Why We Worship This Way
WHY WE WORSHIP THIS WAY
The Biblical Case for the Call to Worship, Corporate Confession,
the Assurance of Pardon, and Written Prayers
DWIGHT BAPTIST CHURCH | GADSDEN, ALABAMA | EST. 1897
A pastoral letter to the congregation, written in answer to real questions honestly asked. Read it with your Bible open. Nothing here asks you to trust me. It asks you to check the text.
I
The Question Behind the Question
When someone asks why we are doing all this new material in the service, the honest answer is that none of it is new. What is new to us is that our order of worship is now deliberate rather than inherited.
Every church on earth has a liturgy. A liturgy is simply the shape a service takes. Three songs, announcements, special music, sermon, invitation, dismissal is a liturgy. It is just a liturgy nobody chose on purpose, and one that is younger than most of the hymns we sing inside it.
So the real question is not whether we will have a liturgy. The real question is this: who decides the shape of worship, and by what authority?
II
Who Decides How God Is Worshiped
Everything that I command you, you shall be careful to do. You shall not add to it or take from it.
Deuteronomy 12:32 (ESV)
God struck down Nadab and Abihu for offering worship he had not authorized, and his verdict was, “Among those who are near me I will be sanctified, and before all the people I will be glorified” (Leviticus 10:3). Worship is not a matter of taste. It is a matter of obedience.
This is what our confessions call the regulative principle. Westminster Confession 21.1 and the Second London Baptist Confession 22.1 both teach that God may not be worshiped according to the imaginations and devices of men, but only in the way he has himself appointed in Scripture.
Notice what that principle actually does. It does not sweep the service clean and hand us a blank page. It hands us a list of things God has commanded: the reading of Scripture, preaching, prayer, singing, the ordinances, confession, blessing. Our task is to include what God commanded, not to invent what he did not.
THE POINT
Everything we have added is on that list. Not one part of it is our idea.
III
God Calls, We Respond
From Genesis forward, worship never begins with man. God always speaks first. Adam hides and God calls out, “Where are you?” (Genesis 3:9). Israel camps at Sinai and God summons them up the mountain (Exodus 19:3 to 6). Isaiah does not climb to heaven; God opens the throne room to him (Isaiah 6:1).
This is why our service opens with a Call to Worship read from Scripture rather than a greeting from a man. We do not gather ourselves. We are summoned. The first voice you hear on the Lord’s Day ought to be God’s.
Oh come, let us worship and bow down; let us kneel before the LORD, our Maker!
Psalm 95:6 (ESV)
Psalms 95, 100, and 24 are not devotional poetry that happens to sound churchy. They are summoning texts, written to be spoken over an assembling people. Psalm 24:7 commands the gates to lift up their heads so the King of glory may come in. That is a call to worship, and it is inspired.
The New Testament raises the stakes rather than lowering them. When we assemble we are not merely in a building in Etowah County.
But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering
Hebrews 12:22 (ESV)
If that is where we actually stand on Sunday morning, then opening with announcements and a joke is a strange way to begin.
IV
Confession of Sin: What Israel Did
The most common objection is that corporate confession feels Roman Catholic. That objection has the history exactly backward. Corporate confession is Israelite. It predates Rome by more than a thousand years.
The Day of Atonement
and Aaron shall lay both his hands on the head of the live goat, and confess over it all the iniquities of the people of Israel, and all their transgressions, all their sins
Leviticus 16:21 (ESV)
Corporate. Spoken aloud. Commanded by God.
The Revival Under Ezra and Nehemiah
When Israel returned to the Word after the exile, this is what the gathering looked like.
And the Israelites separated themselves from all foreigners and stood and confessed their sins and the iniquities of their fathers. And they stood up in their place and read from the Book of the Law of the LORD their God for a quarter of the day; for another quarter of it they made confession and worshiped the LORD their God.
