The sermon titled 'An Ordinary Life Together' by Scott Brown emphasizes the beauty and simplicity of the life God calls his people to. It discusses the virtue of an ordinary Christian life engaged in the ordinary means of grace, the challenges posed by the current cultural environment, the importance of the regulated principle of worship, the weekly rhythms of activity at Hope Baptist, and the call to embrace the beautiful ordinary supply of God.

Okay, here in this series, joining it together, this session is called An Ordinary Life Together, An Ordinary life together. And it's about a lot of things, but I think centrally, it's about the beauty of the simplicity of the life that God calls his people to. And there are Five points I want to make, and maybe we could put those up. I want to walk through each one of these points. First of all, the virtue of an ordinary Christian life engaged in the ordinary means of grace.

The second point is the current cultural environment fights against the ordinary means of grace. Thirdly, the importance of the regulated principle of worship. Fourth, the weekly rhythms of activity at Hope Baptist. And then fifth, the call for the beautiful ordinary supply of God. So that's where I want to go in the next 30 minutes on this.

Let's begin with this first category, the virtue of an ordinary Christian life engaged in the ordinary means of grace. Now, God has given particular ways that His people are to gather together, what they ought to do together and how they ought to be with one another. And we've been talking about some of those things. But I want to speak of and glorify a simple life that God has provided for his people. To become a church member is to enter in to this new and simple and rhythmic life that is characterized by various means of grace that God gives.

We've been experiencing several of them just this morning so far. And we want the people at Hope Baptist to be deeply satisfied and invested in these rhythms. And we want to encourage every person who becomes a Christian to make these means the center of their life, that these are the things that they do before they do anything else. Maybe you have time to do lots of other stuff, hope you do, but at least invest your life in these means here. As a launching pad for everything else in your life, Lloyd-Jones once said that what the church needs to do most of all is to begin herself to just live the Christian life.

And he said that if we did that, people in the communities would fill the buildings and ask what is the secret of this life that these people are living? And so what we as elders desire from the members of the members of Hope Baptist is simply that we live like Christians, we think like Christians, specifically the ordinary Christian life that's described in the Bible. That's what we want. We're living as strangers in a strange land, and strangers live strangely. They prioritize strange things.

And we want to have a holy people who have taken their cues about the rhythms of life from God himself. And to have a life that's inclined toward heaven and works its way out in practical matters in this world. Now, there are a lot of different levels of this. We could speak about church life and what the church does, but many of the things in our lives are appointed for us by nature. Like some of you are mothers.

And because you're a mother, there are certain things that you do that children don't do. You have appointments that are different. If you're a child, you have particular responsibilities and appointments by God. If you're a father, if you're a friend, there are various defining functions that come directly from God. You know, I think, you know, I'm a father, I'm a husband, I'm a friend, I'm a church member, I'm a pastor, I'm an uncle.

So there are various appointments that God makes which define the focus of your life. And so to be satisfied with those is really important. So I'm here to try to cast a vision for an ordinary Christian life. The second point is that the current cultural environment fights against the ordinary Christian life and the ordinary means of grace, the way that I'll define them. A theologian by the name of Michael Horton recently wrote a book that addresses this issue.

He called the book Ordinary, Sustainable Faith in a Radical Restless World. And he starts the book with these words, radical, epic, revolutionary, transformative, impactful, life-changing, ultimate, extreme, awesome, emergent, alternative, innovative, on the edge, explosive breakthrough. And he says, ordinary is one of the loneliest words in our vocabulary today. Who wants a bumper sticker that announces to the neighborhood, my child is an ordinary student at Bubblingbrook Elementary. Who wants to be that ordinary person who lives in an ordinary town as a member of an ordinary church, has ordinary friends, and works in an ordinary job?

He says, our life has to count. We have to leave our mark. We have to have a legacy. We make a difference. And all of this should be something that can be managed, measured, and maintained.

And we live in a world where it's really not important to live an ordinary life, an ordinary Christian life. Living an ordinary Christian life means that we participate in the things that God has commanded us to do and be satisfied with those things. And there are these generational fads. And What Michael Horton is saying is that with boomers and millennials, the generational fad is an impatience and a disdain for the ordinary. He says, they share a passion for programs that deliver impressive, quick, and observable results.

