Written by T. M. Suffield |
Sunday, June 4, 2023
If we chase after experiences we won’t find them, but that if we look to worship God in spirit and truth, we will have dramatic and dynamic encounters with God by his Spirit that will change us, change our churches, change our towns and cities, shake the foundations of the earth, challenge the powers successfully, and occasionally be just a little bit strange.

In my last post in this series filling out my ‘eucharismatic’ manifesto, I argued that the church exists to worship God, and therefore our primary purpose is worshipping God.
However, if you’ve been following along, you might think that this is an odd first step when I have argued that the church is defined by her encounters with God, which seems to shift the focus to us. That’s not right, church isn’t about us, it’s about God.
Except, I’m a Reformed Charismatic; Calvinistic in my understanding of salvation (and more). Which means I want to argue an important point that affects what happens on Sundays, but also everything else in the entire cosmos. It’s this: God always moves first.
When I repent what I discover is that in the counsels of the Almighty God, he first chose me and elected me to life, the Spirit regenerating my heart so that I can respond in faith to his call and repent. When God calls, he makes what he calls for happen.
When I move towards God and meet him, I will always find that he has moved first. God’s kindness is gratuitous, it overflows, what we call grace or gift is how God always works with his people.
It’s because of the Lord’s gracious posture towards us, his movement, that we can speak of the gathered Church as a series of encounters with God, or even of the Church itself as the mystery of the bride encountering the husband, the son encountering the father, the army encountering the general, the Temple bricks encountering the divine presence of Yahweh filling the holy of holies.
When we gather to worship God, he will have graciously ‘presenced’ himself with us. And before you cry that ‘God is everywhere’ and so can’t be especially present, you’re going to need to go and look at the holy of holies again.
Read More
Related Posts:

Written by R. Scott Clark |
Tuesday, July 19, 2022
The Old Testament is coming alive before our eyes. Suddenly Sodom and Gomorrah seem more real, do they not? Nothing will subvert the new sexual order more than singing joyfully the Songs of Zion in the midst of the nations raging against the King (Ps. 2).

It was only a matter of time. There is a story on CNN about the the 2019 publication of a LGBTQ hymnal, Songs For The Holy Other: Hymns Affirming the LGBTQIA2S+ Community. This collection is published by the Hymn Society, which is a century old this year.
The story begins with an acknowledgement of the affective power of singing. The first interview is with a Lesbian who chafed at being “tolerated” in the church. She wanted her Lesbian sexuality be affirmed even as she wanted to retain her Christian faith. She sought to synthesize Christianity with feminism as she studied music and “fell in love” with her “now-wife.” She contributed two hymns to the collection.
The title is a play on words. Theologians often speak of God as “wholly other” as a way to characterize his transcendence. The title uses a homonym but applies it to homosexuals in the church. They are the “holy” other. According to CNN, the hymnal was compiled by people from “seven denominations and a wide range of sexualities and gender identities.”
The contributors are explicit about their aim: “It is important for churches to explicitly state who is welcome there. It is important for members of our community to hear their names spoken—and sung—in their houses of worship…”. One authority contacted for the piece identifies as “pansexual.” “Queer people,” she says, “are longing to be heard,” she says “The church was supposed to protect them and love them and teach them about God. It has made a lot of mistakes, and we have a lot to make up for.”
Analysis
We are in the midst of the third phase of a great sexual revolution in the last century. The first, a century ago, was about the role of women in secular society and in that revolution women gained the freedom to drive and to vote. In the second phase, in the 1970s, women left the house for full-time careers, gained no-fault divorce, and abortion on demand. In the third, the very definition of marriage has been turned on its head and the heterosexual hegemony—grounded in nature since time immemorial—is being overturned in favor of queer, pan-sexual neo-paganism. It turns out that Pandora’s Box is pan-sexual chaos. It is so radical that even some third-wave feminists and advocates of homosexuality and homosexual marriage are complaining about being marginalized.
In the face of this revolution Christians have two choices, to try to co-opt the culture (or be co-opted by it) or to resist it. Of course, the mainline churches (e.g., the United Churches of Christ, the Presbyterian Church USA, the Episcopal Church USA et al) will try to incorporate the radical new sexual ethos in a sad attempt to remain relevant, but after giving up the Scriptures as the un-normed norm, what else can the seven sisters do?
For our purposes, the question facing the confessional Presbyterian and Reformed (P&R) churches is this: is there a rule of worship or not? It is the unquestioned assumption of this hymnal and its advocates that it is the function of the church and her hymns to affirm and to express the religious experience of the church. As the church changes, so must the hymnal.
The confessional P&R churches, however, do not begin with that assumption. They begin with the assumption that it is not the function of singing in worship for us to say whatever we want to God but to repeat God’s Word after him. The role of a song in worship is not for us to say to God what is on our hearts but for the congregation to say to God what is on his heart.
This is how the classical Reformed churches understood the function of singing. They understood worship to be a dialogue in which God speaks and his people respond but the Reformed all understood that God’s people are to respond with his Word. This is part of what they understood sola Scriptura to mean: God’s Word is sufficient for the Christian faith, the Christian life, and public worship.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however, as religious subjectivism swept through the Modern church, first under the influence of Pietism, and then under the influence of the liberal children and grandchildren of the Pietists, God’s Word was gradually marginalized in favor of Watts’ paraphrases of the Psalms and then, finally, hymns. Eventually, in virtually every quarter of the church (and even in most P&R churches) the hymnal completely routed the Psalter.
Read More
Related Posts:

In light of what God has revealed to us in the 3rd Commandment we are to be sure to rest and trust in the beauty of His ways, for what one of us wants to end life broken, defeated, and under the weight of their transgressions like Solomon? Finishing well means obeying this portion of God’s law, with joy, thanksgiving, and humility.  

Vanity is a word that we usually associate with King Solomon and his book called Ecclesiastes. The opening verse of that portion of Holy Scripture says, “The words of the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem. ‘Vanity of vanities,’ says the Preacher; ‘Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.’ What he means by that is his going after the sensual things, heeding the counsel of his pagan wives (Neh.8:26), all had brought him to the point that he realizing how much of the blessing of God he had wasted in this present evil world. What had been the point of all that frivolity but to bring the very son of David to his knees in a quiet and fleeting desperation? If you go on and read the rest of Solomon’s testimony to how he had spent his life he ends with a pretty straightforward word of confession:
“Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God and keep His commandments, for this is man’s all.  For God will bring every work into judgment, including every secret thing, whether good or evil.” — (Eccl. 12:13-14)
There we see in stark detail that every man and woman in their day has a simple choice to make: will we heed the words of a godly father to his son as we read in Proverbs or will they go after the vanity, the worthless idols which cannot do what they promise? In some ways the parable of the prodigal son is a condensing of the life of Solomon. He went from the highs of praising the name of God as the source of all truth and wisdom to the broken man who gave the lamentation of Ecclesiastes to posterity.
In today’s catechism lesson we are going to look at the 3rd Commandment which, as we will see, has a lot more to tell us than just what words we are allowed to say.
Let’s get to this week’s questions:
Q. 53. Which is the third commandment?
A. The third commandment is, Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain: for the Lord will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain.
Q. 54. What is required in the third commandment?
A. The third commandment requires the holy and reverent use of God’s names, titles, at­tributes, ordinances, word, and works.
Having heard statutes against having any other gods before the one true and living god and an admonition against forming any image of God, either in the mind or in physical form, we come now to a warning to all men to consider what the very name of Jehovah means.
Read More