Although Jesus was not the first to use parables in his teaching, his extensive use of them was a distinct feature of his teaching style. But why? Some suggest that he simply harnessed the power of story to enhance his teaching. But Jesus himself explains why he used parables, and he grounds his explanation in a network of Old Testament texts, with Isaiah 6:9–10 as the star of the show.

Grasping Jesus’s purpose provides valuable lessons for our understanding and proclamation of the gospel.

Lest They Turn

Jesus’s explanation for why he teaches in parables is embedded within the parable of the sower and soils. (Although this parable is recorded in all three Synoptic Gospels, we will focus on Matthew’s version.)

The parable comes at the beginning of an extended section of parables focused on the nature of God’s kingdom (Matthew 13:1–52). After Jesus tells the crowd the parable of the sower (Matthew 13:1–9), the disciples ask him privately why he speaks to the crowds in parables (Matthew 13:10). Jesus responds by highlighting their privileged position as disciples: God has chosen to reveal the secrets of the kingdom to them (Matthew 13:11–12, alluding to “mystery” language used in Daniel). He then directly answers their question:

This is why I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand. Indeed, in their case the prophecy of Isaiah is fulfilled that says: “You will indeed hear but never understand, and you will indeed see but never perceive.” For this people’s heart has grown dull, and with their ears they can barely hear, and their eyes they have closed, lest they should see with their eyes and hear with their ears and understand with their heart and turn, and I would heal them. (Matthew 13:13–15, citing Isaiah 6:9–10)

Jesus’s statement that he teaches in parables alludes to Psalm 78:2 (which Matthew cites explicitly in Matthew 13:35), but the sensory malfunction language (ears that do not hear, eyes that do not see, hearts and minds that are dull) anticipates the quote from Isaiah 6:9–10. Why does Jesus turn here to explain his purpose to the disciples?

Unseeing Eyes, Unhearing Ears

In its original context, Isaiah 6:9–10 is part of God’s commission to Isaiah as a prophet. In response to seeing Yahweh exalted on his throne, Isaiah responds to Yahweh’s question, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” with an emphatic, “Here I am! Send me” (Isaiah 6:1–8). Verses 9–10 then give the content of Isaiah’s message to rebellious Israel. God commissions him to denounce their spiritual deafness, blindness, and hardness of heart — the realities that keep Israel from responding to God’s call to repentance and restoration.

This was not a new response for Israel. It had been this way since Moses’s day, who used similar sensory malfunction language to describe Israel (Deuteronomy 29:2–4). Elsewhere, Scripture connects this sensory malfunction language to the effects of idolatry. Those who worship idols become like them, having eyes that cannot see, ears that cannot hear, and hearts that do not understand (Isaiah 44:9–20; Psalm 115:3–8).

“The parables are more like thermometers than thermostats; they reveal a person’s spiritual condition.”

But when Jesus cites Isaiah 6:9–10 and applies it to the listening crowds, he is doing more than simply identifying a recurring pattern in redemptive history. Notice that Jesus introduces the words of Isaiah 6:9–10 by saying, “Indeed, in their case the prophecy of Isaiah is fulfilled” (Matthew 13:14). The sensory malfunction and hardness of heart directed toward Jesus is the culmination of that pattern. The climactic nature of God’s revelation of himself in Jesus leads to a heightened level of sensory malfunction and hardness of heart that fills up the significance of previous occurrences of this pattern.

Wrapping Pearls in Parables

Jesus teaches in parables in order to expose a person’s spiritual condition. The parables are more like thermometers than thermostats; they reveal a person’s spiritual condition more than they determine it. That is why Jesus repeatedly says, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear” (Matthew 11:15; 13:9, 43). Those who have been made spiritually alive and are now able to hear the voice of the Son of God (John 5:25–26) must respond by obeying Jesus’s word. They must be not merely hearers of the word, but doers (James 1:22).

By contrast, the parables further harden those whose spiritual eyes, ears, hearts, and minds have malfunctioned because of their idolatrous rebellion against God. “For those without ears to hear, parables seem to conceal more than they reveal, so that superficial hearing and seeing do not lead to true spiritual understanding or perception,” Craig Blomberg writes (Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament, 46). The parables are thus a way of speaking the good news of the kingdom to the crowds while at the same time not casting pearls before swine (Matthew 7:6). As D.A. Carson puts it, Jesus teaches in parables “in such a way as to harden and reject those who are hard of heart and to enlighten — often with further explanation — his disciples” (Matthew, 309).

