Are We There Yet?

From Joel Beeke’s The Family at Church, some tips on preparing for the preached word:

1.  Prepare yourself and your family with prayer-  pray for the conversion of sinners, the edification of God’s people, for your pastor’s preparation and delivery, and for yourself.  Pray that you, your family, and others will come as those in need of the gospel and the Word.

2.  Come with a hearty appetite for the Word-  Heed I Peter 2:2 and come as a newborn baby longing for milk.  Realize that preparation for the Word begins Saturday evening.  Get a good night’s rest for you and your family if at all possible.

3.  Meditate on the importance of the preached Word-  The God of creation and redemption is meeting with you!  Thomas Boston said, “The voice is on earth, but the speaker is in heaven!”  Remember that every sermon counts for eternity as salvation comes through faith and faith through hearing God’s Word (Rom. 10:13-16).   Remember that every Lord’s Day you are receiving spiritual food for the week ahead.  The Puritans called this day “the market day of the soul.”   They went weekly to stock up on supplies- so do we in a spiritual sense!

4.  Remember as you enter worship you are entering a battleground-  the enemy of our souls would desire to distract us from the Word.  Yesterday’s ball game and tomorrow’s work day will conspire to pull us away from the hearing of the Word.  Pray for strength to overcome these and other enemies.

5.  Come with a loving, expectant faith-  Come as a Mary and not a Martha.  Be ready and prepared to sit at the feet of Christ listening to Him speak in the Scriptures.

I’ve only been to one Gothic cathedral in my life and it was this one- St. Stephansdom in Vienna, Austria.  I was able to visit it on two separate occasions during overnight layovers on the way home from missions trips to Odessa, Ukraine in 1998 and 2001.

Let the record show that I’m a Reformed Protestant and believe deeply in the Biblical truths recaptured during the Reformation.  Those truths have been summed up in the Latin phrases of “Sola Scriptura” or Scripture alone, “Sola Fide” or Faith alone, “Sola Gratia” or Grace alone, and “Sola Deo Gloria” or For the Glory of God Alone.  That being said, when I walked out of St. Stephansdom I was profoundly impacted with the reality that architecture communicates.  In this case, this massive facility that took hundreds of years to complete spoke volumes about God’s transcendence.

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(HT: Between Two Worlds)

Can you name the movie from which the quote above came?

This is why you’ll never see dancing during worship at HLPC:

Found HERE.

(HT:  James Grant)

Ours is a narcissistic culture. That’s a fancy way of saying we are lovers of self and our own pleasures. The sad reality is that we are all products of our culture to some degree- our blind spots keep us from seeing just how self-centered we really are. Francis Schaeffer was right when he wrote over 20 years ago that the two priorities for Americans are personal peace (leave me alone and don’t bother me with anything) and affluence (I want it all and I want it now!).

What’s the cure for self-absorption, aka narcissism? Marriage and parenting sure help as they surface new levels of self centeredness. But even then we can retain our consumer driven mentality that it’s “all about the customer- me!”

The best cure for naricissism is worship. Corporate worship becomes the time when it becomes all about God. We need God-centered worship. We need a focus outside of ourselves and onto Him who created all things and redeemed us in Christ.

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