Thank you for joining us on the Church and Family Life podcast. Today we have Tom Askell, a defender of faith, really grateful for this guy. We're here, we're going to talk about the regulator principle of worship in contrast to the normative principle of worship. Hope you enjoy the discussion. Enjoy the discussion.

Jason, we talk a lot about our distinctives. They really are confessional distinctives. You know, we've believed for many years that churches should embrace a historic confession. What we've been saying is we think churches should embrace the Baptist Confession of 1689. If you're a Presbyterian, you know, it's okay to be a Presbyterian, kind of, but you or the Westminster because they're just so like-minded in really fundamental areas.

And we're thankful. We've seen really a resurgence of churches devoting themselves to the confessions and particularly in our network but not just there, all over the place. So one of those distinctives is the regular principle of worship. Yeah I think I was in my early 30s before I ever even heard the term, and then I thought, why didn't somebody tell me about this earlier than this, because it's so foundational, it really shapes the way you think about church life. If you embrace this, you end up with a radically different church life than if you don't So it's a good time for people to be learning about it now, no matter how old you are.

Let's start with definitions Let's let's try to define the regulator principle course our our confession does but let's just talk about what we're talking about when we speak of the regulator principle. Tom, what are your thoughts? Yeah, well the confession of faith 1689 in chapter 22 tells us that all worship should be limited to that which God Himself has instituted, or that which is regulated by Scripture. And basically, the difference has been, as you know, historically, the debate between the normative principle or the regulative principle. The normative principle says, you know, what the Bible doesn't forbid is allowed, and the regulative principles, what the Bible doesn't prescribe, is not allowed.

And one way I try to simplify it for folks is, you know, you ask what should we do in worship or can we do that? Why regular to principle or why not? The normative principle. And so we're always wanting to know why we do what we do in worship. And we're talking about the essentials of worship, the elements of worship, not the incidentals, you know, not the things like air conditioning, time of worship, chairs or pews, things like that, but what do we actually do that constitutes worship?

And so it's important, you know, does the One question I put to young people pretty regularly is, hey, does God have anything to say about how we worship? Does God care about how we worship? And whenever you start asking that question and going to the scripture and thinking about answers that we find in scripture, it's pretty quickly determined, yeah, God does care. He's the one we are worshipping, and we ought to worship him the way that he says he desires to be worshipped. So that's a vitally important subject, and I'm glad that we're talking about it today.

So you have these two different principles, the regular principle of worship and the normative principle of worship. And I think of it like this, we're asking and answering two fundamentally different questions. The regular principle is asking and answering the question, what must we do? So you open up your Bibles and you try to answer that question. What must we do when we worship the God of this book?

And then you restrict yourself to whatever answer you come up with out of that book. The people who subscribe to the normative principle are asking a very different question, what must we not do? And then they're looking for explicit prohibitions, and then once they've answered that question they think anything else is fine. And it really does land you in very different places. Your church life will look very different depending on which question you're asking and answering.

You know, the modern church has really gravitated toward the normative principle. But the normative principle limits creativity. The regular principle limits innovation. The regular principle limits change in the church. And but people today they want change, they want something new, they want something more innovative and exciting.

And I grew up, you know, as a young pastor, having gone to a seminary in California, where creativity was touted as one of the most valuable assets that a pastor can have. And it's kind of like the most creative guy wins. But the regulatory principle really contradicts that. Yeah, you're exactly right, and I think you're being generous when you say that most churches today are governed by the normative principle. I'm afraid that many of our churches in the evangelical world aren't even thinking about it.

Does the Bible have anything to say about worship? It's all about creativity. What is it that attracts people? What is it that communicates to this generation? That's why you have out at Saddleback Church with the husband and wife that succeeded Rick Warren dressing up as movie characters and child's movie stars and coming out on the platform in a Sunday morning worship service is because they're not thinking about what the Bible says or does God say anything about worship.

They're just trying to be creative. They're trying to communicate. I mean, how many times have we heard, you know, this church is not your grandfather's church. You know, we're here to reach the younger generation. And it's as if the folks that do that think that the younger generation, they don't have any brains, you know, or they're not really concerned about what the Bible says.

