Selected Scriptures

January 3, 2021

Lord’s Day Worship

Sean Higgins

The sermon starts around 23:10 in the audio file.

Or, How Our Worship Has Created a New Normal

Series: Our Worship #1

Introduction

Years ago I read an observation that by the time you get meaningful feedback, the real work is already done. It’s a general principle, even if modern men are more assuming about immediate replies and reports. The farmer works and works, and waits, to see how much will come up in his field, and he is not the only one whose fruit takes a while to taste.

We at TEC, by God’s grace, have tasted some blessed fruit. It’s not perfect. We haven’t arrived. But the feedback we’re getting (especially over the last year or so) shows what sort of work we’ve been doing. I do not mean feedback such as, “Oh, those people at TEC are nice,” nor am I referring to the work done by the elders or leaders. What I mean is the feedback of our corporate joy and maturing and our unified irritation over the governor’s restrictions on worship. That feedback comes from the work we’ve been doing, and the work that has been done on us, through our Lord’s Day liturgy.

TEC is a week shy of ten years old. Many of the relationships among us are twice that long, and our total number these days is a little more than half from one other church. When TEC started we started by considering our worship. The first Sunday I preached from Revelation 5, getting our focus onto the worthy Lamb. The motivation was to keep us from becoming the F.O.G., the Fellowship of Grievances. It is easy to gather a group around shared complaints, until the complainers “bite and devour one another” (Galatians 5:15).

Contemplating Christ, praising His glory, hearing His call for us to obey as His disciples, was not new to any of us. What was different were some of the unspoken parts of our service. Most of us were familiar with singing songs to prepare our hearts to hear the Word preached in the sermon. Perhaps there was a Scripture reading, even a corporate prayer, then maybe another song or two after the sermon, either for an altar call, or a pew call, where you could think a little longer about the message.

That is an order of service, a liturgy. Every church has a liturgy, whether it is simple or sophisticated, whether it is meandering or direct, whether it is admitted or contradicted. I myself, as a mostly Baptist, had never belonged to a church which practiced much more than the Sing, Read, Pray, Preach, Sing pattern. Especially in the churches who cared about truth, theology, Bible, it made sense for the pulpit and the preaching to be in the center.

It may be facile to describe it this way, but that sort of worship service is more like a melodic classroom where you pay every week instead of once a semester. Some of you may remember me talking about truth-tubes. I imagine a science lab with rows of skinny beakers ready to be filled with whatever truth they can collect. It’s as if the goal of the Christian life, and the church’s worship, is to accumulate more accurate sentences and good thinks.

That is wrong on a number of levels, and it is one reason why even conservative, orthodox, Bible-preaching churches have struggled so much over the last nine months. Their liturgy has not prepared them, and they are getting the feedback.

Like the tubes, believers may not be empty, but they are disconnected from the other tubes, even if they are next to one another. Like the tubes, most Christians are an audience, waiting for someone to fill them up (which can, it turns out, mostly be accomplished through screens). They are collecting truth, and trying to avoid cracking, these seem to be the goals.

This is not much of a defense against the world’s efforts to conform us. Even if it isn’t new, the world made clear this last year what it wanted and wants with us. Here is my list of what our rulers and our experts want with us.

The world wants us to be complaint.

Sometimes t[...]