Song of the Drunkards

JESUS FACED A CONSIDERABLE AMOUNT OF OPPOSITION FOR HIS HARD WORDS AND UNFLINCHING DEVOTION TO YAHWEH. NO SURPRISE THEN IF WE FIND OUR NAME FESTOONED IN BARROOM BALLADS (CF. PS 69:12).

Psalms & Worship

December 10, 2023 in Advent, Bible - OT - Psalms, Christmas, Meditations

Colossians 3:16 

16Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom, teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord. 

For Advent and Christmastide we are continuing our tradition of preaching through the psalms. So let us review once again why this is a fitting tradition. Why should we devote considerable time and attention to the psalms? In our day, various ideologies have divorced Christians from the OT. Consequently, Psalm singing has fallen on hard times, especially among Protestants. So as we recover this practice, let us consider the foundation Paul lays in our text today.

First, Paul identifies the content of our worship. We are to let the word of Christ, Christ’s own word, dwell in us richly. Jesus speaks to us today; He is calling today. But where? Paul tells us: He speaks in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs. In the Greek translation of the OT, these labels correspond to the various types of songs found in the book of psalms. Paul’s categories of psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs are, in other words, different ways of directing us to one book, the book of Psalms. It contains psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs which we are to sing. Why? Because they are the Word of Christ – Christ’s own words to us. When we sing the Psalms to one another, we hear Christ speaking to us in and through the voices of our brethren.

Second, Paul identifies the function of our worship. We are to teach one another and admonish one another. First, we teach one another. When we sing the psalms to one another, we expand our knowledge of God and our awareness of His work in the world. We teach one another of His righteousness, His mercy, His wrath, His love, His patience, His judgments, etc. The psalms force us to reckon with ways in which our own thinking differs from God’s thinking. When we sing a psalm and find ourselves disagreeing with its words, the problem is not with the psalm but with us. Consequently, we not only teach one another as we sing, we also admonish one another. We correct erroneous thoughts, summon one another to trust the Lord more fully, rebuke one another’s complacency, immorality, greed, idolatry, and deceitfulness. As we sing the psalms, we teach and admonish one another.

Third, Paul identifies the motive of our worship. We are to sing with grace in our hearts. True worship emerges from a heart that has been transformed by the grace of God. By nature, we are all sinners; we have hearts of stone, hearts that love neither God nor neighbor rightly. When God delivers us from our sinfulness by His grace, He changes our hearts of stone into hearts of flesh; He makes us true worshipers. By His grace, He transforms our loves and enables us to sing truly. While any sinner can sing the psalms with his lips; only a true worshiper, by grace, can join heart and lips together in song.

Finally, Paul identifies the object of our worship. We are to sing with grace in our hearts to the Lord. The Lord is the object of our worship. He alone is worthy of praise, thanksgiving, and honor. He has created us and not we ourselves; He has redeemed us through the precious blood of His Son Jesus. He has sent His Spirit to empower us to walk in newness of life. So we are to thank and praise Him, to sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs to Him, for He is worthy of praise.

So reminded that we are to sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs that we might teach and admonish one another as we worship the Lord, we must confess that much of the church has abandoned the psalms in favor of songs that do not teach and admonish. We often speak to one another our own words rather than the words of Christ. But even when we do speak the words of Christ to one another, even when we sing the psalms, we often fail to learn from our brethren, we often fail to correct ourselves.

Penitential Singing

December 3, 2023 in Advent, Bible - NT - 1 John, Meditations

1 John 1:8–10 (NKJV) 

8If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. 9If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. 10If we say that we have not sinned, we make Him a liar, and His word is not in us. 

Today is the first Sunday of Advent, the time of year when we recall both God’s promise to our fathers that one day He would send a Son of Adam to rescue the world from sin and death and God’s promise to us that one day that Son, whom we now know as Jesus of Nazareth, shall return in glory to vindicate all who have trusted in Him. As the beginning of a new year in the church calendar, there are a number of changes that occur in our service of worship. We have already recited a different call to worship and greeting. Soon we shall recite a different corporate confession and creed.

But while we change some of the details of our worship, we retain the central components or basic structure of our worship. And one of those central components is the confession of our sins. John reminds us that if we say we have no sin, we both deceive ourselves and make God a liar. If we confess our sins, however, God is faithful and just to forgive us our sins on account of Jesus’ death and resurrection on our behalf. The blood of Jesus cleanses us from all unrighteousness. Thus, while the specific wording of our corporate confession changes depending on the season of the year, the fact of our confession does not. As John implies, the closer we get to God and the more we meditate on His word, His truth, the better we will get at seeing and confessing our sin.

