me get stranded in a small fishing town in Alaska has given me time to pause, to think, and to write. (The photo above is one I snapped here.)

Time passes at a constant rate, of course, never any faster and never any slower. Yet sometimes it seems to have been so short a time since he died and sometimes it seems to have been so long. Sometimes he feels almost as present in my life as the day I last saw him and sometimes he feels so distant. Sometimes my memories of him are sharp and clear and sometimes they are dim and hazy. Increasingly they are like dreams I’m desperately trying to remember or reminiscences I’m desperately grappling to hold on to. The sound of his voice, the cackle of his laugh, the feel of his hugs—these are all fading into a past that seems ever more distant. I don’t like it that way, but it seems to be how human memory works—that without constant reinforcement, the old gives way to the new and the past to the present. It makes me wonder what I’ll remember of him years from now, or decades.
Today, though, I sure do miss him. I miss having someone who loved me in that unique way a son loves his father, and I miss having someone to love in that unique way a father loves a son. There are many kinds of love, of course, but that father-son bond is sweet, strong, and true. It’s no better than a father-daughter bond. But it’s different. Irreplaceable.
I miss having someone who shared so many of my interests and who was similar to me in so many ways. In varied ways, and mostly good ways, he was a kind of reflection of myself, though one who had the good sense to assume my virtues and eschew my faults.
I miss having someone who was deliberately following in my footsteps—who wanted to be like me enough that he observed and imitated. I miss the challenge of continuing to be worthy of being followed by someone so dear to me as a son.
I miss having someone who was growing beyond me, whose increasing experience and education had begun to reverse the roles so that I was beginning to turn to him for advice and guidance. We were becoming peers, he and I.
I miss the future we had mapped out in our conversations, a future in which he would get married, complete his degree, return to Canada, and take up a position at our church or at one nearby. We had planned to live close together, a family reunited after that time of preparation and education.
We will be reunited, of course, though at a much different time and in much different circumstances. We will be reunited in that place where our faith will become sight, that place where our pain will be erased and our tears wiped away, in that place where this will finally all make sense. He is already there. I will eventually catch up.
In the meantime, God continues to grant us the grace to trust him. None of us have wavered in our confidence that God is good and that in some way even an experience as painful as this is an expression of that goodness. None of us have allowed this to knock us out of the race or to give us an excuse to become less useful to the Lord’s purposes. None of us have allowed this to rob us of our joy or to keep us locked endlessly in sorrow or lament. All of us have committed to staying true to the Lord, to living our lives well, and to looking forward to that day when we will be together again.
Together again with our Savior. Our family whole, our hearts whole, our souls whole. All made whole through the goodness and grace of our God. Until that day I miss my sweet boy. I miss him, I love him, and I can’t wait to see him again.