Nehemiah 9:2 to 3 (ESV)
Read that again slowly. Scripture reading and confession, side by side, forming the structure of the service. Nehemiah 9 then records the confession itself, a long prayer the Levites led the people through, written out and prayed aloud. If a prepared confession is dead formalism, then Nehemiah 9 is dead formalism.
The Prophets and the Kings
Ezra tore his garment and confessed for the nation (Ezra 9:5 to 15). Daniel, a man with no recorded scandal in his life, prayed “we have sinned” on behalf of the whole people (Daniel 9:3 to 19). Solomon dedicated the temple assuming the assembly would come there and confess (2 Chronicles 6). David’s Psalm 51 was handed to the choirmaster, which is to say that a confession of sin was scored for congregational use.
I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not cover my iniquity; I said, “I will confess my transgressions to the LORD,” and you forgave the iniquity of my sin.
Psalm 32:5 (ESV)
V
Confession of Sin: What the Church Did
Christ did not remove confession from worship. He placed it in the prayer he taught the church to pray, and he did it in the plural.
and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors
Matthew 6:12 (ESV)
Not forgive me. Forgive us. That is corporate confession, given by the Lord himself, for the regular use of his people.
If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
1 John 1:9 (ESV)
James commands the same practice among the saints (James 5:16). Paul requires the congregation to examine itself before coming to the Table and warns that failure to do so brings the Lord’s discipline (1 Corinthians 11:28 to 32). A service with no confession offers no place for that examination to land.
Outside the Bible, the earliest surviving descriptions of Christian worship show the same thing. The Didache, a church manual from roughly the end of the first century, instructs the congregation to confess its sins when it gathers on the Lord’s Day before breaking bread. Justin Martyr, writing around AD 150, describes a Sunday service made up of the reading of the apostles and the prophets, a sermon applying what was read, common prayers, and the Supper.
There is no era of the church, until very recently and mostly in America, in which the gathered people of God did not confess sin together.
VI
The Assurance of Pardon
Here is what must be said clearly, because this is where the objection usually really lives. People are not truly afraid of confession. They are afraid of being left in it.
They should be. Confession without assurance is cruelty. But God never leaves his people there. Under the law, after the sacrifice, the priest stood and declared the verdict out loud.
And the priest shall make atonement for them, and they shall be forgiven.
Leviticus 4:20 (ESV)
Four times in that one chapter (verses 20, 26, 31, and 35) the blood is shed and then a man announces that it worked. Nathan does the same thing to David: “The LORD also has put away your sin; you shall not die” (2 Samuel 12:13).
Isaiah 6 gives us the entire sequence in a single vision:
▪ God appears and is worshiped, verses 1 to 4. This is the call to worship.
▪ “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips,” verse 5. This is confession.
▪ The coal from the altar: “your guilt is taken away, and your sin atoned for,” verse 7. This is the assurance of pardon.
▪ “Whom shall I send?” and “Here I am! Send me,” verse 8. This is the Word and the sending.
That is our order of service. We did not invent it. We copied it.
In the New Covenant the declaration is made not by a priest with a knife but by a minister with a text, because the sacrifice is finished.
There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.
Romans 8:1 (ESV)
A NECESSARY DISTINCTION
This is not absolution. No man forgives sin. Your pastor grants you nothing. He is a herald reading out a verdict God has already handed down in Christ, announced to all who are in Christ by faith. That distinction is the entire difference between Reformed worship and the Roman confessional.
If our people leave here unsure whether God is angry with them, we have failed them. The assurance is exactly what keeps confession from collapsing into morbid introspection.
VII
Why We Read Our Prayers
“It just seems like it should come from the heart instead of off a page.” This is the question I am asked most often, and it deserves a real answer rather than a shrug.