One of the resources that God in His kindness has given to us that we might learn how better to confess our sins are the penitential psalms. These are psalms in the psalter that model faithful confession – psalms like numbers 5, 6, 13, 22, 32, 38, 40, 42, 51, 56, 63, 80, 130, 137 and others. Alongside these psalms, the Cantus Christi contains hymns that likewise share this penitential flavor. 

Historically our congregation has sung many of these psalms and hymns in our service of worship. However, because we haven’t had a slot to sing them during the confession of sins, we have included them elsewhere in our service. This has resulted in the odd phenomenon of confessing our sins, hearing God graciously pronounce our forgiveness through Jesus’ death and resurrection, and then confessing our sins again later in the service. To avoid that odd phenomenon, our elders have decided to adjust the order of our songs and to begin including a penitential psalm or hymn as part of our confession. 

So this morning as we enter the presence of the Lord and are reminded of our calling to confess our sins to the Lord, let us turn to Psalm 130 and cry out to the Lord for His forgiving grace.

Christian Plodding

November 19, 2023 in Bible - NT - Luke, Church Calendar, Meditations

Luke 13:18–19 (NKJV)

18 Then [Jesus] said, “What is the kingdom of God like? And to what shall I compare it? 19 It is like a mustard seed, which a man took and put in his garden; and it grew and became a large tree, and the birds of the air nested in its branches.”

As Americans, we tend to have a love affair with that which is new, spontaneous, or instantaneous. As American Christians, therefore, we tend to grow tired of what we call the “same old thing” and hanker for some new fad or new teaching to invigorate our Christian walk. Now, of course, it is always good to push ourselves to grow and develop; to long for God to continue His work of sanctification in our lives; but the longing for some new experience rather than the pursuit of steady faithfulness reflects our cultural bias not our biblical grounding.

After all, what Jesus articulates for us in His parables of the kingdom is that the way the Holy Spirit works both in our individual lives and in the life of His Church is better pictured by the growth of a tree than the lighting of a sparkler. Sparklers, of course, are fun and exciting – they burn bright and shed their fire on all around them. But sparklers soon burn out while trees, planted and taking root, slowly grow over time; growing almost imperceptibly, soaking up the nutrients in the soil and increasingly displaying the glory of their Creator and becoming a nesting place for the birds of the air.

This steady, slow, natural growth is the way Christ typically works in the lives of His disciples. Normal Christian growth involves long periods of steady plodding – plodding that brings prosperity but plodding nonetheless. Typically God’s work is characterized by slow growth, gradual transformation – through what theologians have called the ordinary means of grace: reading and hearing the Word of God and participation in and meditation upon the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Steady plodding. Few sprints; mainly marathons. A long obedience in the same direction.

You may not know, but the last six months in the Church Year – roughly June through November – are called “ordinary time.” During these months there are no special feasts or celebrations; just the regular time of the Spirit’s work in the Church, during which we count one Sunday after another. This season fittingly follows Pentecost – for after Christ poured out the Spirit, the Spirit began working in the Church, gradually transforming the people of God into the image of Christ. Hence the color of this period is green, a color of growth. Tree-like growth.

In a couple weeks we’ll be introducing some liturgical changes as we enter a new church year with Advent’s arrival. We will have a different Call to Worship, a different Confession, a different Creed – this year we’re even going to be introducing a change in the order of songs. Before we change, I wanted to draw to your attention the fact that for the last six months we have not changed these things. 

Why have we done this? There’s no biblical requirement that we use the same words week by week. We could have changed them weekly, monthly, or periodically. God has left such decisions to the wisdom of church officers. And for six months we’ve chosen to use the same ones. Perhaps you noticed; perhaps you’ve wondered if this is ever going to change. And perhaps you’ve thought the same thing about periods in your own life and spiritual development. And the message of Jesus is that He is at work growing His kingdom and even growing you – so trust Him and keep plodding. Look to Him in faith; He is at work.

Reminded that Jesus’ work in our lives is often gradual, like the growth of a tree, we are alerted that often our hankering for something spontaneous or new or different is not an impulse of our Christian faith but our Americanness. And this reminds us that we need to confess our fickleness to the Lord and ask Him to enable us to practice a long obedience in the same direction. So let us kneel as we confess our sins together.