The sermon discusses the Regulative Principle of Worship, emphasizing that worship should be based solely on scriptural commands rather than cultural or personal inclinations. The speakers critique 'creative Christianity,' which adapts church practices to modern culture, arguing that this approach starts with man rather than God. They highlight the importance of prioritizing scripture over tradition, culture, or personal experiences. Biblical examples, such as Nadab and Abihu's punishment for unauthorized worship, are used to illustrate the dangers of deviating from God's prescribed methods. The speakers assert that God's commands are liberating and that true worship should reflect scriptural patterns, not human innovations. They warn against the trend of adopting worldly methods in church, emphasizing the importance of maintaining scriptural sufficiency and acknowledging human depravity.

Good morning gentlemen welcome to a new day. We're here at another podcast to discuss Important issues and so this morning we have with us Steve bregge who's an elder at Hope Baptist. Good morning, Steve How are you? Great I'm doing very well. So Jason is a deacon at Hope Baptist, Jason Dome and Dan Horne is with us as well, another elder at Hope Baptist.

The focus of our discussion is the regulative principle of worship. It's enormously relevant to Christianity today. Today, I would just like to suggest that we live under the shadow of 50 years of creative Christianity, and that many of our modern church leaders believe that it's okay to create the church in the image of the culture in order to reach that culture and it sort of falls into the philosophy of you know while in Rome do as the Romans do and In the last 50 years we've been very good at creating a brand of Christianity that works in modern culture. The principle of creative Christianity is this. Find the best way to engage the culture.

Find the need and meet it. And the only problem with this principle is it starts in the wrong place. That's the fatal danger in the DNA of modern, creative Christianity. It starts with man. But biblical Christianity starts with God and with the proposition that there's a way that God desires his people to function, particularly in worship.

So we're here to address a fairly hot issue. So it brings in all kinds of questions regarding tradition, culture, preferences, experience. And in a lot of ways we want to present the idea that we ought to think sort of in the rock-paper-scissors matter that something overwhelms another thing. Something is greater and overrules the smaller. So when tradition contradicts scripture, scripture overrules.

When culture contradicts scripture, scripture overrules. When preferences contradict scripture, scripture overrules. When experience contradicts it, the same principle is in play. This is very important. We live in a day of sort of God told me Christianity.

When they explain their behavior, they say, well, God told me. Well, what do you mean, God told me? Often in the church, we have the same principle. We create the Church because God told me. Unfortunately, what God told them really doesn't have any reference point in Scripture at all.

And so we face this principle, in whose image should we make the church, God's image or our own? We try to encourage people in our own church to love the patterns of Scripture, to prefer them above their own inclinations. And We just finished ministering to some young men that came to be with us for a period of time. And after being with us, one of the men said, I don't think it should be called regulative because it's so freeing. He said, God's commands are infinitely liberating.

And that's really what we want to say here this morning, that we would not take lightly the Word of God. I would like to begin reading a section from the confession that our church subscribes to, the Second London Baptist Confession of 1689 to define what we mean by the regulative principle of worship. Article 22 in the Second London Baptist Confession on worship and the Sabbath day reads the light of nature shows that there is a God who has lordship and sovereignty overall is just and good and who does good to all therefore he is to be feared loved praised called upon trusted in and served with all the heart and with all the soul and with all the might. But the acceptable way of worshipping 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, nor the suggestions of Satan.

He may not be worshipped by way of visible representations like idols, statues, pictures, etc. Or by any other way not prescribed in the Holy Scriptures. So that should help us think about how to explain this doctrine. So we want to spend some time defining terms and giving a historical background on this whole matter and a number of the other practical issues. So let's first begin with definitions.

So there are two principles in play here that stand in contrast to each other. The first is the regular principle of worship, which is our topic this morning. And a very simple definition of that is this, whatever is not warranted by Scripture is forbidden. In other words, it's a going to the scriptures to answer this question, what must we do? And then we find what is revealed in scripture, the things that we should be doing in church life.

And we restrict ourselves to those things that we find have a clear warrant. The other principle is the normative principle. And a simple definition for that would be this. Whatever is not specifically prohibited by Scripture is permitted. And so if you ascribe to that principle, you're also going to the Scriptures with a question, but it's a different question.