They just want to be entertained. And that's not what I found. I found where people are serious and willing to engage in serious conversations about eternal matters, that they want to know if God says something in Scripture, and are willing to look into the Scripture. But so much of what goes on in the name of worship today doesn't even pause to ask that question. Let me introduce two texts of Scripture that I think really get to the heart of this.

The first is the Apostle Paul in 1st Timothy 3.15. He says, I write so that you may know how you ought to conduct yourself in the house of God. That's a really good starting point. Is there a way that we ought to conduct ourselves in the house of God? And if there is, we better be finding out what that way is.

The second is a really informative text, Leviticus 10, 1-3, and it's Nadab and Abihu, I'll just read verses 1-3. Leviticus 10, 1-3, then Nadab and Abihu, the sons of Aaron, each took a censer and put fire in it, put incense on it, and offered profane fire before the Lord, which he had not commanded them. So fire went out from the Lord and devoured them, and they died before the Lord. And Moses said to Aaron, this is what the Lord spoke, saying, By those who come near me, I must be regarded as holy, and before all people I must be glorified. So Aaron held his peace.

So a couple things that are noteworthy from there. What they did was not something that was explicitly forbidden. In other words, you can't go, you find a commandment that says don't do what they did. And actually the text itself says that what they did, they did something he had not commanded them. In other words, God's expectation was they would be doing only what he had commanded them to do.

God is the object of worship, and so as the object of our worship, he ought to be saying what pleases him, how we can worship Him in a way that pleases Him. Just one more point to finish that. Well, like the quote of God in this text is, by those who come near me, I must be regarded as holy. Holy just means other, separate. When we bring our own worship innovations, we're treating God like he's like us, like he's not separate and other than us.

And God says, when you come and worship, I have to be regarded as not like you, as separate from you. You know, I think that's why the Bible explicitly condemns all worship that's not commanded by God. I'm just gonna read some verses for people who wanna look them up later. Leviticus 10, one through three, Deuteronomy 17, three, Deuteronomy four, two, Deuteronomy 12, 29 through 32, Joshua one, seven, Joshua 23, six through eight, Matthew 15, 13, Colossians 2, 20 to 23. There are other places, but it's so clear that God wants his people to worship the way that he has commanded them.

And the problem with the normative principle is that if you reject the regular principle, then the church becomes subject to the next creative guy. The most persuasive, the most powerful, the most interesting person now is running the church and is bringing in all kinds of inventions that really are titillating, that really are interesting and that really do interest people. That's the problem with the normative principle. I'm reminded of a book that Andy Stanley, who pastors in the Atlanta area, wrote years ago. It was called Can We Do That?

And in the book, he's actually advocating for asking that question, like, why not? Do try things and experiment. And I was a young pastor when I read it, even back then though, I realized this, if you follow this principle, there's no guardrails. You're gonna go off the road at some point and over the cliff, and the scriptures that you just referred to, obviously indicate that no, God's the one we worship, and he gets to determine how we should worship him. I've described it like this to our people before.

You know, if you want to honor me, You say, Hey, let's honor Tom. If the congregation got together and they said, we're here really wanting to honor Tom, let's throw a big banquet in his name for his honor. And then they make the main dish, fried liver. I'm not gonna eat, you know, because Tom doesn't like fried liver. So they at least ought to ask what I like, you know, if they're going to do something in my honor.

We're going to call this the Fried Liver Pot Podcast. So there's a fascinating account in Second King 16 versus 10 through 16. I'm not going to read it, but if you want to look it up later, it's 2nd Kings 16, 10 through 16. And in it, King Ahaz travels to Assyria, and in one of the pagan temples he sees a super awesome altar and he actually gets the design of it and sends the design back to the high priest in Jerusalem and he says we ought to have an altar like this, make an altar like this, and they do that. Now here's what here's what's so interesting to me.

