Here Comes the Church (Pt 2)

Automated transcript of the sermon audio, generated with OpenAI Whisper (small.en). It has not been checked against the recording and may contain errors, especially in names and Scripture references.

So here we are tonight to continue on the subject of here is the church and Tonight I want to try to cover the dress code of the minister Baptism and Music and We’ll see if we can do that. I think we can do that in the next 45 minutes easily and Make you maybe think again outside the box with what we’re trying to do here. So go ahead and put the first one up, Jesse. Yes, there is Luther, the Catholic cartoon with the devil blowing in his ear and him putting out his heresy that the Catholic Church said it was that caused us to be where we are today. So go to the next one and the next one shows him, that’s a picture of him at the Diet of Worms when he declared that he could say no other and that he would stand there and that they then pronounced him a heretic and went after him.

So with that, we’re now in that stroke of things.

And in this book that I mentioned this morning that Sean has been reading and I now have been readings, the on worship and what the reformed position on worship is and how we fundamental Bible churches maybe have dropped some of that and why we reached back to do the public confession of sin and the consecration, the communion every week, and then the commissioning. We thought that that was a good thing that they did and something to remind us and give us kind of a pegs to hang what we’re doing on. I think that that’s a good thing to see. And in this book he talks about clerical dress and oppositions and the reformed opposition to clerical dress. So now go to the third one Jesse. There’s a picture of the current Pope and he has the little pointy hat and the hat is called a miter and the pointed headdress worn by cardinals, bishops, and abbots dates to the 4th century and may have been borrowed from that era’s Roman magistrates, always worn when carrying the crazier but removed for prayer.

Its color matches the rest of the outfit, which is the cloak. The interesting thing is immediately they start borrowing from the Roman magistrates right away. 400 years goes by and they start to copy the government. And the Pope, Papa, is the leader and that was borrowed from that also. Then in the, around his neck and you see in different pictures, you can go down to the next one down, you’ll see these guys, the Pope there has his cross around his neck. That’s standard when they preach.

The pectoral cross hangs at the breast from a chain around the neck, may be decorated the precious stones and contain relics from saints or martyrs. The cross is warring during liturgical function over the street clothes or over his shirt there. So all of these things have, you know, meaning and all of that. Go back to the one with the Pope. If you look at that one also, you’ll notice that in the Catholic circles, who’s on the cross? Jesus. And it’s interesting that we Protestants have him off the cross, that’s a huge statement. We feel he’s off the cross. He’s not still hanging on the cross, which then gets back to the whole crucifixion over and over that they do. The other things that happened, his ring is not apparent, but it is on his right hand. The bishop’s ring given as a mark of his jurisdiction, it signifies the union between the bishop and the church.

The rings which once served the practical purpose of sealing official documents probably first came into use in the 11th or 12th century. And when you look at those like the letter that the Pope sent back to Henry VIII that started the Anglican Church that I mentioned this morning, the seal is the wax part. When they sealed that document up, they took that ring, melted the wax and then stuck it on there to seal that document up. And it’s amazing when you get into looking at the historical documents, how many seals they have, cords, and then they’ll have all these different seals of this bishop, this guy, that guy, all going up and then getting to the pope to seal the document.

And then the sandals, we don’t see their feet, but they wear sandals or very simple shoes. I think this one is an interesting little touch. Simple shoes are symbolic of the vow of poverty. And he will also be wearing a hooded brown robe of his order under the white vestments. This is a description of a guy that got to be a bishop in Boston. But the idea of we wear very simple shoes and so we’ve taken this vow of poverty. It’s interesting how over a period of time how quickly the person standing up in front of everybody gets above everybody. As the Reformation pointed out and what the Bible says, we are a priesthood of believers.

a huge linchpin to the Reformation and Protestantism is that we are all the priests to do the work, and that inside of that, if we’re doing the work of the ministry, we really are the ones doing it. This whole arrangement of the clothing is to move away from that. as the reformers started to talk about this, and this is out of Kuyper’s book on worship, he said that in Switzerland and France ministers wear mostly what they call the robe de Kelvin, an imitation of the dress that Calvin used mostly and was no more than a common academic dress of those days in Geneva. Thus from the designation of the robe de Kelvin one can hardly conclude that Calvin introduced a kind of clerical investment.