God Wrote His People a Prayer Book
The Psalter is one hundred and fifty prepared prayers, given by inspiration, with liturgical and musical directions attached to them. Many are addressed to the choirmaster. They were composed, written down, copied, distributed, and prayed by the assembly for centuries. If reading a prepared prayer quenches the Spirit, then the Spirit spent a great deal of effort inspiring one hundred and fifty of them.
God Dictated the Words More Than Once
▪ The blessing in Numbers 6:22 to 27 is a script. God tells Aaron the exact words: “The LORD bless you and keep you.”
▪ The Israelite bringing his firstfruits was given words to recite: “A wandering Aramean was my father” (Deuteronomy 26:5 to 10).
▪ Moses wrote a song and taught it to the people so they would have it by heart (Deuteronomy 31:19 to 22).
▪ David appointed Asaph and his brothers to sing a psalm he had composed (1 Chronicles 16:7). Hezekiah later commanded the Levites to praise with the words of David and Asaph (2 Chronicles 29:30). Written words, appointed by authority, used generations later.
Christ Gave Us a Form
The disciples asked to be taught to pray. Jesus did not tell them to speak from the heart. He gave them words. Matthew records, “Pray then like this,” and Luke records it even more plainly: “When you pray, say” (Luke 11:2). The Lord Jesus Christ handed his church a written prayer and told her to use it.
The Apostolic Church Used Fixed Forms
Luke describes the first congregation as devoted to “the prayers,” with the definite article, not to prayer in general (Acts 2:42). Paul assumes the congregation says “Amen” to what is prayed, which requires that they can follow it (1 Corinthians 14:16). The New Testament preserves fragments the church evidently recited together: 1 Timothy 3:16, Philippians 2:6 to 11, and the summary of the gospel Paul delivered in 1 Corinthians 15:3 to 5.
Heaven Has a Liturgy
The worship of heaven is antiphonal, ordered, and repeated. The seraphim call to one another with the same words in Isaiah 6:3 and in Revelation 4:8, where they never cease saying, “Holy, holy, holy.” The angels have a set form and they have not tired of it in all the ages of the world. Nobody accuses them of insincerity.
The Honest Objection Answered Honestly
The sincerity argument assumes that spontaneity equals sincerity. That is not a biblical idea. It is a Romantic one, absorbed into American church life through the revival movement, and we should be able to name it for what it is.
No one thinks a sermon is less sincere for having been prepared. No one wants an unprepared surgeon. And we should be candid about the alternative: extemporaneous public prayer is rarely spontaneous. It is usually a handful of memorized phrases delivered from muscle memory, the same eight sentences week after week, filled out with repetitions of the divine name to buy time for the next thought. That is not more heartfelt. It is only less examined.
A prayer written on Thursday is a prayer that has been weighed against Scripture, purged of error, aimed at the actual needs of this congregation, and shaped so that every person in the room can pray it rather than listen to someone else pray at them. That last point is the heart of it. When the prayer is printed and prayed together, the whole body prays. When it is improvised from the front, the body listens.
WHY IT MATTERS PASTORALLY
Written prayer gives words to people who have none. The widow six weeks into her grief, the father whose son will not come home, the man who cannot pray at all this week: they can pray the church’s prayer, and the church carries them until their own words return.
One clarification, because it is often missed. Reading prayers does not mean we have banned free prayer. Our services contain both, and always will. This has never been an either or question. It is only a question of whether the most important prayers of the Lord’s Day deserve the same preparation we give the sermon.
VIII
For Whom Is the Service?
“Why don’t we have an invitation anymore?” This question is really a question about audience, so let us answer that first.
First, the Service Is for God
The stated purpose of the exodus was not liberation but worship. God’s demand to Pharaoh was, “Let my people go, that they may serve me in the wilderness” (Exodus 7:16). The redeemed are brought out in order to be brought in. Worship is the end of redemption, not a tool for something else.
That means the first question about any element of our service is not whether it works. It is whether God asked for it.
Second, the Service Is for the Saints
Scripture is remarkably consistent about who the assembly is for and what it is supposed to accomplish.