They don't have the courage to just throw out God's altar, meaning the one prescribed by God. They just move it over into the corner and start using it for a secondary purpose. And this really sort of illustrates the point, I think. Every time you bring in something that God hasn't commanded, none of us would have the courage to say, we're not going to do preaching anymore, we're not going to do prayer anymore, we're just going to move it over into the corner and give it a secondary value while we take our invention and sort of put it front and center. Every addition has replacement value to something that God gives us.

And I think what we want to say to people is, as the people of God, we just need to trust God knows what's best for his people, and the worship that is pleasing to him, and just give ourselves to those things, knowing that in the end it will be best. Yeah, one of the things I've noticed in looking at the worship from the Old Testament to the New Testament and the progression of how God's people were to worship Him is you go from complex and highly ceremonial to that which is very simple because all of those ceremonies in the Old Testament were pointing to Christ and Once Christ has come well now those ceremonies are no longer necessary And what we find in New Testament worship is just very a great simplicity that focuses on Christ. And Paul says in 1st Corinthians 11, the first couple of verses, that he feared for the church at Corinth that they would lose that simplicity that is in Christ. And so if we're thinking biblically and we recognize what God wants from us as we corporately gather in worship, Christ should be front and central. And if Christ is front and central, then all of those other things that might have some value that we think is a benefit entertainment-wise or attractional-wise, they will be completely unnecessary because we have Christ.

And if we would focus more on Christ and study Christ more, know Christ more and preach Christ more and sing Christ more, I think that our people would recognize, No, this is precisely how we ought to come before God in worship, is looking to the provisions He's made for us in the life and death and resurrection of His Son, the Lord Jesus. You know, how does, let's try to compare and contrast, and I want to ask a series of questions along this line. How does the normative or the regulator principle affect your view of God? How would you guys answer that? I'm gonna just ask a few questions like that in the next couple of minutes.

How does it affect your view of God either way? Well, I think the normative principle tends to be very man-centered because we're looking for things that we can do that actually have no no direct line to anything that you find in Scripture. Well then who's being worshiped? I was looking for an opportunity to quote John Knox, so I'll take it now. Here's what John Knox said, all worshiping, honoring, or service invented by the brain of man in the religion of God without his own express commandment is idolatry.

What's John Knox saying there? He's saying when you invent things for the worship of God, you're actually not worshiping the God of Scripture. It's idol worship. He doesn't know who you're worshiping. He just knows it's not the God of the Bible.

Thank you for doing that. You can read that quote in this book, Counterfeit Worship, three essays on the inventions of man and the worship of God, and there are three authors, I'm one of them. But John Knox is devastating on the normative principle. Tom, what are your thoughts? Yeah, and at the end of Hebrews 12, you know, it tells us that we are to worship God and offer up acceptable worship to Him with reverence and awe for our God is a consuming fire.

So, being casual and being indifferent and just, you know, going to church and thinking, man, what's in it for me? Is this going to hold my attention today? If the scriptures are regulating worship, then we're going to be thinking about this God who is a consuming fire and we're going to remember that and we're not going to be light and trite in our approach to him. All that we do will be with a sense of reverence. That doesn't mean stiff and starch and you know made up but it does mean no we'll realize we're not here for ourselves.

We're here in the presence of the God who kills people, who raises people from the dead, the only God there is, and he's he's been worshipped in reverence and all. You know those those are just in really important individual impacts. How does it impact the local church as a body to embrace one or the other? I think it sends a right message whenever we worship being regulated by Scripture that we are here for God. What Jason says, right, this is not up to us.

We're not trying to manufacture something. We're trying to be submissive to the one to whom we belong by creation and redemption. And so when unbelievers come among us, That 1 Corinthians 14 passage that says, you know, when the unbeliever is there and sees God's people worshiping, he'll be convicted. The thoughts of his heart will be exposed, and he'll fall down and say, hey, surely God is among his people. Well, That's what we want.

We're not there for ourselves. We're not there to get something out of it for ourselves, though we do. We're there for God. We're there to offer up to him worship. And whenever unbelievers come among believers who are dialed in to that, There is a kind of a doxological evangelism that takes place when unbelievers see God's people worshiping him together according to his will.