Instead of what must we do, the question that you go to Scripture with is what must we not do? And you're looking for things that are specifically prohibited and then anything that isn't specifically prohibited you would view that as fair game and appropriate for for church life. These things are very extremely fundamental to how you view church life and what you think is appropriate for life together in the church. And most people may not even be aware, I can testify personally, you can grow up in an evangelical church and spend 30 years there and not even be aware of the terms, which is a tragedy because everyone is either in one camp or the other and it completely controls how you view church life and what you think is appropriate for our life together in the Church. Yeah, and let's just be honest.

I mean, we're all regulated by something. We're regulated by our own thoughts. We're regulated by the thoughts of other people. We're regulated by scriptures. Let's first acknowledge that all of Church life is regulated from somewhere.

And it's easy to think, well, this is a new thought. Well, really, actually, we are under regulations, really, by virtue of the nature of life itself. Right. And that's really the big problem, because We live in a culture that we don't feel like we need to be regulated. And I think you're right, Scott.

We are regulated by something, but oftentimes we think, well, we don't need to be regulated. We can be our own autonomous being. We hate the idea of being regulated. We hate law. We hate being told what to do.

However, we are the creature and God is the creator. He is the potter, we're the clay. And so, because of that, because He is God and we are His creatures, he has complete authority over our lives, or he should, we should recognize that. And so he gets to tell us what to do, and most importantly, he gets to tell us how we are to worship him properly. And when we think of the church gathering together and just, you know, the regulation.

If you look historically, the church government does decide how it's regulated. And if you look at a hierarchical church, in the end, that hierarchy is going to say, we get to say how every church runs. Or if you go straight congregational, you get to the point where who decides how you worship God. It's going to be the people gathered together and say, this is how we like to worship God, so this is what the church service should look like. And in any case that you find like that, in the end, the worship becomes man-centered.

The worship becomes men decide what is the right thing to do. And what they're denying is the fact that God said in His word that you're supposed to follow the pattern of sound words that I've given to you, that you're supposed to do these things that I've commanded. And the idea that we can come before the throne room of God and come however we want. In civil matters we don't think the same way. So why do we think before God we can treat God less than a civil magistrate in this world?

Are we also saying that our ideas are better than God's? So Paul writes to Timothy in 1st Timothy 3 15 I write so that you may know how you ought to conduct yourself in the house of God and this is a This is a concept that has become despised, that there is a way that we ought to conduct ourselves in the house of God. But Paul is clearly advocating that there are things that are appropriate in the church and things that are inappropriate for our life together in the church. And the question then becomes who decides since we will be regulated who decides and the best answer to that question is that the object of worship gets to decide how he's worshiped. Well that's why Paul said in Timothy in 1st Timothy 1 13 hold fast to the pattern of sound words, which you have heard from me in faith and love, which are in Christ.

So there's a pattern, and it's not our pattern, It's the pattern of sound words that are delivered, in this case, by the apostle Paul. And Paul uses the term pattern, which is the Greek word, tupas, to make an impression, to strike, to mark with a blow, to imprint where the die is harder than the medium, so that when it strikes the blank, the blank is nullable while the die is not. So that's why Paul said in Philippians 3.17, brethren, follow my example and note those who walk as you have for us a pattern." He uses that same term. So there's an idea of conformity. There's an idea of pattern that we find in the New Testament.

Of course, we find it in the Old Testament as well. But it's just another way of saying that God has authority over His Church by the Word of God. Not culture, not tradition, not preferences, but the Word of God alone. So we define these two terms, the regular principle of worship and the nominal principle of worship and Jason did a great job in defining those terms. What I find interesting about the regular principle of worship, just the term the regular principle of worship, if you look back to the Reformation, they probably didn't use the term the regular principle of worship.

What they did was, or what they may have called it was, the application of Sola Scriptura to the practice of worship. There's a classic story in the Protestant Reformation where John Knox is brought before the Bishop of Durham because he's been saying that the mass is idolatry. And the question on the table for him to answer, And they gave him time to answer it, is, did you really say that, and what did you mean by that? And he said, yes, I did say that, and I did mean that. And he said that anything to the honor and service of God that is not commanded by the express Word of God is idolatry.