Let all things be done for building up.
1 Corinthians 14:26 (ESV)
Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God.
Colossians 3:16 (ESV)
Add Ephesians 4:11 to 12, where the ministry of the Word equips the saints and builds the body, and Hebrews 10:24 to 25, where we assemble to stir one another up to love and good works. The very word for church, ekklesia, means the assembly of those who have been called out. The covenant people gather as the covenant people.
What About the Lost Person Who Walks In?
He is genuinely welcome, and Paul tells us exactly what happens to him. The key passage is 1 Corinthians 14, where Paul addresses the case of an outsider entering the assembly.
But if all prophesy, and an unbeliever or outsider enters, he is convicted by all, he is called to account by all, the secrets of his heart are disclosed, and so, falling on his face, he will worship God and declare that God is really among you.
1 Corinthians 14:24 to 25 (ESV)
Read what Paul does and does not say. He does not tell the Corinthians to restructure the service around the visitor. He tells them to do the intelligible, orderly, God centered thing that builds up the church, and the unbeliever is undone by the overflow of it. Evangelistic power is the byproduct of faithful worship, never the aim that reshapes it.
And consider what an unbeliever actually encounters here. He is summoned by the voice of God from Scripture. He hears the law expose him and a congregation of respectable people admit out loud that they are sinners. He hears the blood of Christ declared sufficient. He hears the Word preached with the demand of repentance and faith. He watches the church eat a meal that proclaims the Lord’s death until he comes.
PLAINLY
A service built for the covenant people preaches the gospel to the lost more clearly than a service built as a rally for the lost, because a rally has to stay simple, stay positive, and stay short. Our liturgy preaches sin, atonement, and pardon every single week before the sermon even begins.
So Why No Invitation?
Because Scripture never commands it, and because it is a great deal younger than most of us assume. This is the part of our practice that draws the most fire, so let me set it out carefully rather than briskly, let me say, we do explicitly what Scripture commands and we do not have the right to fill in perceived gaps.
What the Bible Actually Commands
Our Lord opened his ministry with a summons, and it is worth noticing exactly what he told men to do.
The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.
Mark 1:15 (ESV)
Repent and believe. That is the command, and the apostles never varied it. When Peter’s hearers were cut to the heart and asked what they should do, he did not lead them in a prayer. He said, “Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins” (Acts 2:38). Paul told the Athenians that God “commands all people everywhere to repent” (Acts 17:30), and summarized his entire ministry as “testifying both to Jews and to Greeks of repentance toward God and of faith in our Lord Jesus Christ” (Acts 20:21). To the jailer at Philippi, trembling and asking how to be saved, the answer was, “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household” (Acts 16:31).
Repentance is not a bad feeling about sin. It is a turning. Faith is not agreement with facts about Jesus. It is resting the whole weight of your soul on him. Both are the gift of God and the work of the Spirit, and neither one is produced by an aisle, a raised hand, or a certain number of verses of Just As I Am.
WORTH SITTING WITH
Not once in the New Testament is an unbeliever instructed to pray a prayer in order to be saved. Not once. The apostolic answer to “what must I do to be saved” is always repent, believe, and be baptized into the visible church.
But What About the Sinner’s Prayer?
The text most often produced is Romans 10:13, “For everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.” But read the next four verses. Paul immediately asks how anyone can call on him in whom they have not believed, and how they can believe in him of whom they have never heard, and concludes, “So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ” (Romans 10:17). Calling on the Lord in that passage is what a believing heart does. It is the cry of a soul that has already been given faith through the preached Word. Paul is not handing us a formula to administer to the undecided.
Someone will point to the tax collector: “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!” (Luke 18:13). Notice what Christ actually commends. He does not commend the words, which the man was not coached to say. He commends the broken and self despairing heart that produced them. Turn that cry into a script recited after a stranger, line by line, and you have kept the syllables and lost the very thing the parable is about.