In both cases, the invitation is to break away from business as usual, to think outside the box, and to do something great for God. And he quotes a woman who has gone through various cycles of this in missions and things like that. And she writes, after having a couple of children, Everyone wants a revolution, but no one wants to do the dishes. So I think that captures the spirit of the age. You want a life that's not yours.

You want a different life. You want to do something really great, and that's not what you're doing. It's just not that great to be a mom. It's just not that great to be a father. It's not great enough to be a church member.

You want something greater than that. So as elders, we want to encourage the members of this church to be satisfied with the ordinary means of grace for their lives. So relax, take a deep breath, breathe, breathe the air of heaven and let that be the air that creates your life. So we want to remind current church members of our life together and we want to instruct those here today who may become church members, that we're encouraging a simple, ordinary life in this church. Now, I think all of us would say, if we follow the Lord and do the ordinary things that he's called us to.

Extraordinary things will happen by his grace and by his spirit. They might not be honored by everybody in the world. They might not be called great by everybody in the world. And I also just want to submit that there are things going on in this church that are judged very plain and ordinary in the eyes of this world, but are massively significant. They're massively significant because they are intimately connected to obedience to God and so that makes them extremely significant.

But the world doesn't praise you if you follow God. The world only praises you if you follow them. So, hence, you know, this second point that the current cultural environment fights against the ordinary means of grace. We're here to fight against that fight. And the third category that I'd like to speak about is the importance of the regulative principle of worship.

Because the basis of this ordinary life is described in part by what theologians have called the regulative principle of worship, which states that the activities of the Christian life, particularly as they exist in the church, should be shaped by the Word of God and by the Word of God alone, and not by her inventions, not by her desiring to become like any contemporary culture, but that we must worship God only as we have been commanded in scripture. And there are various voices that have spoken about this over the years. Louis Burkoff, the theologian, said this. The Regulator Principle addresses the objective channels which Christ has instituted in the church. You can read about this in the Baptist Confession of 1689 in chapter 14 in paragraph 1 and in chapter 22.

John Owen said this about the ordinary means of grace. The means of grace that are enjoined, the means of grace are the enjoined duties of reading and expounding the scripture, of singing psalms to the praise of God, to the administration of the sacraments of baptism of the Lord's Supper, and diligent preaching of the Word, all of them with prayer." Spurgeon made a similar statement. He said, Whatever form of religion God has ordained, it is ours to practice it without the slightest variation, and to alter any one of the ordinances which God has enacted is a dire profanation, however reasonable that alteration may seem to be. It is by treason against high heaven, and it is not to be permitted in the Church of Jesus Christ. So ours is a call to satisfaction with God.

The world today wants to be cooler than God. And many people in the church today are coolness technicians. And it's always a temptation to try to keep up with the coolness technicians. I grew up in an era, I went to a seminary where it was actually advocated that creativity was a primary virtue of church leaders. And it's taken a while to realize how wrong that was.

We're not coolness technicians. We're not innovators. We are obedient children who do the will of God. A few years ago, I wrote a booklet called Counterfeit Worship, Three essays on the inventions of man in the worship of God. I wrote one essay.

Kevin Reed wrote another one. And John Knox, it's John Knox's treatise on counterfeit worship. And what Knox says is that all worship, which are of the inventions of man, are idolatry. So the church is regulated by God, shaped by the Word of God, not by inventions, not by culture, not by needs, but by the Word of God and by the word of God alone. Now, in order to save time, I would just encourage a reading of chapter 22 of the Baptist Confession.

This is the foundation of everything that I'm saying. And it's titled of religious worship and the Sabbath day and I I think I'll just read a short statement from the first paragraph which which says that the the acceptable way of worshipping the true God is instituted by himself and so limited by his own revealed will that he may not be worshiped according to the imagination and devices of men, nor the suggestions of Satan under any visible representations or any other way not prescribed in the Holy Scriptures." And the confession speaks of the various elements of worship, of prayer, and thanksgiving, of the reading of scripture, preaching, hearing the word of God I'm reading from paragraph five, teaching and admonishing one another in Psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord and also to the administration of baptism and the Lord's Supper are all part of the religious worship of God. And then the confession also addresses worship in families and that even in private families and in secret devotions one must consider the Word of God to regulate those activities as well. There's tremendous detail and clarity in our confession about that And so I want to just take some of these elements.