And he was very precise in his use of words, not commanded by the express Word of God. And Knox acknowledges that our ideas, our practices might be, as he says, good or laudable or pleasant, but they're not commanded by God, and therefore they're idolatry. And in the end, we might think they're good, they're laudable, but in the end, they will lead to the place where all idolatrous worship leads. Where if you put man at the center and you say, this is what pleases me to worship, instead of saying what pleases God to worship, in the end you'll be passing your children through the fire. This is what happens time after time after time in human experience.

And we shouldn't think that it's going to be any different from us. We either say there's a standard of worship. We say that when we're standing in the throne room of God after, when we're all in heaven, is God going to tell us how to worship Him? And if He is, everything else should be focused towards moving so that the worship on earth is like the worship in heaven. And God does regulate it in heaven.

The angels are saying, holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty. They're not singing a rap song. And when we think of these things, yes, all these things apply. How do you think through what you should be doing in the church service because it should be a reflection of heaven. It should be a reflection of the type of worship that we will be doing eternally.

And if we're focused on ourselves on earth, we should be very concerned about whether we'll be seeing that in heaven. So let's spend some time just diving into the scripture that defines this principle, church life. We talked about Paul's admonition to hold fast to the pattern, the two-pots. We could go to Paul's classic statement in 2 Timothy 3.16, all scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work, establishing the principle that this is the standard and the pattern for all things. We could talk about the Lord Jesus Christ saying, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God.

There are a number of places that we could go to see this principle in operation, both in Old and New Testaments. So let's just talk around the specific text of Scripture that leads us to this conclusion. I think before we do that we even have to, I mean the Scriptures you mentioned, I mean they all point to the sufficiency of Scripture. And there is a difference between the sufficiency of Scripture and the regular principle. And it's not that somehow the regular principle is contradictory to the sufficiency of Scripture.

It's a statement that Scripture is very explicit to say that God has said how we're to worship Him. If you offer strange fire, you are to be put to death. I think Deuteronomy 12, I can read it from a translation but I think the best translation from the Hebrews is, you shall not worship the Lord your God such. Meaning, don't worship him like the pagans worship. We're so quick to bring in worldly things to worship God.

And then that same chapter, Moses ends with, what things, whoever I command you, observe to do it. Thou shalt not add thereto nor diminish from it. In worship, there are specific regulations for worship that don't apply to what job should you do. We each have a different calling, but we end up on the Sabbath day when we come before God, we're all supposed to come before God the same way. We have both unity and diversity in our life, and the unity is, as children of God, the unity is that we come before our father in the same way throughout the history of the church.

It's probably also a good time just to refresh our minds about hermeneutics and how to interpret scripture and the importance of understanding the full counsel of God. God did not give us in Romans 17, which of course doesn't exist, but a list. This is exactly how God wants to be worshipped, and he gives you a step-by-step list of how the church is to be set up, when these things happen, what exactly is supposed to be there. So we're not looking for one passage that outlines and details exactly how we worship God. But make no mistake about it.

Look at the whole Council of God and you will see that God has regulated his worship. And so what we do is we look through scripture, we look for direct commands, but We don't only look for direct commands that say, you shall do this, you shall do this. It's also a proper hermeneutic to deduce things from Scripture by good and necessary inference as well. I think a key thing that's related here is to answer the question, is there any such thing as a neutral idea? And to answer that question, I'd like to pull in Colossians 2.8.

Paul has given us this verse that really helps us think about this. And Colossians 2.8 says this, Beware lest anyone cheat you. The literal translation of cheat you here is plunder you or take you captive. Beware lest anyone cheat you through philosophy and empty deceit, according to the tradition of men, according to the basic principles of the world, and not according to Christ. And so what we'd like to argue is that there is no neutral zone from which to pull ideas, and that the church has many practices today that don't have a clear warrant from scripture, but do have a clear warrant in philosophy, and through the tradition of men, and according to the basic principles of this world.

And Paul has a very dim view of that. His view is that the church is cheated when that happens, that it's plundered and it's taken captive and not taken captive to God. We do want to be slaves to God, but certainly This is not the captivity that Paul is speaking of in Colossians. Dan momentarily mentioned strange fire. And that takes me straight to Leviticus 10.