So we do not tell people to pray a prayer. We tell them what Christ told them: repent and believe the gospel. If a man’s heart is broken and he cries out to God, he will not need my words to do it, and if his heart is not broken, my words will not help him. They will only give him something false to lean on.
Where the Invitation Came From
The public appeal at the close of the service, with the aisle and the extended verses of the closing hymn, is not found in Scripture and is not found in the church for roughly eighteen centuries. It entered American life through the camp meetings, and it was popularized and vigorously defended by Charles Finney in the 1820s and 1830s as one of his new measures, along with the anxious bench. Finney judged the shape of a service by whether it produced decisions. He also denied original sin as our confessions state it and rejected the imputation of Christ’s righteousness. Read his own Lectures on Revivals and judge for yourself whether I am describing him fairly, because a church ought to know where its habits came from.
Set Finney beside Jonathan Edwards, who preached in a genuine awakening a century earlier. Edwards spent years afterward writing Religious Affections precisely because so many professions had proved empty, and his conclusion was that the surest evidence of a saving work is not the intensity of the moment but the fruit of a changed life over time. One of those two men is our inheritance. It is not the one who gave us the anxious bench.
That method is pragmatism, and pragmatism is the precise opposite of Leviticus 10. A thing is not fit for the worship of God because it seemingly works.
The Deeper Pastoral Problem: Assurance Without Fruit
Here is the heart of it. The invitation quietly relocates assurance. It moves a person’s confidence off the finished work of Christ, received by faith, and attaches it instead to a moment: an aisle, a raised hand, a signed card, a date written in the front flap of a Bible. Ask that man years later how he knows he is saved and he will tell you about a night at camp in 1974. He will not tell you about Christ.
Our Lord was blunt about this. He warned of a class of people who would stand before him on the last day certain of their standing, and he told us how to know the difference.
You will recognize them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thornbushes, or figs from thistles?
Matthew 7:16 (ESV)
The verdict he pronounces over them is not, “You never came forward.” It is, “I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness” (Matthew 7:23).
Even more pointed for our purposes is the parable of the soils. Note carefully which soil produces the fastest and most enthusiastic response.
And the ones on the rock are those who, when they hear the word, receive it with joy. But these have no root; they believe for a while, and in time of testing fall away.
Luke 8:13 (ESV)
An immediate, emotional, joyful response to the Word is exactly what Christ tells us can be rootless. A system designed to produce decisions on the spot, and then to reassure everyone who makes one, is a system built to manufacture rocky ground and then to certify it as good soil.
Scripture tells us instead to test the profession, our own first of all. “Examine yourselves, to see whether you are in the faith. Test yourselves” (2 Corinthians 13:5). John wrote an entire letter so that believers “may know that you have eternal life” (1 John 5:13), and he gave marks by which to know it: keeping his commandments (1 John 2:3), love for the brothers (1 John 3:14), and a life that practices righteousness (1 John 3:7 to 10). Christ said, “By this my Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit and so prove to be my disciples” (John 15:8). Peter charged us to “be all the more diligent to confirm your calling and election” (2 Peter 1:10). Paul lists the fruit the Spirit actually produces in Galatians 5:22 and 23, and it is a life, not a decision.
THE ISSUE STATED PLAINLY
We have handed assurance to a great many people who show none of the fruit of the Spirit, and we handed it to them on the authority of something they did one night rather than on the authority of Christ’s work and the Spirit’s evidence. That is not evangelism. It is the manufacture of false converts, and it is the cruelest thing a church can do to a soul.
I Am Not Alone in Saying This
This concern is not a Presbyterian import and it is not novel. It has been pressed hard from inside Southern Baptist life for years. Paul Washer has argued at length that our methods have produced multitudes who trust in a decision they once made rather than in Christ, and that the sinner’s prayer as commonly practiced has given false assurance to people with no evidence of regeneration. Voddie Baucham has made much the same case, warning against telling children and adults that they are saved on the basis of a repeated prayer rather than examining them for the fruit of repentance and faith. Both men remain Baptists, and both preach the gospel with more urgency than the men who criticize them for this.