John also uses Isaiah to explain the people’s rejection of Jesus (John 12:36–43). Despite all the signs Jesus did, they did not — in fact, could not — believe in him, which fulfilled the words of Isaiah 53:1. Indeed, the reason they could not believe in him is explained by a citation of Isaiah 6:9–10. After quoting the prophet, John explains that “Isaiah said these things because he saw his [Jesus’s] glory and spoke of him” (John 12:41). In other words, the exalted Lord whom Isaiah saw sitting on the throne of heaven was none other than Christ himself (Isaiah 6:1–5). Thus, Isaiah foretold the rejection of Jesus nearly seven hundred years before he was born.

Simply put, Jesus teaches in parables to demonstrate the need for divine revelation to understand the mysteries of the kingdom and to reveal the spiritual condition of his listeners. Both of these realities are grounded in his understanding of Isaiah 6:9–10.

Eye-Opening God

The way that Jesus and the New Testament authors use Isaiah 6:9–10 teaches us at least three important lessons.

First, the gospel was hidden in plain sight in the Old Testament but is now revealed through the person and work of Jesus Christ. On the one hand, the New Testament makes it clear that the good news of Jesus Christ is the fulfillment of the Old Testament hope. At the same time, the way that Christ fulfills the Old Testament hope is unexpected in many respects.

Second, God must open a person’s spiritual senses to rightly perceive the gospel. By fallen nature, we come into this world as spiritually dead sinners with hearts of stone (Ephesians 2:1–3; Ezekiel 36:26). Apart from God’s Spirit making us spiritually alive (Ephesians 2:4–6), giving us eyes to see (2 Corinthians 4:6) and hearts that are responsive to God (Ezekiel 36:26–27), no one ever comes to faith in Christ. If we trust in Jesus, our hearts should be filled with gratitude that God has opened our eyes to see the beauty of Christ, because none of us deserves such a privilege. There is no room for arrogance in the kingdom. No one comes to know Christ because he is smarter or wiser than others. As believers, we should marvel at the fact that God has opened our eyes to see “the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Corinthians 4:6).

Finally, truly understanding these realities will make us people of prayer. All our efforts to share the gospel with others should be bathed in prayer. Learning how to respond to common questions about Jesus, the Bible, and Christianity is wise, but our ability to explain and defend the gospel is not what enables people to repent and believe in Jesus. This truth frees us from the anxiety that comes from thinking a person’s response to the gospel depends on how well we communicate.

Instead, we can confidently pray for God to do what only he can do. We can pray that, as he did with Lydia (Acts 16:14–15), God would open our hearers’ eyes to see the beauty of Christ, open their ears to hear the good news, and replace their heart of stone with a heart of flesh that responds to God in faith and obedience.

What a wonder that Jesus groaned.

It’s one of the more arresting glimpses into his humanity that we find in the Gospels. Like his flare of righteous anger at Pharisees in Mark 3:5. Or, after Lazarus’s death, his being “deeply moved in his spirit and greatly troubled” (John 11:33). And then, remarkably, “Jesus wept” (John 11:35). How many readers have been stopped in their tracks by his admission of the limits of his human knowledge? “Concerning that day or that hour, no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father” (Mark 13:32).

We might overlook this remarkable moment in the human life of Christ — his groaning aloud in Mark 7:34 — if it didn’t happen again, and with more intensity, just a few verses later in Mark 8:12. That is, twice, just paragraphs apart — first before the feeding of the four thousand, then again immediately after — “Jesus sighed.” And the second instance was more dramatic than the first (“he sighed deeply in his spirit”). The Greek for sigh (stenazō) we translate groan elsewhere in the New Testament.

The emotional life of the sinless God-man might be more complex than we’re prone to assume.

What’s in a Groan?

Jesus’s sighing, his groaning, stands out all the more in Mark 7–8, because that’s not the tenor of his ministry elsewhere.

Yes, we know him as Isaiah’s “man of sorrows” not because he groaned his way through ministry, but because he came, in the end, to bear the cross for our sin. Typically, the Christ of the Gospels is conspicuously calm, composed, unnerved in the face of his foes, telling provocative parables, responding to hostile quips with grace and penetrating questions, exhibiting the equanimity that seems to be in shorter supply today.