And it's a very, very sobering passage and speaks directly to the issue we're speaking about today. How does God want to be worshipped? And so let me read the first three verses of Leviticus 10. Then they dabbed in a by-through, the sons of Aaron, each took his 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 the people I must be glorified." So Aaron held his peace. Aaron understood this. Aaron understood as you approach God he must be regarded as holy and that he must be glorified and so Aaron held his peace. But What's interesting about this little passage here is that it doesn't say, you're doing something which I explicitly told you not to do. What it says here is, you're doing something, you're worshipping me in a way that I never told you to worship me.

And the penalty for this is death. And so these two gentlemen were struck dead because they were worshiping God in a way in which he had never told them to worship him. And when we think about the church today and you read there that God is holy. What does the church today mostly use? It uses the same marketing techniques that the world uses.

We're gonna sell God with appealing to emotions, we're gonna sell God with excitement, we're gonna sell God with X, Y, and Z, and they're all coming straight out of the marketing world. But God is holy. He is separate. The way you quote unquote sell God is not that way. The way you do sell God is you proclaim the truth as it says in Romans 10.

How does faith come? Faith comes by hearing the word of God. A lot of the reasons that churches go to these other techniques and add these things to the worship service is they think they can save people in a different way than how God has said people get saved. People get saved by the preaching of the truth. That principle of staying with the way that God has ordained is really so beautifully illustrated in that Leviticus 10 text, because what it does is it shows the inclination of man's heart to try to do something different, to try to do something innovative.

And God's admonition was an admonition against innovation. They shouldn't have gone beyond what He had commanded them. And, you know, this tendency in the heart of man that we see today is not new. It is in the heart of man, so we'll continually have an inclination to try to invent things because we think they'll be more effective, we think that they'll be more enjoyable or whatever. They come from the fruit of our emotions and our thoughts, but not out of the heart of God.

And that was the problem with Nadab and Abihu. In the heart of every man is rebellion against God. In the heart of every man is rebellion against God. In the heart of every man is a desire to be God and to replace himself with God. So you see it in Genesis 4, you see it in Genesis 3, you see Cain saying, well, I offered this, you have to accept it.

And the answer is no. God doesn't have to accept it. God gets to define what an acceptable sacrifice is. And so even in Genesis 4 we see the same principle that plays out. So yes, it's from the very beginning.

We have always wanted to say we can approach God however we want. Yeah, and today you see a reflection of it. What's the driving principle of modern culture in the church? Follow your heart. You have a wild heart, go follow it.

Do what seems right to you. That's really the way that we think that our lives should be governed. And so we take that into the church. And then our churches become simply reflections of ourselves and our own hearts, instead of the heart of God. And when we look at Jesus Christ preparing a bride for him without spot and wrinkle, Even there is the concept that there is a standard that we're supposed to be moving towards.

It's not just, do whatever you want, you know, hey, we're purple today, we're green today. No, he's preparing a spotless bride. The bride is supposed to be moving towards a goal. There is something that God has set that says this is what the church should look like. And so we can trust that He has regulated that and He has revealed it to us.

There are always a number of dangers before the church in every generation. And the Apostle Paul in Colossians 2, 8 makes clear what it is. He says, Beware lest anyone cheat you through philosophy or empty deceit, and not according to Christ. Those are the threats that we face, and they are always trying to encroach upon church life. So another significant passage of Scripture that we should bring to the table, and it appears directly on the regular principle of worship is found in 2 Samuel 6.

And it's a good passage to talk about, and I'll read a bit of it, but it's a good passage because it really strikes at the heart of those who think that good intentions are actually good enough. Because we often hear that. Not only do we hear, well it works, it works, so we hear a lot about pragmatism. But we also hear the mantra, well they meant well. We're trying to worship God.

We're trying to figure this out. And so the idea is that as long as your intentions are good, as long as you're sincere, then still anything goes. But this passage here would speak directly against that. In 2 Samuel 6, I'll start in verse 3. So they set the ark of God on a new cart and brought it out of the house of Abinadab, which was on the hill.