First of all, reading scripture. To be satisfied with the reading of scripture. You know, It's the wisdom of God that moves the heart. It softens, it guides, it comforts. And the truth of the matter is that the simplest, most uneducated person can receive enormous blessing from heaven just by reading scripture.

You know, it's important, and I wish I remembered this every time I read scripture, but I don't. It's so important before you read scripture to cry out to God and say, Lord, open my heart, do a supernatural work, take your Holy Spirit and illumine me. The simplest person can get more out of the Bible than the most sophisticated scholar on the planet. That's how God wired his word. You need to be the kind of person who meditates, savors, and considers the words prayerfully.

And that's a very powerful thing. There's nothing more powerful than that in a person's life. The second is the preaching of the Word. God has prescribed preaching for the saints to be edified. He uses imperfect men to preach a perfect word.

And there's, It's perhaps true, as many have said, there's nothing more important in a church than the preaching that happens in that church because it really sets the pace for how people think about everything. And so the preaching of the Word of God, Everybody knows how difficult it is to hear preaching because our minds wander. Some preaching is so riveting, some men are so gifted, and fortunately you guys get to listen to ordinary preachers. That means you need an extraordinary outpouring of the Holy Spirit. But cry out to God during the preaching that He would touch you, that He would move you.

You know, we're getting ready to have a new crop of interns come in here in about three weeks, and there are five of them that are going to come. We have them read a lot of books. Some people say We make them read too many books. That may be true. But here's what we tell them about the books.

If you find yourself rushing through the reading, it's without profit. We want you to read to be moved, to be moved. And I'll say the same thing about preaching. We want you to listen so that you'll be moved. Mike and I have felt that the people in this church are movable.

They listen. That's a huge blessing. It really is. We don't have this sensation that we're just hitting a brick wall, but that there is a heartfelt reception. We also know that that's not dependent upon us because we have many weaknesses in our preaching, many weaknesses.

They're grievous. But the preaching of the Word of God is critical in a church. We want you to come here to experience the simplest thing that God has put in the church, preaching. In our church, we try to bring everybody along with it. Like you know what we're going to preach.

We're going to preach on the next section in this conversation with women at the well. The men are going to meet tomorrow morning. We're going to discuss that section of scripture. We're going to pray about it on Wednesday night. You're going to get an email about it sometime Tuesday or Wednesday.

You know, and we're going to want you to actually live it and have it in your home. We want you to take the text and read it in your home, maybe all week long, to meditate on it. We want to center the consciousness of our church on the preached Word of God. If you want to know what's on our hearts for this church, look at the texts we're preaching on. That's what's on our hearts.

Then you have prayer. Prayer is given to the church for a number of reasons. You know, in the book of Revelation, In Revelation 5 verse 8, you have this remarkable scene that the 24 elders are falling down before the Lamb and they're all holding a harp. Guess what? Elders play harps in heaven.

I think that's guitars. Wouldn't you say? Probably elders are playing guitars in heaven, so you might as well start now if you're an elder. But anyway, they're holding a harp, these elders, and golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of the saints. They're holding these bowls, and these bowls contain the prayers of the saints.

And these are the prayers of the people of God that have been lifted up. They're like incense. And there's these prayers that have been incense to God in those bowls, they're precious. The prayers of the saints are precious to God. Now think about that for a minute.

Do you want to have a lot of prayers in that bowl? In those bowls? Are your prayers going to be in those bowls? Pray a lot. Fill the bowls up.

Fill them up. They're precious to God. We gather on Wednesday nights to pray and we pray here. We open up the time to pray at the beginning of our services on Sunday morning. We dedicate an evening to prayer.

We want you to come to prayer. We do. If you're not there, it hurts us, because we think we want to be filling up the bowls with prayers. And if you come to prayer and you're not praying, we would just encourage you to start praying. Everybody doesn't pray.

We want young men and young women to pray. We even want children to pray if they're praying in sincerity and truth. We want the men to pray who don't normally pray. We want to pray together. It's really critical that we do that.

Then there's singing. The church is a singing family. The church, God gives the church a way to unite that you don't find really anywhere else in society. The church sings. You know, the world listens.