What he’s doing here in this is he’s defending himself against the Roman practice of all these fancy stuff that Calvin took on a simple robe that like when you graduate from college. Now go to the next one. This is a picture of J. Gresham Machem, for those of you that went to seminary and used first year Greek books. He’s the guy that wrote it.

And that’s the college robe and then the doctrinal thing that goes or doctoral thing or whatever your thing is you get many colors of it. Now go to the next one. This is a picture of D. James Kennedy Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church same kind of thing. That’s where those robes came from as copies of university type things not as copies from the Catholic Church. Then we move on in Protestantism and end up wearing a suit and he gets into this long discussion about what should be worn white colors, a vest, all this kind of stuff, the dress of his day. This man lived from 1863 to 1920. So he talked about how you should look. So it begs the question then, how should we dress? What should we wear? What should, you know, if I’m going to stand up in front of you, what should I wear? And how should I look? And should I be distinct from you?

Or should I wear just a simple robe without anything? That’s the whole thinking behind choir robes. So if you’re looking at everybody dressed the same, then you’re not concentrating on, oh, look, Susie got a new dress. You’re seeing all these nondescript people singing in unison to you. And we’ll get into that as we talk about it. So the whole thing here is an interesting comment on what we think. And that’s why we prefer to just come like in a suit and tie in the morning or a coat and tie and then in the evening to be more relaxed because it is a more relaxed interchange. And you know if you think about the early church I don’t think they had big fancy things.

The priesthood obviously did but remember they became the priesthood of believers. They believed in Jesus and the priestly system is gone. on the book of Hebrews, that’s its main point, not to return to that, but to move away from that. And part of the Reformation looks back to those things and sees Old Testament references to the way they act in certain services. And I don’t think that that’s true. And even in a non-dispensational way, that dispensation has passed away. Even you would agree with that, right, Dick? So the idea is that whole sacrificial system is done. The ultimate sacrifice has come, so we don’t need to mimic that.

Let’s see here. Let’s go down to the next one. All right, now the next picture is an interesting clerical dress. Do that one. Who do we think that is? I don’t know if you guys can see it, but I think this is a very interesting picture. It’s an El Greco, and it’s a biblical figure that Sean has been preaching on, we have been talking about, who do you think that guy is? John the Baptist, I see those lips moving, okay. And notice he has his little camel hair coat and it’s hard to see up there in the dark image, but his hand is kind of like this and these two fingers are pointing and look what they’re pointing at. You see what’s on the rock down there? Can you make out what that is? That’s a lamb, right? The lamb of God. And you notice he’s standing there with the cross in his left hand. So he’s pointing to the Lamb of God in that picture.

Now remember that most of the people that looked at these pictures and went to cathedrals and saw these things, I’m going to show some pictures of baptism in a minute, they couldn’t read. So these signs and symbols in Christian art were very important to them. And people would look at the thing and you’d see Jesus over here and then there’d be a lady with a plate with eyeballs on the plate and you go, whoa, what is that all about? And that’s St. Barbara who was blinded by having her eyes plucked out. So they’d show all these things, but the common man knew this stuff because that was the stuff that was being taught in the church and that’s the way that they reinforced that. And speaking to music, our music should reinforce the truths of God’s word, I think, in the lyrics and that kind of thing. So We’re now moving into art, and there’s a representation of clerical dress in Camel’s air coat.

Now, probably, if I came dressed like that, that probably would be objectionable today. No, Gail’s telling me not a good look. Okay. So, the whole thing in clothing is, you know, we see, yes, we should be respectable, and we shouldn’t dip down into wearing the coolest next t-shirt either. I think that’s pushing over the edge. the Mars Hill kind of thing. Identifying, you need to be Greek to the Greek, but you don’t need to actually be pierced tattooed and be an ex-drug addict to be able to give the gospel to the people that need the gospel. You don’t need to get in pit with them to be able to witness to them. You have a reason beyond that.

So there’s an edginess to that that maybe is pushing the envelope that probably doesn’t do it. Now, be careful. I’m not saying they’re not Christian. I’m saying that they’re carrying their evangelistic attitude possibly too far. We went and visited there in between founding this church and leaving the last one. And it was interesting that during the communion they had it off to the side And it was very unclear what you were supposed to do with it when you took it. We took the bread and little cup, and then we went back to our seat. And the guy just kept talking, and they kept singing. And we’re looking around, and certain people were eating the bread, and others were drinking the cup.