And Uzzah and Ahiyah, the sons of Abinadab, drove the new cart, and they brought it out of the house of Abinadab, which was on the hill, accompanying the ark of God, and Ahiyah went before the ark. Then David and all the house of Israel played music before the Lord on all kinds of instruments of fir woods and harps, on stringed instruments, on tambourines, on cystrums, and on cymbals. And then you come to verse 6. And when they came to Nacon's threshing floor, Uzzah put out his hand to the Ark of God and took hold of it, for the oxen stumbled. Then the anger of the Lord was aroused against Uzzah, and God struck him there for his error, and he died there by the Ark of God." And so I remember reading this passage and thinking, wow, that is extremely harsh.

That is an unloving God. What does he think he's doing? This man, Uzzah, had probably no other thought in his mind than to protect the ark from stumbling and crashing onto this threshing floor and just making a mess of everything. And so his intentions, I suspect, were very good. He saw something holy about to stumble and he was going to protect it from falling to the ground.

The problem is he did not take the whole counsel of God and what he rejected was Numbers 415 where God says no one shall touch any holy thing of mine and that's exactly what Uzzah did. In an effort to protect something that was holy he disregarded God's Word and he touched something that was holy and the punishment for that from a loving God, a just God, was death and that's exactly what happened here. I think this is a great example because it goes to a critical point which is this. When we set aside the things that God has given us, the practices that have clear warrant in scripture, they always get replaced with something else. And in this case, carrying the ark properly with the practice that God had given them, carrying it with poles, had been replaced with lumping it in an ox cart.

And this was really at the base of what the problem was. They had replaced what God had given them with another method. And anybody who's ever taken an economics course is very quickly introduced to the concept of opportunity cost. And opportunity cost just means this, if you have a dollar you can only spend it once, because once it's spent, it's spent. You don't have the dollar anymore.

So if you buy object A with it, you can't buy object B because you already spent your dollar. And for the church today, the church has spent its dollar on the wrong things. And we're very exercised, we're very disturbed about how the church applies its resources to things that have warrant nowhere in scripture. Many of the modern practices in the church you can find no warrant for in Scripture. And it means that the dollar's been spent and that the practices that God has given the church, which is best for the church, by definition are neglected because you only have there's a limited amount of resources and you either spend it one way or another and when we Adopt our own practices and spend the best of our treasure and I don't just mean money when I say treasure I mean, you know the best of our time the best of our energy the best of our finances then you can't spend it a second time.

And so that's really one of the risks here. When we invent things, it's resources diverted away from the practices that God who knows everything and has given the best practices to his church, those things are neglected. I think as you're saying, as you spend that dollar on something else, the other thing is we get confused as to whose omniscient we tend to think of ourselves. This way is going to work better that we understand And what we don't realize is you could see them putting the Ark of the Covenant on an ox cart saying, hey, this is a lot easier. It's 30 miles.

Who wants to carry this thing 30 miles? We'll put it on an ox cart. This will be more efficient. We'll get it there. Everything will be going wonderfully.

And they don't recognize that the secondary effect of putting it on the ox cart is it's going to slide out and fall. And when we do all these practices in the church, we're not omniscient. We do not understand what the results are. So we say, well, hey, a puppet ministry is more effective than preaching the word, so we'll bring people to Christ with a puppet ministry. Well, we don't know what the secondary effects of that ministry are.

We don't know that they have the picture that somebody is putting their hand in God and putting their words into God's mouth. And all these things that we do, we're not omniscient, we're not that bright, we're pretty dumb people actually. God is infinitely wise and we're not and yet when we choose these other methods other than what God has said, we seem to think that we can believe we can expect and understand what all the outcomes are going to be and we don't we cannot see the future that way we're just not that smart you know one of the major issues in the Protestant Reformation was that the reformers were saying that the Roman Catholic Church had been spending their opportunity cost on what they called thralldom that they were spending it on hundreds of unbiblical practices. And the reformers would have nothing to do with this, and they wanted to look at everything happening in the church and ask, is this a command of Scripture? So out went the litany, out went the prayers to the saints, out went the pilgrimages, out went the indulgences and the kneeling at communion, and the cult of Mary, the tauntry of the funny monk haircuts, out went the purgatory, signs of the crosses, dozens and dozens of things.

And Calvin said that the church had been overcome by thralldom. And what he meant was that our tendency is to try to thrill the people. We keep them coming back. We thrill them with candles and kneelings and all kinds of things like that. And it does keep them coming back.