But manifestly self-possessed as he may be in the Gospels, Jesus is fully human, with all that our nature entails — body, mind, will, and emotions. In particular moments, Jesus could be righteously angry and greatly troubled and even weep. And with each unexpected revelation of his full humanity, we mere humans have much to learn.

We might intuit some grace for us in glimpsing Christ’s groaning. Many keen observers, like J.C. Ryle, have anticipated “a deep meaning in that sigh!” (Expository Thoughts on the Gospel of Mark, 115) — but what, then, is the deep meaning? What might there be for us, his people, in the groaning of our Lord?

Truly Man, Not Only God

For one, we see the realness of Christ’s humanity, and with it, his identification with our plight. Not only does he, in Mark 7–8 as elsewhere, show distinctively human emotions — which he has by virtue of his humanity, not deity — but we find him drawing near to us. His groaning is not only like ours in this fallen age, but also for ours — as it is particularly for the deaf and mute man of Mark 7:

And taking him aside from the crowd privately, [Jesus] put his fingers into his ears, and after spitting touched his tongue. And looking up to heaven, he sighed and said to him, “Ephphatha,” that is, “Be opened.” And his ears were opened, his tongue was released, and he spoke plainly. (Mark 7:33–35)

As William Lane observes, Jesus took the man aside from the distraction of the crowd, entered his world, and “openly expressed the strong emotion he seems to have always felt in the presence of the ravages of demonic [oppre]ession and disease” (Mark, 267).

We might mistake the wrong kind of calmness for spiritual maturity. Godliness does indeed bring calm and stability to a human soul, but not at the expense of deep, spontaneous groans over sin’s curse (holy groans that are, at heart, markedly different from the grumbling which Scripture uniformly condemns). This picture of Jesus is different than the one we might be prone to imagine or portray. The healthy, sinless emotional life is not as one-dimensional as we might think. Holy emotions in a fallen world may fall across a wider spectrum.

“We all have moments, if not extended seasons, where this age of not-yets wears on us. Jesus too.”

Biblically, sighing is not an expression of joy, but of grief. Paired with groaning (Job 3:24; Ezekiel 9:4), sorrow (Psalm 31:10; Isaiah 35:10; 51:11), and the longing for divine deliverance (Psalm 38:9), sighing expresses (audibly) a kind of inner languishing, the opposite of a merry heart (Isaiah 24:7). Sighing is a soft, more quiet form of mourning (Ezekiel 24:17). And it is a universal aspect of the human experience: we all have moments, if not extended seasons, where this age of not-yets wears on us. Jesus too. Jesus sighed.

In the first instance in Mark’s account, the prompt is sin’s curse, as Jesus sees its effects in the deaf-mute before his eyes. Then his groaning intensifies in Mark 8:12 as the focus sharpens to sin itself, in the unbelief of the Pharisees.

Truly God, Not Only Man

If his first groan endears him to us, his second unsettles us as sinners prone to unbelief:

The Pharisees came and began to argue with him, seeking from him a sign from heaven to test him. And he sighed deeply in his spirit and said, “Why does this generation seek a sign? Truly, I say to you, no sign will be given to this generation.” (Mark 8:11–12)

“Jesus did not explode with anger and lose control. Nor was he stoic in the face of unbelief.”

Note this: “he sighed deeply in his spirit,” but did not rage. He did not explode with anger and lose control. Nor was he stoic in face of unbelief. Previously, we might assume his sigh was audible. Now, it’s both more intense and apparently less audible: “deeply” and “in his spirit.” His next words are not an outraged attack on the Pharisees, but a composed, though condemning, refusal to give the sign for which their unbelief pines. “The emotion displayed in his deep sigh was an expression of indignation and grief,” comments Lane. “There is a note of exasperation in the question, Why does this generation seek a sign?” (277).

For us, Mark’s peek into Jesus’s groan, deep in his spirit, exposes our own human proneness to trifle with unbelief. Our age conditions us to take unbelief lightly. We cast a desperate father’s cry — “help my unbelief!” (Mark 9:24) — as a sanctifying of doubt, rather than as a plea for deliverance without delay. But doubt is never a badge of honor in the Bible. Jesus can indeed handle our doubts (and heal them), but he does not celebrate them. In fact, as his deep groaning in Mark 8:12 reveals, few things, if any, discourage him like unbelief.

To this, we might ask ourselves how much we groan as Jesus does. Do we sense, with him, the seriousness, the atrocity, of unbelief? Or do we soft-pedal it, in ourselves and in others? Our Savior may find not that we groan too much, but too little. We need Jesus not to banish such groanings but to right the ship of our hearts, to get them back on course. Like a vessel off course, we groan at what we shouldn’t and do not groan at what we should.

