Revelation 12:13-17

August 23, 2020

Lord’s Day Worship

Sean Higgins

The sermon starts around 20:20 in the audio file.

Or, Why Is All of This Happening?

Good liturgy does more than check the boxes of what someone has said is good to do at church. It’s more than well-arranged hooks to hang meat on, though it does give opportunity for content delivery. Good liturgy is like a recipe for making food that tastes good and fills you up, even though you usually don’t think about all of the individual ingredients while eating dinner.

Good preaching also does more than meet certain standards of public speaking with the additional concern of theological accuracy. Good preaching pleases God as God’s Word is proclaimed, good preaching feeds and equips the saints, it even rebukes and corrects. Good preaching consecrates the living sacrifices as it renews the minds of believers, and it should stimulate faith in the Word which promises blessing.

On an annual basis I take a break from whatever series I’m preaching through and focus on the subject of corporate worship and liturgy. Most of the time the liturgy just works on us, sometimes we attend to how it works on us.

I don’t remember the last time I got specific about why I preach the way that I do, and what I expect to come from it (interestingly enough, was probably during a message about where preaching fits in the liturgy). For sake of some of you who are new to the flock, or growing up in it, here are some of the things always dancing around my mind.

I love studying the Bible. One of my favorite things to do is diagram verses. I love to see the grammatical main point and the syntactical modifiers. I enjoy reading the Bible, reading books about the Bible and commentaries on specific parts of the Bible. I am fanatic about paragraphs, about context, and about considering as much as possible what the original readers would have understood before taking advantage of the larger context of all 66 books, a blessing we have, but one that belongs in its place.

I got to spend eight and a half years in Bible college and seminary, I have been preaching on a regular basis for over twenty years, I know that I have extra accountability as an elder and as a teacher (James 3:1), and I still want you to see the Scripture and understand the text and learn how to read it for yourself. I’m not abdicating my authority, I’m using my authority to get you to see that my authority is attached to the Word, and you can go straight to the Word, too.

Some of you have heard me talk about my attitude on this a lot, or at least a long time ago. Some of you are newish to the flock, and that’s great, and my goal is to affirm that I want you to get the Word, not get my word. It doesn’t mean that you have as much time, or interest, in studying it as I am blessed to do. But we’re only five hundred or so years into God’s people having their own copies. What an opportunity to read it, whenever you want, for yourself. I am responsible to teach, and you are responsible to see if what you’re being told is biblical (Acts 17:11).

When it comes to the book of Revelation, I’m trying to show my work. I’m not offering a special decoder key to understand it. In fact, apart from a dumb amount of reading on coronavirus and capitalism and constitutions, I’ve been spending most of my weeks reading a variety of options and interpretations to test my perspective, verse by paragraph by seal and trumpet and woe. When we come here together, I’m not sharing my opinion, I’m telling you my observations of the text, for sake of interpretation and application. This is true for Revelation, and it is a pattern for whatever you’re reading in the Bible.

I’m convinced that the prominent challenge comes from the fact that what John describes in Revelation has not happened like John describes. We’re either supposed to realize that his la[...]