And we thought, well, what’s going on? And there was no real explanation. So when you’re not clear about why you’re doing certain things, I think it can be confusing to people that are in the congregation. So it’s interesting how those things develop. So that’s the idea of the dress, and that’s one of the big subjects in this book. The next thing I think we should talk about is baptism. And this guy is a paid O Baptist, so we won’t go into that. But go to the next slide, Jesse. This is a mosaic from a Byzantine church. And I think it’s interesting, and that it shows the person is in water, at least up to their waist, and notice that the person pouring the water on the head is pouring it, and yet the person is in enough water to be dunked.

And notice that the kamikaze pigeon coming down on him is a representation of the Holy Spirit. Remember, Sean was quick to note to you that it was like a dove he came down, that settling on the situation. And the dove then is that pictorial reference to the Holy Spirit. And you’ll notice, who do you think the guy is off to the left? This Joe Smough pew sitter. Could be God. This could actually be Jesus’ baptism. Could be God saying, this is my son and whom I’m well pleased. Wow, representing God in a mosaic. That’s a little sketchy, isn’t it? So we have to be careful with our art and what it says to us. One of the most famous examples, I showed you guys a picture, if you’ve seen the picture of the Moses statue that Michelangelo did that’s in St. Peter’s, Moses has horns, and the reason he has horns is because in the Vulgate they mistranslated what the Bible said, said that the rays that radiated from his face, they mistranslated into horns.

So they put horns on his head because that’s the way their translation read. So those things get passed down incorrectly. Go to the next slide. And this one is the famous, that’s Da Vinci’s picture of Christ being baptized. There’s two angels there. You see the dove coming down. And again, the water being poured on them. So we’re wondering, what is this pouring thing? Remember, this is the 1500s. The other one’s probably 6, 800 something and those kind of things. Where is this all coming from? And why are they doing this in art? Well, B.B. Warfield, Benjamin Warfield, who was the big time scholar at Princeton University and did the conservative split of the Presbyterian Church in America, a great scholar and has written a lot of really good books.

He wrote on baptism, and he says this. We may then probably assume that the normal, patriotic baptism was by a triune immersion upon a standing catacomb and assumed that the normal, patriotic baptism was by a, I’m sorry, was standing catacomb and that this immersion was completed either by lowering the candidate’s head beneath the water or possibly more commonly in parentheses, by raising the water over his head and pouring it upon it. While in some places and in certain circumstances, total immersion very likely was practiced. So even a Paedo Baptist saw that the idea of baptism, which is a thing if you guys have heard me teach before, that the whole reason they put baptism into the Greek is that when they read, or when it came into our English translations, that the word baptizo, they had a huge discussion about what it meant.

All the lexicons say that it means to immerse dunk pots and pans and wash them and all that kind of stuff. They said, well, we don’t do that, so we can’t translate it that way. They solved the problem in the wonderful translator’s way by just taking the word and moving it over into English. Instead of saying baptism, they just said baptized, so they created a new English word, so they didn’t have to say immerse. So they got away from that problem. But even Warfield recognizes that the people had to be dunked, and that was the normal practice in the early church. The other interesting thing there for you men and I, brethren types, and I came to the Lord in a brethren church and have actually baptized people this way.

They baptized forward three times in the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. It’s a distinctive of their denomination. The kind of slang for that would be triple dippers. The idea is that they see it clearly that you’re baptizing in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Warfield recognizes as you read through the Church Fathers, it’s mentioned a lot that triune baptism is used. Harry Stearns is a great scholar of the New Testament. He is actually a great defender of the text that made up the King James. He was an old, really respected theologian in the Brethren tradition. I had the privilege of getting to know him and talk to him back in the 80s before he died.

You want to get a guy hot on a topic. guy could talk about triune immersion and go on for days and point out why if you didn’t do it that way you didn’t do that. Now does that mean that we should pound the pulpit here and go in that direction? I don’t think so but I don’t have a problem if somebody wanted to be baptized Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. I mean the issue is what? We are doing a picture of what’s happening and that’s That’s the death and then the resurrection to the new life that we have. So all of these things here, more of a war field, he says, Here are the words of St. John Christendom might be noted.