Over His Dead Body

Finally, in the sweep of the Gospel of Mark, we also find an anticipation of the coming cross in the groans of Christ. We do here peek at the griefs of the man of sorrows.

As his first groan of holy compassion escalates to a second groan of holy indignation, the weight on his shoulders grows with each step toward the cross. The curse he will own, the sin he will become, and the unbelief he will remedy are a growing weight as he owns the purpose of his coming. “I have a baptism to be baptized with,” he testifies in Luke 12:50, “and how great is my distress until it is accomplished!” This heaviness was already there in his first sigh. As Tim Keller observes, when Jesus is about to heal the deaf-mute, he doesn’t grin and say, “Wait till you see what I’m going to do for you.” Because no healing, or faith, is free. Jesus will pay for it at the cross.

And the cross-ward solemnity is even more manifest in the second sigh, with the solemn tone of “Truly I say to you,” and his striking, implied self-imprecation. Jesus says, literally, “Truly I say to you, if a sign will be given to this generation . . .” (Mark 8:12) and then does not complete the statement. It’s an if without an explicit then. What’s implied is, “. . . may I be accursed.” Or, as we might say today, “Over my dead body.” Perhaps he trails off because the cross in the distance is becoming all so real. It’s one thing to say “Over my dead body” as a figure of speech; it’s another to own that death is indeed coming, and that he had not come to bring divine curse, but to bear it.

As much as we might hope to imitate our Lord in his holy groanings, we come to this great contrast as the hill in the distance draws near: the God-man went to the cross for the curse of sin and the unbelief he grieved. There were righteous groans in the mouth of Christ, on his way to Golgotha, that are not ours after Calvary.

Still, to groan is human — and Christian, for now. In this age of glorious alreadies and distressing not-yets, we groan, inevitably and even virtuously. And not only do we groan like our Lord, but we marvel that he groaned for us.

The individual human soul, rightly seeing the glory of Christ and rightly savoring the glory of Christ, is at the heart of God’s purpose in creating the world. Until we grasp, in some measure, why that is the case, we will not be able to give an account for why the corporate reality of the worshiping church is essential to God’s purpose in creating the world.

So what I hope to do in this message is steer a biblical course between two errors. On the one side, I want us to avoid the error of thinking that the relationship between the individual worshiping human soul and God is in itself the ultimate purpose of God in creation. It’s not.

On the other side, I want us to avoid the error of being so captivated by the corporate reality of the worshiping people of God — the body of Christ, the temple of God, the bride of Christ — that we lose sight of the fact that the vital, ongoing, eternal intensity of the individual soul’s affection for God is absolutely essential to the very existence of the corporate reality of the worshiping church.

The New Testament forbids us to forget, neglect, or minimize the radical, essential, eternal significance of the individual worshiping human person. And the New Testament forbids that we forget, neglect, or minimize the coming into being of the blazingly beautiful bride of Christ who is more than the sum of her flaming parts, though not less.

Individual Soul and Glory

Let’s begin by focusing on the relationship between the individual soul and the ultimate purpose of God in creation. One of the clearest statements in the Bible of God’s ultimate purpose in creation is found in Isaiah 43:6–7:

Bring my sons from afar,     and my daughters from the end of the earth,everyone who is called by my name,     whom I created for my glory.

Or there’s Ephesians 1:11–12: “[He] works all things according to the counsel of his will, so that we . . . might be to the praise of his glory.” And we have Romans 11:36: “From him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen.”

God created the world, he sustains the world, he governs the world, he is doing his saving work in the world, in order to display his glory — his greatness, his beauty, his worth, the whole panorama of his perfections. We see this all across Scripture:

“The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork” (Psalm 19:1).
“The trees of the forest sing for joy” (Psalm 96:12).
“Let the rivers clap their hands; let the hills sing for joy together” (Psalm 98:8).
“[The meadows and the valleys] shout and sing together for joy” (Psalm 65:13).
“Sing, O heavens . . . shout, O depths of the earth; break forth into singing, O mountains, O forest, and every tree in it! For the Lord . . . will be glorified in Israel” (Isaiah 44:23).