It does keep the cash flow up. You invent one new thing and there's new cash flow for it. And there's new interest. But what Calvin said is that this enslaved the people, that this thralldom enslaved the people. The Roman Catholic Church understood what every pastor or every megachurch pastor understands, that if you can thrill the people, if you can enrapture them, if you can give them something new, if you can create something so hot and interesting, they'll keep coming back.

And what's happened to the modern evangelical church is the same thing that happened to the Roman Catholic Church. It invented itself, whether it was candles or programs or whatever, and we've basically done the same thing. They invented all kinds of titles for their leaders and things like that and so the whole system was overturned and I guess what we would say is let's look at what forms of thralldom that are upon us today. And you can see that in church government, you can see it in church programs and all kinds of things like that. Scott, The classic example of this has to be Willow Creek.

Willow Creek has been held up as the example to be followed. It's the place you sent your leadership team to learn how to do church. And the reason was is they were drawing crowds like few churches ever have. And so that became the definition of success. Interestingly enough Willow Creek recently conducted a study and as a result of the study they came out and said you know we've gotten it wrong for the last 20 years.

It really hasn't produced the fruit that we had hoped for and thought So now we want to start again with the blank sheet. And we just want to stand up and say, this is madness, a blank sheet. God has given practices to the church. And what Willow Creek is freely admitting is they've tried out their best ideas on a generation and it didn't work and now they want to try out new ideas on the next generation As a father, I only have one generation. I don't have time for trial and error and that's where The timeless Word of God Giving the Church the practices that we can put our full weight on comes in.

And also, you know, this principle of rejecting the principles of Scripture and replacing them with your own in order to thrill the people, it always leads to liberalism. It always ends in apostasy. That's why you find, you know, the Willow Creek movement at this point is embracing the Emergent Church. It's headed in the direction that it started with. But I think we do need to, when we look at the Roman Catholic Church and understand where it was at the time of the Reformation, You really have to go back 700 years before that because then potentially sincere men, we don't know whether they were sincere or not, said, well, it's too hard to raise the people up to understand scripture so what we'll do is we'll put seven pictures up on the wall.

The seven stations of the cross and once they understand these pictures then they'll be saved. And so it can start with very sincere things where people are potentially saying this is easier to bring people to Christ. It will end up always is at 2 Timothy 4.3, For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine, but after their own lust shall heap up to themselves teachers having itching ears." And the people will say, hey, this is easier. Give us more of this easy stuff because we like this. This is pleasing to us.

And that's why we get Unbiblical practices like movie clips, like dramas, like women teaching men, like youth groups, like solos, like multiple services, like Coke and chips for communion, like rock and roll bands, these things are not founded anywhere in Scripture. You have unbiblical offices, offices that the Church has never heard of until modern times, like youth pastor, like singles pastor, like children's minister, or how about senior pastor. Alexander Strauch says, look in the New Testament until your eyes bleed, you will not find a senior pastor there. You mention all those things, Scott, and I think of liturgical dance. I mean, you could go on and on with the practices of the church.

And I'm sitting here thinking how constraining this must be, how non-liberating this is, how much of a slave, if I was to be a pastor of a church like this, trying to come up with all these innovative things, trying to make sure I hire the most creative staff, which is probably why you see ads for youth pastors and whatnot, Not so much concerned with whether or not they are steeped in the knowledge of the Word of God, but how creative they are, how innovative they are. And because you have things change all the time, we know if God's come and go. And so When you read that list, all I could think of is, wow, I would not want to be a slave to that kind of thing. There is no liberty in that. Because I'm constantly trying to figure out how to grow my church.

And there's got to be new, innovative ways. There's always a better way, but there really is no better way. And I think to my own self, I'm so steeped in pragmatism. I always, oftentimes the thought comes up, well, does it work? Is this going to work for my family?

Is this going to work for church? And that's not the question that I should be asking or that anybody listening to this ought to be asking. They ought to be asking, what does the Word of God say about this? And which is the perfect law of liberty? That's true liberation, is God has spelled it out for us.

We just have to be, and we do, we have to be diligent. It's not easy. It's not going to just fall on our lap. We actually have to labor. We have to know what God says, which means we need to be in His Word all the time.