The church sings. The church goes to get entertained. I'm sorry, the world goes to get entertained, but the church entertains one another with songs and hymns and spiritual songs teaching one another. So we're a singing family. We're a musical family in that sense.

And all of us lifting our voices together, it uniquely unifies us in our beliefs and even in our messaging of one another. We're saying the same thing to each other. You know, when I'm singing a song, I'm singing it to you and you're singing it to me. I'm being taught while I'm singing at the same time. And you have children actually, we're united in a unique way in our singing.

And then you have the Lord's Supper. The Lord's Supper is such a brilliant ordinance because it engages all of your senses, your sight, the sense of touch, your sense of taste, your hearing, you know, all these things are touched. All these senses are activated in the Lord's Supper so that we can see it and feel it and taste it and hear it. And God brings us together. This is just another one of the ordinary means of grace.

You know, when we started doing the Lord's Supper weekly, We wondered if people would just sort of it would just become routine. You know yeah here we are then that yeah We do this every week blah blah blah But I've I found that it's really beneficial One thing that it does a lot of things, one thing that it does is that after the preaching, which from time to time they're convicting things in the preaching, You end with the gospel. You end with the magnificent grace of God, the God who covers all of your sins, the God who supplies the righteousness of his son, Jesus, to all of your unrighteousness. You know, I was reading Psalm 15 this morning, and it was talking about, Lord, who may worship at your holy hill? And everything that was listed there, I violated every single thing.

And I'm thinking, Lord, I need your son. He is the one who's kept all of those commandments and never sinned in any of those ways that are listed in Psalm 15. But we taste and see that the Lord is good in the Lord's Supper by remembering his death and his resurrection until he comes. And then there's baptism and things like that. Okay, all of this to say that it's critical that we are regulated by Scripture alone.

This is the essence of the regulative principle of worship. And we don't want to invent the church in our own image you know in the Protestant Reformation What happened was the Reformers realized that only God could regulate worship. And as a result, there was a revolution that took place. And I mean it was a revolution in everything. It was a revolution in church life, family life, and even in civil life.

The reason is because they went back and said, what does Scripture say about this? So, as a result, you know, out went the worship of saints, Out went the worship of the Virgin Mary. Out went clerical haircuts. Out went the vestments of the clergy. Out went all this stuff because there was a desire to worship God in simplicity and in truth the way that He has defined it.

And so worship got a lot simpler. Not a lot of candles, not a lot of statues, not a lot of pictures, not a lot of pomp and circumstance. You know, there were dozens and dozens of offices that had been created in the church, And those were replaced by the two offices that are in the Bible, elder and deacon. Got a lot simpler. So we're here really to advocate a simple, ordinary life.

If that means that something radical happens, if that means that there are some great and wonderful earthquakes that take place in the culture, praise God. But our focus is to be engaged in the ordinary means of grace, of Sabbath worship, of private devotion, of prayer, and things like that. And I'm not all that interested in being focused on creating the next generation of transformational leaders. I'm really not. I'm really interested that we become a people who pray, that we become a people who love the Word of God, and we're moved by the Word of God, and that when we read it, we desire with all of our hearts to obey it, and we love one another from the heart.

And we find our lives being defined, not by these great and grand schemes, but by our simple devotion to Jesus Christ. It's out of that that issue all the other manifestations of your life. It begins very simply. God is perfectly able to do anything great he wants to do. But I don't think it's so important for us to produce the next generation of culture changers.

I just don't. It's the culture of our hearts. It's the culture of our church. Out of that flow the wellsprings of life. So all this to just advocate an ordinary life participating in the ordinary means of grace.

So if you want to become a member of this church we pray that that's what you get here and that it's a blessing to your soul. In some ways I want to say take a deep sigh of relief and throw your life upon God and his word and do the simple things that he is ordained for you he's good and he knows how to do is good so would you pray with me Lord we thank you for the marvelous array of things that you've brought us into to pray, to seek your face, to read your word, to hear preaching, to fellowship with one another, to care for one another, to love one another. Lord, you've called us into the sweetest things. We praise you. Thank you for creating such a beneficial and a sweet and a real community.

We thank you for this community of your church. We pray that you would just help us to obey you in it. In Jesus' name, amen.