The heavens, the mountains, the hills, the forests of trees, the rivers, and the meadows — they all were created to sing the glories of their Maker. And they do. And so does the most brilliant assembly of one hundred and fifty unbelieving singers gathered to perform Händel’s Messiah at Easter, surrounded by the most accomplished orchestra of unbelieving musicians. When they play with excellence and beautifully sing those magnificent biblical truths, all of it reflects the glory of God, like trees clapping their hands.

Why Worship Must Cherish

So if God gets so much glory from the external echoes of his excellencies in the things he has made — including unbelieving musicians and scientists and athletes — why is there any need for the individual human soul to have any particular affections for God? Isn’t God’s purpose to be glorified being achieved anyway?

“God does not intend to be half-glorified.”

No, it’s not. God does not intend to be half-glorified.

A king may be glorified for his great achievements and power and wisdom if he rules his kingdom with an iron hand and sees to it that great fortifications are built, and beautiful buildings and gardens are constructed, and citizens, under coercion, are forced to become excellent musicians and perform for him the finest pieces of musical art. This king may have a reputation for his power throughout the world.

But he is not so great nor so glorified as a king who is loved by his people — admired, revered, cherished, treasured, enjoyed, desired — so that out of that affection for their king, these happy subjects build even greater fortifications and buildings and gardens and musical compositions. A king is more glorified by a cherishing people than a cowering people. God does not intend to be half-glorified.

Not All Sound Is Worshipful Song

Jesus said to the scribes and Pharisees, “You hypocrites! Well did Isaiah prophesy of you, when he said: ‘This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me’” (Matthew 15:7–9). Here you have an excellent use of lips: “You honor me with your lips. My honor, my glory, is sounding from your lips. I am being glorified by your mouth, just like I’m glorified by the mountains and trees and rivers that have no souls, and just like I am glorified by unbelieving choral ensembles that sing the ‘Hallelujah Chorus.’”

But Jesus still says that their heart, their soul — their individual human soul — is far from him. What does he mean? Jesus tells us in Matthew 15:9: “In vain do they worship me.” In vain. Meaning: “The external echo of my excellence is a zero when it comes to the essence of the kind of worship I created this world to give. A zero.”

Why? “I did not create the world to get magnificent nothings from the hearts of humans created in my image — whether they are singing the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ in unbelief or going through the motions of corporate worship in church on Sunday morning. That’s not why I created the world. I created the world not only for the echo of my excellence in the external wonders of the created world, including humans created in my image, but also for the echo of my excellence in the affections of my people.”

And where those affections are missing — where Jesus is not trusted and loved and cherished and treasured and desired — the words of God through Amos 5:23 will sound out over our worship services and choral performances:

Take away from me the noise of your songs;     to the melody of your harps I will not listen.

And it almost goes without saying (but it is so crucial I will say it) that these absolutely essential affections for God happen in the individual human soul — or the heart, as Jesus calls it Matthew 15:8. This is why the vital, ongoing, eternal intensity of the individual human person’s affection for God is absolutely essential for the fulfillment of God’s purpose in creating the world, namely, that he be not half-glorified (as by trees and unbelieving musicians), but glorified as he ought in the affections of the heart.

Gathered People and Glory

Now we turn to this question: If affections for God in the individual human soul are the essence of the self-glorifying purpose of God in creating the world, how do those heart-affections give rise to the corporate reality of the worshiping church? Because it is clear from the New Testament that God’s ultimate purpose is not millions of isolated, independent, human souls with white-hot affections for God, like great solos.

God is bringing into being a diverse, global church pictured as the body of Christ, the temple of God, the bride of Christ. Paul pictures the church as the wife of Jesus in Ephesians 5:27 and says that Christ’s purpose in coming and dying was “so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish.” Christ means to have a beautiful wife. That’s not the same as saying he aims to have many individual worshipers. She is more than the sum of her parts, though not less.

This conference is devoted to blessing churches understood as local expressions of that emerging, global, everlasting, corporate, worshiping reality called the bride of Christ. What local churches do in their gathered worshiping assemblies is rehearse for that eternal vocation of corporate worship by the bride of Christ.

To God and One Another

The text that connects the heart of the individual worshiping lover of Jesus with this corporate reality is Ephesians 5:18–19: “Be filled with the Spirit, addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with your heart” (Ephesians 5:18–19). Notice those three dimensions: all of this singing is from “your heart,” all of it is “to the Lord,” and all of it is “addressing one another.”