You know, people who don't know, they know what coolness technicians look like. And, you know, And the church has embraced the idea that pastors should be coolness technicians. But I marvel at how people don't see that in a lot of these massive Joel Ulstring kind of churches. But a person whom God is really moving in their heart They can they can see through the sham. Hopefully That you know that this this church is focused on God not on coolness So let me let me give you the confessional language.

So this is from the 1689 Baptist Confession of Faith, chapter 22, which is on worship. It says, the acceptable way of worshiping the true God has been instituted by himself, and therefore our method of worship is limited by his own revealed will. He may not be worshiped according to the imagination and devices of men. He may not be worshiped by way of visible representations or by any other way not prescribed in Scriptures. So the key word here is limited.

Wait, we're Americans, we don't accept limitations. Actually, we're Christians, and we do accept limitations. Amen. That reminds me of Colossians 2.23. I think the ESV renders it.

Self-made religion, or man-made religion. Boy, that's a danger that we can all fall into. And yet if we're committed to the understanding that no God prescribes his worship and we are to seek to follow that and submit to it, we'll be spared going off in some of those bad tangents. You know, when we have a membership class in our church, we'll tell the people that the elders in this church are bound by oath to embrace the 1689. And so what we say is, look, when you come back here in 10 years or 20 years or 30 years, you're going to find a regulative principle church unless there's some great calamity that might take place.

But it actually provides a continuity and a stability to a church, you know, to embrace the regulator principle so that the church is not running in whatever way they want to because of the next pastor, the next elder group, or the next loud voice in the church, we're limited to a particular set of things. One last question, how do you think the normative or the regulative principle would affect a family. Because, I mean, we're all advocates of bringing children into the worship of God so that children are being inculcated in the regulative principle, right? And we're just doing the things that God commanded us to do. And we think it's the most beneficial thing you can do for children to hear preaching, to hear the reading of the word, to hear Anne's singing and all the things that the church is required to do.

Let's talk about just lastly, the impact on the family. Well, Scott, you and I both have a lot of grandkids and, you know, periodically, one of those grandkids when we're singing will climb up in my arms. And there's one little girl particularly who's about five years old, six years old now, just turned six, and she watches every wrinkle on my face when I'm singing. I mean, she just, she's zeroed in on me. And other kids will look around and they'll see their parents or other adults singing, praying, and we're making a testimony for our children that there's a God in heaven and he is worthy of our worship.

And you know, if you don't send them off to children's church, well when you do send them off to children's church, what are you saying? Well there's something special about children that we tailor church to them. Well No, we're actually testifying against that, that God has described for us how he's to be worshiped. And that's true for men, women, children. It's cross-cultural.

It's cross-generational because He's God. And that is a man, you're setting your kids up for entering into a right understanding early in life and not having to overcome a lot of bad understanding by following the regulatory principle in worship. Amen. Jason, last shot. Let me enter one final quote into the record, and it is Jim Elliot, missionary martyr.

He was martyred, he gave his life for the gospel in 1956. He said this, The pivot point hangs on whether or not God has revealed a universal pattern for the church in the New Testament. If he has not, then anything will do so long as it works. But I am convinced that nothing so dear to the heart of Christ as his bride should be left without explicit instructions as to her corporate conduct. I am further convinced that the 20th century has in no way simulated this pattern in its method of Churching a community it is incumbent upon me if God has a pattern for the church to find and establish That pattern at all costs and I think that's really the heart behind the regular principle.

Amen. It makes for a solid and stable church that's focused on God. It really focuses the whole church on God and what a blessing that is. So you know if anybody is considering going to a normative principal church I think we just want to say reconsider because there are substantial differences in normative principle and regulatory principle churches and I think that we really want to see more regular principal churches planted and reformed as well because many are doing that right now. It's actually a very encouraging moment in the history of the church.

I think we've all seen that. Tom, thank you so much for joining us. Really, really appreciate you. Well, glad to be here with you, brothers. Thank you for all that you do.

Thanks, man. And thank you for joining us on the Church and Family Life podcast, and We hope you can join us next time.