It is in a tomb that we immerse our heads in water, and then when we lift our heads back, the new man comes forth. In a word, while early Christians were very attentive to symbolism relating to baptism, funerary shape of the Baptist rebuilding, the steps typically three for descending and rising from the font, and the iconography relating to regeneration, they show few signs of preoccupation with total immersion. I think that that is not true. And now I’m going to show you why. Go to the next picture. This is at the base of the Temple Mount, and these are things called mikvahs. And in Israel, the Jews, before they went into the Temple, would go into the mikvahs and immerse themselves.

And they still do this. And in conservative Judaism, people go to mikvahs to purify themselves so they can go to the next service. And they still observe the laws and the things where, if you’ve touched this or done that, or if a lady has her period, she then has to be immersed and go into a mikvah before she can then come into the next service. And so go to the next slide, Jesse. This is a closer up. This is another mikvah that’s at the base of the Temple Mount. And notice the three steps that go down. And the people went down into this tub-like arrangement. And by the time we got down in them when we were in Israel, they’re this high.

So it’s no big deal to get dunked in this thing. And so that’s the tradition that they had coming out of Judaism. Do the next slide. The next one shows a very early temple with mosaics around it. You’ll notice the stepping down in. And it’s basically real close to what we have right here. In fact, oh, this one’s heretical. It has four steps. And it’s made out of fiberglass. So we can’t use that one. But the interesting thing is, isn’t it amazing how all these things get, you know, symbolized and you start making these things. And then this is our tradition. This is the way we’ve always done it. We can’t do it any other way.

And you can get lost in that and defend your tradition and lose sight of what we’re trying to do and who we’re worshipping by all these different kind of things. So the last quote here is, in the early centuries, baptism was usually by immersion. However, this need not have meant full immersion in water. Early Christian mosaics portrayed persons kneeling or standing in the baptismal pool with water being poured over them. Notice how it’s early church things. These early church drawings that we saw like Da Vinci there, that’s the 1500s.

So when you see the older paintings that maybe on the catacombs and stuff like that, it’s more looking like that first one that I showed you where they’re standing in a river or actually being submerged and there’s even fish swimming in the water with them being immersed into it. So they’re showing you that kind of thing. Now, is this a hobby horse because I am in the Baptist tradition telling that you need to be baptized in order to be saved? No, because a little story and a little testimony time here, I was baptized at nine in a Baptist church in Arizona. And then I lived like hell till I was 37, and then was confronted with 1 John 2, 4, that how could I do all those things and be a Christian?

And it stopped me up short. That’s the verse that turned me around, because I knew I wasn’t doing those things, and yet I was. So this whole baptism things, remember, they’re symbols. They’re things that we do in remembrance. They are ordinances. And as Shawn has pointed out, we don’t want to give up the term sacrament just because it’s taken on a meaning that you get additional grace by doing the sacraments like the Catholic Church does. When we say they’re sacraments that we observe, We don’t see that we get additional grace by doing those things. So those are interesting things. And that’s why in our camp, most of the time, people will say, we observe these two ordinances.

They don’t want to use the sacrament term because it confuses people. But actually, that’s a good biblical word. And you really, we shouldn’t have to give it up. But there’s a lot of baggage with that word. And it requires you to explain why you would use it. So that’s that one. Go to the next one there, Jesse. This is kind of an interesting group of Micbas. They’re rocks, and obviously they’re a little cruder. Now go to the next one. Whoa, what is that? Does anybody recognize what that is? That’s the Qumran caves. Now, that baptism, the cruder baptism, or the cruder Micbas were at Qumran, and that’s where they found the old evidences of the Old Testament that justified the Masoretic Hebrew text, where they found the portions and Isaiah and all those things that had literally no difference from the Masoretic Texts that had been passed down to the 1200s from 100 AD.

So these guys were copying the scripture, handwriting it down on these things, and then the oldest copy we have, the Masoretic Text, in full is 1200, about 1270, I think it is. And those texts are exact to the vowel pointings and everything to those 1,200 years later that had been hand copied, which is a real evidence to the idea of faithful copies of the scripture. So, Nyquist were even being practiced there at Qumran. So, the next thing we have, go to the next picture and we’ll graduate now into this This is a picture of a Presbyterian church in Austin, Texas. And notice we have the aisle, we have the cross up there.