It doesn’t matter whether the words of the song happen to be (the vertically directed) “We Come, O Christ, to You” or (the horizontally directed) “Come, Christians, Join to Sing.” Whether it is verbally directed to God or verbally directed to man, in both cases it is to God and in both cases it is addressing man because in corporate worship everybody is hearing every song, and God is attending to every song. And all the songs are sung from the heart — or they’re not worship. That is God’s design, as we rehearse for the everlasting corporate worship of the bride.

What is plain from those three dimensions in Ephesians 5:18–19 is that the birthplace and essence of worship is the individual human heart. That’s where the glory of Christ awakens the Christ-exalting affections that magnify his greatness and beauty and worth. Then from this furnace of Christ-exalting affections there flames up expressions in song to God and to people.

“God designed for Christ to have a worshiping bride and not just worshiping individuals.”

The corporate reality of the worshiping bride of Christ is brought into being by God’s combining these individual burning hearts of worship into a new reality — the worshiping bride of Christ — first in the foretastes of our gatherings and finally in the complete, perfected, eternal worship of the bride. This is the ultimate goal of God in creation.

Why? What is it about the corporate reality of the singing bride that makes her worship the ultimate end of God’s purpose, rather than simply white-hot individual worshipers? Why is it that God designed for individual hearts aflame with holy affections for God to combine into a new reality of corporate worship, the worshiping bride of Christ? I’ll give three biblical answers to that question, and they all have the effect of elevating the importance of united congregational worship as high as I know how to elevate it. It is the rehearsal and foretaste of the ultimate aim of creation.

1. Shared joy increases joy.

First, there is a pointer in 2 Corinthians 2:2–3, where Paul touches on the mystery of the union of souls as individual joy becomes shared joy. Paul says to the church, “If I cause you pain, who is there to make me glad but the one whom I have pained?” And: “I felt sure of all of you, that my joy would be the joy of you all.”

In the body of Christ, where we are spiritually united in him, something profound happens in the experience of joy in God. It’s not merely that the corporate reality is the assembly of solitary joys. Paul said, “My joy is the joy of you all, and yours is mine. My joy is more because yours is mine, and yours is more because mine is yours.”

Therefore, the totality of Christ-exalting affection that comes into being especially in corporate worship is greater than the sum of individual affections. The worshiping bride is the goal of creation because the interpenetration of Christ-exalting joy is something new, something greater, something more God-glorifying than the assembled joy of individual worshiping hearts.

2. Diverse voices sing more beautiful harmonies.

Second, the unified harmony of diverse voices is more beautiful than the greatest sound of voices in unison. It is a glorious thing when a thousand voices, like a trumpet blast, sound in unison. But when those voices break into the unified diversity of harmony, something more glorious comes into being.

And this is not just a musical phenomenon. It is true in relation to countless diversities God is assembling into his church — across all time and all geography. Ethnic diversities, age diversities, male and female diversities, personality diversities, taste and preference diversities, voice quality diversities. (Think of voices like Bob Dylan and Pavarotti.)

In the unified diversity of the worshiping bride of Christ something more beautiful is created, and Christ is more glorified as the Creator and Redeemer and Beloved of that bride. That’s why the corporate worship of the bride is ultimate.

3. Diverse affections display Christ’s worth.

And third, God designed for Christ to have a worshiping bride and not just worshiping individuals, because the greatness and beauty and worth of the Leader is revealed by the extent of the diversity he is able to inspire and unify in one following, one body, one bride.

This is why the song of heaven in Revelation 5 calls attention to the worthiness of Christ — precisely because he ransomed so many diverse peoples and united them into one kingdom and one singing priesthood.

They sang a new song, saying,

“Worthy are you to take the scroll     and to open its seals,for you were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God     from every tribe and language and people and nation,and you have made them a kingdom and priests to our God,     and they shall reign on the earth.” (Revelation 5:9–10)

“When you gather in worship next Sunday, remember: you are a rehearsal of the end for which God made the world.”

The glory of Christ shines more brightly because he is the kind of Leader-Redeemer who holds together the allegiance and the affections of so many peoples, tribes, tongues, and nations in our worshiping kingdom.

The universe was created to display the worth of the Lamb, and in him the glory of God. When you gather in congregational worship next Sunday, remember: small or large, you are not just individual worshipers; you are a manifestation, a foretaste, a rehearsal of the end for which God made the world: the combining of individual souls aflame for God into something more — the greater joy, the greater harmony, the greater diverse affections of the worshiping bride of Christ — the goal of all things.