I would encourage you to hear them for yourself rather than take my summary of them. Washer’s sermon Ten Indictments and his messages on the sinner’s prayer are widely available, as are Baucham’s messages on evangelizing children. Listen and judge whether the concern is fair.
And test it closer to home. Compare the number of names on our rolls with the number of people in this room, and then ask what those numbers mean. Every Southern Baptist church in Alabama carries members who walked an aisle once and have not been seen in twenty years. We counted them, we assured them, and then we lost them. Many of them still believe they are right with God because of that afternoon. If that does not trouble us, nothing will.
What We Do Instead
▪ The invitation is in the sermon, not after it. Every text is preached with the demand of repentance and faith. You are called to Christ every week, from the Word, not from a hymn stanza.
▪ The call is to repent and believe, never to repeat words after me. If a man is under conviction, we will take him to Scripture and press Christ on him for as long as it takes.
▪ The ordinances do the public work. Baptism is the God appointed public confession of Christ, and membership at the Table is the church’s ongoing testimony that it recognizes his profession as credible.
▪ Your pastor and elders are available after every service, and my door is open all week. No one is turned away and no one is hurried. A soul is worth more than ninety seconds during the last verse.
▪ We would rather send a man home unsure and searching than send him home falsely comforted. The first man may yet be converted. The second one thinks he already is.
The Other Side, Stated Fairly
Many godly men defend the invitation, and their argument deserves a hearing. They point out that Scripture calls for public confession of Christ (Romans 10:9 and 10; Matthew 10:32), that the apostolic preaching did call for immediate response, and that people genuinely under conviction need somewhere to go with it before the moment passes. Some also note, rightly, that a church can abandon the altar call and quietly abandon urgency along with it, preaching to the comfortable and calling no one to anything. That is a real danger and I do not dismiss it. I have no doubt the Lord has saved people during invitations, since he has never been limited by our methods.
But Romans 10 speaks of confessing with the mouth that Jesus is Lord, and God has already appointed how that confession is publicly made in his church. It is called baptism, followed by membership at his Table. Christ gave his church an altar call. He simply did not put it at the end of a hymn. He put it in the water, and he attached to it a lifetime of following him.
IX
The Shape of Our Service
The service moves the way the covenant relationship moves. God calls, we are cleansed, God speaks, we commune, God sends.
MOVEMENT | WHAT HAPPENS | WARRANT IN SCRIPTURE |
Call to Worship | God summons his people | Ps. 95; Ps. 100; Ex. 19; Heb. 12:22 |
Confession of Sin | We come clean, together | Lev. 16:21; Neh. 9:2, 3; Dan. 9; Matt. 6:12; 1 John 1:9 |
Assurance of Pardon | The gospel verdict is declared | Lev. 4:20; 2 Sam. 12:13; Isa. 6:7; Rom. 8:1 |
Word Read and Preached | God addresses his people | Neh. 8:1 to 8; 1 Tim. 4:13; 2 Tim. 4:2 |
Prayer and Song | The people respond | Acts 2:42; Col. 3:16; 1 Tim. 2:1, 2 |
The Table | Communion with Christ | 1 Cor. 11:23 to 26 |
Benediction | God sends us out blessed | Num. 6:24 to 26; 2 Cor. 13:14 |
Nobody is asked to love every part of this equally at first. You are asked to see that every part of it came out of the Book.
X
Straight Answers to the Objections
“This feels Catholic.”