They have kind of an altar, but it’s really not an altar. They have communion over there. And you’ll notice that the pulpit’s off to the right, kind of off center like the Calvin thing we talked about. And then they have the little baptismal fount, that’s the little round thing. And they put the baby over there and they put some water on his head and that kind of thing. modern day version of those older churches that we saw. And so that’s the kind of the history of baptism and the clerical robes. And now, go to the next slide, we have this picture. And who does that look like? That’s an older dude there. And he seems to be playing an organ or a piano singing to people.

And this happened during the turn of the century. And this guy did the music with Dwight L. Moody. And his name was Ira Sankey. And he wrote a lot of hymns for people. And he would sing. Apparently, this guy had a great voice. I don’t think there’s any recording that I know of. But he would sing in this really clarion voice to these people. And the whole idea is this is one of the first times that music and soloist have come into the church at this point. So hang your thought that now we have Ira Sankey at the turn of this century. Now let me go back that music in the church’s history. A council held at Laodicea in the 4th century decreed that besides the appointed singers who mount the ambo and sing from the book, others shall not sing in the church.

the fourth century AD, they shut down all corporate singing. The only people that could sing were the people that got on a platform that were Gregorian chanters or priests, and they could sing, but the congregants could not. So immediately they started moving into, were the pros, will sing, you sit down, you listen, you obey, you don’t interact. How crazy is that? How do we see any corporate worship if we’re just being entertained from the stage, right? And this went on for a long time. Now, before this time, there’s all kinds of church fathers that say people were singing songs and making up songs about all their faith.

I mean, little folk ditties that they would sing in the streets. They sang during the time of Arian, let me get this one. Let’s see here. When Christianity was legalized by Constantine in 313, this is by the way from a really good article, The History of Congregational Worship by Bob Coughlin. You can get on the internet and print it out, but this little part of it was fascinating. When Christianity was legalized by Constantine in 313, Constantine pronounced the whole Roman Empire Christian, the church was beset by division from within. One of the most well-known heretics was Arius, born in 250. He was a public relations expert who combined catchy tunes with lyrics that denied Christ’s divines equality with the Father.

Devout Arians would blanket the local communities at dusk with the sound of their hymns. Leaders like Ambrose of Milan and Ephraim of Sirius countered with doctrinally accurate songs that exalted Christ as God. Some of these were set to Arian melodies. So they took their music, put the right words, and came right back at them. Kind of like taking secular music and putting the right words on it, coming back on. And this precursor to the battle of the bands, biblical truth eventually won out. So what, during all this time, up until the fourth century when they made it, don’t sing as a group, that’s what we’re pronouncing from on high.

Before that, people were singing all kinds of things. And it’s, greet each other with a hymn. And there’s certain passages in the scripture that people said were actually little portions of hymns. They look like poetry. And they’re set apart like when you read Philippians and stuff. They’re put in little indentations in your Bible. And a lot of scholars think that those were hymns that people sing. So obviously, they were singing to each other in their hearts, just like you sing in the shower. I think that all of that is good. But here’s the issue that really cranks Mr. Kuyper.

And he said, preaching through song, this is a section about worship, the same contrast between a conventical and the assembly of God’s people before his face has presented itself rather sharply of late, and remember that he wrote this at the turn of the century, of late by the introduction of musical preaching. Interesting way he goes about it, right? Musical preaching. And the musical preaching, we all know how the gospel singer Ira Senke initiated this. It is less well known how this very idea has led to a wholesale charge in the form of worship in the English world. So much so that it tends to derail the entire worship service. In reaction to the conventicals, people have made an effort to let God speak through song and music, which eventually led to inviting soloists to the service, ministers of the Word having become spiritually powerless as the spokesman of the Holy One of Israel, called upon soloists from the theater to assist them so that God might speak to the people through their

singing. It is well to consider the significance of Sankey’s musical appearance for worship. What prompted him was the conviction that too many people remained indifferent to the spoken word, but that the same people will be touched and moved with someone addresses them in song, provided always that the content and the melodies stay in balance. He made sure that when he sang, the listener would also understand the words he sang. Sankey’s He’s concern was not first, of all, for the melody, but the word. And no one will deny that the wonderfully clear and melodious way in which Sankey sang his Come Home was extremely effective in moving and gripping people.