You know, Calvin talked about those miserable men who habitually bind over their minds to thrall them in superstition. He says, but we feel that the undoubted power of His Divine Majesty lives and breathes in Scripture. He said there are two great pillars that Satan has erected his program, and that is ignorance and error. And so he said the first step of our mission from this spiritual thralldom consists of having our eyes opened and being turned from darkness to light. And to go back to Jason's comment about the opportunity cost, you know what Steve was saying about how you have to come up with all these clever things and you have to get your program down to a minute so that you keep the flow because, you know, hey, if you have a dead silence for a minute, you're going to lose everybody.

And in the end, what's the senior pastor focused on? He's focused on that creativity. He's focused on keeping the flow. He's focused on these other things. And what does Scripture say?

He's focused on ministry of the Word and prayer. And if you switch and disregard the regular principle, in the end the elder cannot be doing the things that Scripture commands because the opportunity cost is he has to be doing these other things instead of just focusing on the ministry of the Lord. I love what John Piper says about this. He says, what you win them with is what you win them to, which is really true. Churches who bring people into their ministry with all these creative methods are forever enslaved to having to one-up themselves to keep those people around.

Because what they said was, what's important is that you're pleased today with what's going on in the ministry of the Church. And the truth is, if we'll rely on the methods that God has given us, that people will develop an appetite for them. Absolutely true that we should just put our full weight on the practices that God has given us. And then the people of God will definitely learn to appreciate them and will never be able to be weaned off of them when people actually begin to regularly partake of the simple practices of God, just the preaching of the Word, the Lord's Supper each week, and singing together in praise to God and corporate prayer just these simple practices try to get somebody who's developed an appetite for those things to ever go back to these other churches where any sort of crazy thing can be done will be appreciated, they'll never be able to go back. And when you look at the Reformation in Scotland at the time of the Covenanters, you have 18, 000 people die because they're not willing to kneel before the wafer in the Lord's Supper.

You don't get people to be like that, to have that level of faith, that level of dedication to God, that level of willing to martyr themselves for the truth. If what you're bringing them to is interpretive dance, unless you bring them to the basic thing that God has done, you're not going to get people who say, no, these doctrines, what God has commanded is important. It just doesn't lead there from interpretive dance or puppet ministry or any of these things that the modern church uses. In the end, what you get is people that when push comes to shove they're going to run instead of stand firm and say no I will not kneel because it is idolatrous to kneel before the wafer. Right, and in the Scottish Reformation they died because they would not kneel.

Why? Because it's not in Scripture. Kneeling at communion is not found in Scripture, and so they would not do it. And so they were very careful to try to obey the pattern. So when You think about what you should do in church.

What about puppet ministry? Do you see that in Scripture? What about multi-site churches? Do you see that in Scripture? What about, just name it, do you see it?

If you do not see it in Scripture, then you have to ask yourself, is worship regulated by God? Or is it regulated by man? Am I free to go invent anything I want? Or am I limited? Can I do anything I want?

And we would say no, the answer is absolutely not. If you say you can do anything you want, then that's exactly what you'll get. And the church becomes subject to the next man that shows up. The church becomes subject to the next creative brain that enters the scene. Now you have the tail wagging the dog, because the next creative person will be the great mastermind of the church.

Does that make sense? Does that sound like biblical Christianity? Does that sound like a fulfillment of what Moses said, do not add or subtract? So there's broad agreements on the ends. In other words, the end points that we're striving to get to.

There's not a lot of debate there. The distinctions come in around the means. And the question is, does the means matter or is it just the ends? And we'd like to argue that the means matter the most, that we don't even control the ends. This is not a stimulus response kind of system where if you just pull the right lever, you get the right outcome.

God is responsible for those things. He's the sovereign hand over all the universe. He does what He pleases. He can't be thwarted. And it's in the means that we honor Him, honestly.

And He's given us the means to the extent that we have a mindset where we are very willing to constrain ourselves to the patterns of practices that He's given us. We honor Him. Paul planted a polished water and God gave the increase. We need to remember that. That it's God that gives the increase.

When we think it's our means that are giving the increase, we reject the Lord's Prayer. Give us this day our daily bread. Well, why ask God to give us our daily bread? We're producing it ourselves. No, in all things, God is giving the ends.