Nehemiah, Daniel, David, Isaiah, and the Lord Jesus were not Catholic. Rome corrupted these practices; it did not invent them. Reformation worship is not the mass with the volume turned down. Calvin in Geneva and Knox in Scotland both had confession and assurance in their services, and both built those services as a conscious rejection of Rome. Abandoning something biblical because Rome abused it is how a church loses its inheritance piece by piece.
“It is just empty ritual.”
It can be. So can a sermon, a hymn, and a fifteen minute invitation. Isaiah 29:13 and Matthew 15:8, 9 condemn hearts that are far away, not forms that are ordered. Christ’s remedy for hypocrisy is never the removal of form. It is repentance. The answer to a cold liturgy is a warm heart, not the absence of liturgy.
“We have never done it this way.”
Some honesty is owed here. Much of what feels like the old way to us is in fact the revivalist order that entered Baptist life in the nineteenth century. The altar call is younger than the United States. Confession and assurance are older than the monarchy of Israel. One of those two is the tradition of men, and it is not the one we added.
“Doesn’t the regulative principle argue against all this?”
It argues for it. The principle asks one question of every element: did God command this? Reading Scripture, yes. Prayer, yes. Confession, yes. Declaring forgiveness in Christ, yes. Blessing the people, yes. What the principle forbids is elements with no warrant at all. The order in which lawful elements are arranged is a circumstance, governed by 1 Corinthians 14:40: all things should be done decently and in order.
“This is going to run visitors off.”
Perhaps a few. But we are not permitted to ask what keeps a room full. We are permitted to ask what God commanded, and then to trust him with the room. A church that will not offend a visitor will eventually not be able to feed a saint.
XI
A Closing Word
If you have worshiped in this room for forty years, change costs you something real, and that ought to be said plainly rather than brushed aside. I am not indifferent to it. But test this the way Scripture tells you to test everything. Do not test it against what you are used to. Test it against the text.
Open your Bible to Nehemiah 9 and Isaiah 6 this week and ask one question: does our service look more like that now, or less?
If the answer is more, then what has changed is not a church drifting toward something foreign. It is a church coming home.
Pastor Zach Howard
Dwight Baptist Church, Gadsden, Alabama
For Further Reading
▪ Hughes Oliphant Old, Worship: Reformed According to Scripture
▪ Terry Johnson, Reformed Worship: Worship That Is According to Scripture
▪ D. G. Hart and John Muether, With Reverence and Awe
▪ Michael Horton, A Better Way: Rediscovering the Drama of God Centered Worship
▪ Westminster Confession of Faith, chapter 21; Second London Baptist Confession, chapter 22
Scripture Index
Genesis 3:9
Exodus 5:1; 7:16; 19:3 to 6, 10 to 17
Leviticus 4:20, 26, 31, 35; 10:1 to 3; 16:21
Numbers 6:22 to 27
Deuteronomy 12:32; 26:5 to 10; 31:19 to 22
2 Samuel 12:13
1 Chronicles 16:7
2 Chronicles 6; 29:30
Ezra 9:5 to 15
Nehemiah 8:1 to 8; 9:1 to 3
Psalms 24; 32:5; 51; 95; 100
Isaiah 6:1 to 8; 29:13
Daniel 9:3 to 19
Matthew 6:9 to 12; 7:16 to 23; 10:32; 15:8, 9
Mark 1:15
Luke 8:13; 11:1, 2; 18:13
John 15:8
Acts 2:38, 42; 16:31; 17:30; 20:21
Romans 8:1; 10:9 to 17
1 Corinthians 11:23 to 32; 14:16, 23 to 26, 40; 15:3 to 5
2 Corinthians 13:5, 14
Galatians 5:22, 23
Ephesians 4:11, 12
Philippians 2:6 to 11
Colossians 3:16
1 Timothy 2:1, 2; 3:16; 4:13
2 Timothy 4:2
Hebrews 10:24, 25; 12:22
James 5:16
2 Peter 1:10
1 John 1:9; 2:3; 3:7 to 14; 5:13
Revelation 4:8
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