It was preaching in the song that penetrated deep into the heart just because it was in a song. And in preaching, it is definitely not only the words that are important, but the tone of voice that also matters. He goes into a long discussion about how preachers should get their tone right, speak effectively in all of this, kind of copying the thing. This is a diatribe against though, inviting soloists to come and do, because what happens is pretty soon we turn this into a performance. So we have the soloist come and we have this great singer and our little congregation can only give him 50 bucks or whatever, and then he goes down the street and gets 200 the bigger church because he can sing a solo, you know, next week there. And there’s people that are on road trips that do this all over the nation. I mean, that’s how Michael W.

Smith and all those people make their living. They go around singing solos at churches and doing this kind of stuff. Now, I don’t think that’s good for the church. I think that the church should be singing in unison and we should be singing to God and that there’s a supernatural event as we all gather together to make that happen. If we turn it into a road show or turn it into somebody that has to sing the right notes or play fantastic guitar or whatever it is, all of a sudden we think we’re not worthy of that. That’s crazy. We’re here to worship God, not to admire the performer. And that’s what he’s getting at in his criticism of that. Now, does that mean that I think that Ira Sankey he was a bad man? No. I think that he saw that he had a powerful tool and he wanted to use it. I think some of the most powerful things I’ve learned in Christendom is learning to certain music, listening to things, listening to classical music, some of those things.

But the problem is that people say, well, I can’t listen to rock and roll, I’ve got to listen to classical music, so I can only listen to Mozart because he wrote music for the church and all this kind of stuff. Well, these guys were bums. It’s like the great artist that painted some of this stuff. They were, you know, not Christian people, okay? They’re painting Christian themes and creating art that is Christian, but don’t hang your hat on the performers that are singing the song. And the whole thing gets to the point of we’ve done it with excellence this year and we’ve lost two of the people in our congregation that are violinists, so let’s hire out violinists to fill up our orchestra so we’ll hire professional violinists to play these Christian songs so that our congregation can be moved by this great music. Well, is that really what we’re in the business of doing is moving you? I think we should be moved because we are all supernaturally worshiping God together, not from, you know, the

slickness of the performance. So that’s the kind of talk about music that I kind of wanted to get into. Coughlin’s article is really an interesting comment on music by, I think, one of the best writers of Christian music going on today. And it’s interesting, I heard Walter Kaiser once talk, and his hobby horse in this talk, it was at the Master’s Seminary, he did a winterum there for two weeks, and he said, every great revival in the Church’s history has also been accompanied by people that wrote music that the people could sing to help them remember and be moved by those things. And as you think about it, the Jesus movement produced a lot of good stuff, okay?

And it was some of it from crazy, charismatic people. It doesn’t have all that great a theology, but in their song, the things they were singing was right. It was moving, and it, you know, all of that kind of stuff. And the Kaufflins, I think, are kind of the people at this stage that are doing that at this point.

But the problem can become that you pay your admission to go to a conference, and they do their whole thing and people are invited to sing but then they’ll do one you know and that kind of thing and it ends up you’re kind of going to a concert you’re not really worshiping okay and people get into the whole worship thing and it can be the same thing you go watch your favorite musical group you can get swept away by very convincing performances but is that Worshiping? Well, you’re kind of worshiping what the guys are doing and being moved by the music, but you have to be careful who you’re worshiping. You don’t want to worship the performer, you want to worship God in this thing. Now, if you’re going down to admire, you know, whoever’s playing the guitar or playing the piano or the people doing the 9th Symphony or something, yeah, those are moving things and they’re did well done and, you know, they’ll knock your socks off, but don’t be confused that is that worshiping God if we bring that into

the church, even though it’s moving thing. I mean, I think it’s fascinating how people have stolen the ninth symphony that was written for a humanist poet by Beethoven to celebrate humanism, and we Christians have taken that melody and put words to it and created the hymns out of it.