And so what we're responsible for is the means. I think of another passage that we can bring to bear on this. And it doesn't necessarily speak to the issue of worship, but it does speak to the issue of what happens when we decide to come up with our own innovative methods. And I think of Matthew 15, where Jesus is speaking with the scribes and the Pharisees. And the scribes and the Pharisees say, why do your disciples violate, basically, the tradition of man?

They don't wash their hands before they eat the bread. And Jesus responds and says, why do you transgress the commandments of God? And what these Pharisees and scribes were doing, they were transgressing. They had forsaken the Fifth Commandment to honor your father and mother. And the reason why they were doing that is because they thought they were doing a good work.

They were taking their money and they said, we had already dedicated this money to the temple, you know, the issue of Korban. Our money is tied up in the temple. We're very pious. We've got all this money we're giving to the church. I can't afford to be taken care of my parents at this point.

And so just another example that we see in the New Testament of what happens when we decide to come up with our own innovative things. We think that we're doing a good work and what happens is when we've not consulted the Word of God invariably we transgress a commandment of God. There's really two ways to look at the regular principle of worship. One is that you know it's very restrictive and it keeps us from things. And I guess in a sense that's true.

It does restrain us for sure, and it does keep us from things. But I think a better way to view it is that it keeps us for things, that it preserves us for the best things, and it keeps our resources for the things that at the end of the day will be the best for us. No matter which principle you subscribe to, you would have to say God knows best. God can see the end from the beginning. He directs the end from the beginning.

And that His ways should be trusted and His patterns should be implemented. You know, maybe one of the big principles here is that God does want to control your life. He wants to control your schedule. He gives you a day, one out of seven, to come and set aside earthly affairs. And in that day, He's given things for us to do, and we should do those things and not other things.

And so, like you're saying, Jason, he wants to preserve us for wonderful things. By regulating us, by limiting us, he focuses us. And he desires his people to hear the preaching of the Word. He desires his people to hear the reading of the Word. These are precious, wonderful things in his sight he wants to preserve his people for.

He wants them to sing. He wants them to take the Lord's Supper. He wants them to do all the things that he has commanded for the Church to do. He really is preserving us for wonderful things so that we don't in our own judgment make the wrong choice and do something that doesn't nourish the soul. And what's his purpose?

His purpose is that he would bring us to a level of delight that we never could have known on our own. So God desires to delight the soul of man, to care for it, and to nourish it, and he does it by regulating it. And part of what we forget is the doctrine of total depravity. And the reformers understood the doctrine of total depravity because they knew their own hearts, as we should know our own hearts, Because if we look at our own hearts and we start to do what's right in our own eyes, we don't go to good places. We don't.

I mean, it's that simple. And so if we think we're going to come up with a way that's better, we've rejected the idea that our flesh is evil and our flesh draws us towards evil things and draws us towards sin and it's the Word of God that preserves us. It's the Holy Spirit that leads us to righteousness. As soon as we say, well, we can come up with good things, we're just rejecting the doctrine of total depravity. My wife and I are first generation Christians, and we are endeavoring to raise our children in the nurture and ammunition of the Lord.

And so we often think, you know, we're called to think like a Christian. And so this is what we want to do. This is what I want to do every day, is to think like a Christian. But If someone were to ask me, do you always think like a Christian? I would have to say, no I don't, because of what I grew up in, because of my upbringing.

I don't often think like a Christian. I often think like a pagan. And So we can't go back and say, well, look, you went to a public school, or you were trained in this environment, or you grew up in this environment, and look how you turned out. You turned out pretty good. Well, I would reject that notion that I didn't turn out pretty good, because I still oftentimes in many areas think like a pagan, and I often have to go to Romans 12 where I'm called to renew my mind with the Word of God.

And so it speaks to exactly what you just said Dan, is that we've rejected in some way shape or form the doctrine of total depravity. So in embracing the regulative principle, we acknowledge the depravity of man and the goodness of God. And we want to proclaim the truth that man's law constrains, it defiles, it abuses, it distracts, it does many things. But God's law is wonderful. His ways are pleasant ways.

His ways set you free. He gives us the perfect law of liberty. So he gives us a principle to keep us from our own vain imaginations, and to keep us nourished on the sweetest things that God desires for His people from heaven. So we want to just try to encourage one another to humble ourselves, to be regulated, and to walk in a manner pleasing to the Lord.