That’s a good thing. That’s kind of like the Aryan thing where, you know, you got one guy saying one thing and you take it and put another word on it. So there’s a whole battle and a knife edge that we have to be on with music and that’s why here we’re singing together with the band. It’s not a performance. Okay? And that’s a big thing that we’re thinking of when we do that. Alright, I got five minutes and the last one is kind of an interesting that I want to comment on that he comments on in this book and he’s speaking directly to the preachers and the people that teach and I think this is something that we need to really recognize and that we are all you know this is a the Saints are to do the work of the ministry and we believe in the priesthood of the believer so when you’re exercising your giftedness whether you’re teaching your children or if you speaking in public or you’re doing a Bible study I think this thing that he says here is really a good thing to remember and it’s coming from a very formal guy that really thought this out

preach according to one’s talents and I would say one’s giftedness neither Neither should the preacher be encouraged to imitate others, a preacher must in the first place be himself and not imitate someone else, for it is precisely the self that is choked by imitation. One who tries to imitate a model tends to choose an exceptionally capable minister, only to find himself in the lesser ability badly mangling the attempt.

The preacher comes necessarily to absurd imitation, like an ordinary recruit, standing guard, the general’s uniform. Should one choose more ordinary but acceptable model to imitate, the failure would be less remarkable. The imitation may even be successful. That would be an argument for imitating the ordinary through each in his own way. The point is that he was received, only one talent, should not bury it, but make the most of it. Moreover, he should not restlessly pursue a greater talent that he will never acquire anyway, But make the most out of what he has, and bend that one talent to the service of the word.

He should never say, because I only have one talent I am going to improvise for all I am worth. Then he buries the little that he has, sins against his maker, and in his own cause for his steady regress. So the idea is, remember that each one of us is gifted individually and uniquely, and use your gift. Don’t try to mimic somebody. just outright copy somebody. You are a unique gift to the church and when you exercise that gift, for those of you who experience this, there is a supernatural sense that you know you have connected with people when you do that. And sometimes you don’t even know in that process what you’re saying.

And I think those times, in kind of a almost charismatic way, that that is when you are in the Spirit and it’s not you who lives, Galatians 2.20, but it’s Christ living through you, ministering to other people. And I think each and every one of us has those times when you’ve done that. I mean, I think you have it when you talk to the kids and you see Paul mowing when he does the little Bible clubs. I mean, this guy has such a passion. There’s no way that that child cannot look at him and know that he cares for him. That’s an incredible transference of truth that needs to happen. And so all of us have that. We’ve reached the end of tonight and my encouragement, my, what do I want to see here?

My charge and benediction tonight is that go out and make that happen with all the gifts that you have, whether it be service for mowing somebody’s lawn in the spirit, you know, giving them a good word to giving them a word of encouragement or just being that shoulder to cry on. All those things are the ministry. And we want to keep doing that and keep being open to that. And look into our statement of faith. And think about the way that we’ve written it. Come back to us when you see things you don’t understand or wish we worded it differently. Remember that it is the beta version, and we’re ready to do that. And then I think tonight you guys are offering your house again for the youth to come over, for the weather’s more youth here.

You’re probably going to get more at your house than we got here, so that’s doing good. But that’s on for tonight. And yeah, all those people that think they’re, yeah, that’s me. I get myself in trouble trying to think I’m young. And those outcasts in the back, you two that came in late, you’re allowed to come too. How’s your back? Is it good? Good. OK, well, let’s pray. And then we’ll go home. And it’s only 7 16. I only went a minute order, not over. That’s not bad, OK? Father, we thank you for this time together, another time maybe to draw this kind of crazy patchwork that I put together to discuss how we’ve gotten the church to this point.

Help all of us to become interested in this and understand what we stand on. We stand on the shoulders of a lot of people that have gone before us. And we want to do the right thing. We want to establish the church in the way that would be most beneficial to you. And we do want it to be that symbol and worship you. The idea is that you are the one great God that created us, made us, hold us together, all those things, and to make us recognize that. Help us to always keep that in mind as we go through our life. And help us be that light to the world, and desperately dying world, as it’s always been. And yet you have given that light, and you have those people out there that you have saved even before the foundation of the earth.

Help us to be that part that you would have us be, and those people coming to you. We thank you for all these things, and of course we thank you for the amazing gift that you gave through your son, and it’s in his name, Jesus Christ, that we pray. Amen.