Good morning. It's good to see you. You know, it's 6.10 a.m., so this is a little crazy. I've done a lot of conferences, but I've never done one at 6.10 a.m. You know, the other thing that occurred to me when Harrison first was up here, if he decides to do tent making, I think he has a future as a flight attendant. Didn't you have that flight attendant vibe? Right? The exits. We have exits here, exits here. I thought, bring your tables to the upright position or put your tables in your chair. I thought he had that down. So anyway, there might be a future. Well, I'm glad to be here this morning. and to think with you about what it means to say that very popular slogan, all of life is worship. What does it mean to say that all of life is worship? Is that true? Recently, a Baylor athlete at the University of Baylor said in an interview, quoting now, I've been challenged to consider what it looks like to not confine God to pre- or post-game prayer, but to be awakened to sport as worship. And that's caught my attention, to sport as worship. Some years ago, a reader, Chris, wrote to me and asked the following question. I've been thinking about a common phrase I hear among many of my Reformed friends that, quote, all of life is worship, close quote. My gut instinct is to argue with this and to state that worship is properly restricted to the administration of the word, the sacraments, and prayer in a local assembly of believers. That is not to say we cannot glorify God with all of our lives, but simply to say that not every activity that a Christian does is worship. Am I off on this? Is this statement about all of life being worship something that the reformers believed historically? And I just want to assure Chris, if you're watching, listening, whatever, still these days, your instincts were dead on. You didn't miss anything. You shouldn't feel nervous or unsure just because a lot of people are saying something. My mother used to say, if everyone else jumped off the bridge, would you do that? That's a very good question. No, no mom, I would not. I don't like heights, I definitely would not, but I would not do it just because everyone else. And just because everyone else seems to be saying, or a lot of people seem to be saying that all life is worship is not any good reason to say it. Now, it might be true, we still have to explore that, but we want to think about this slogan. So here's what I want to argue. I make my students tell me right up front what they intend to argue so I can evaluate whether they've made their case. And this is my argument. If all of life is worship, and if we're using worship unequivocally, then nothing is worship in particular. And if in worship we may do only what God has commanded, which is what we say, then that would make it very difficult to function in daily life. God did not tell me to take Delta Airlines. I had to make a prudential judgment as to which airline to take. Well, let me rephrase that. Mrs. Clark had to make a prudential judgment about which airline to take. But she didn't ask herself, has God commanded that my husband should fly Delta. So if all life is worship, and in worship you do that and only that God has commanded, how does that work? Do I cross the street? I don't know. Should I? I don't know. Well, if you're going to do that, I recommend you figure that out before you start crossing the street. Because if you get stuck in the middle of the street, that could be problematic. Now, we all agree, we should agree, and we've all, Christians have generally agreed since Saint Augustine that the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever. You know that's where that comes from. We didn't invent that. It's great. I mean, we put it very nicely in the Westminster Shorter Catechism, but that comes from Augustine. He said, created things are to be used, God is to be enjoyed. And he's exactly right about that. So there's no question about that. The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever. There's no question about whether those who've been redeemed by the grace of God in Jesus Christ, by grace alone, through faith alone, should seek to glorify God, should seek to love him with all their faculties, as a friend of mine once said, and their neighbor as themselves. But it's still, it seems to me needlessly confusing to say that all of life is worship. If we're going to say that, it necessarily means we have to equivocate on what we mean by worship. And to equivocate is to use the same word in two different senses. And as long as, so all right, fine. We'll come back to that. But we're now not using the same word in the same way at the same time. So let's be clear about that. What are some of the problems that we'll look at here briefly? What are some of the problems with talking about all of life as worship? Well, I think there are... a few things. The first major problem is that I think it either comes from or leads to prioritizing cultural pursuits over cultic worship. And I only use cultic because it's related to cultural. Cultic is the Latin word for worship is cultus. When I say cultic, we think of Jonestown. I think of Jonestown. I don't know what you think of Waco and Salt Lake and people sitting on their roofs in the 1860s waiting for Jesus to come and all that sort of thing. Scientology. In California, I think of Scientology. It leads to prioritizing cultural pursuits over cultic, and by that I just mean religious, pursuits. And so here's the challenge that I've been making to people, and I'm sure I'm just ripping off Daryl Hart here. Show me some place in the New Testament, any place in the New Testament, where it unequivocally commands Christians to engage in And I think that is a very important point. I came in via the sort of neo-Cyperian, neo-Calvinist, in the old sense of neo-Calvinist, the neo-Cyperian movement from the late 19th century, early 20th century. That was the window through which I entered the reformed world. And so there are all these maxims and axioms that I inherited as a young, baptistic, quasi-dispensational, premillennial, evangelical, entering into the reformed world. And one of them was that all of life is worship and that God had commanded us to take every thought captive and to transform things. And we were going to redeem things. We were going to redeem sport, for example. It's not a mistake that this undergraduate student spoke of sport as worship. She'd been taught that sport is something that we have to redeem. Really? I'd like to see that in the New Testament, please. I'd like to see that in the Old Testament, actually. I'd like to see that in our reformed writers in the 16th and 17th centuries. Not that they are the be-all and end-all. I mean, they are for me. I don't know that they are for you. I'm only visiting, like Larry Norman, I'm only visiting this planet, 2023. I really live in the 16th and 17th centuries. But I don't find our writers talking about redeeming this or redeeming that. And they certainly don't talk about all of life as worship. And there are reasons for that. And so that was one of the speed bumps I hit when I started really studying 16th and 17th century Reformed theology, and then later medieval theology, and then still later patristic theology, was that these are ways of speaking that are just not widely found in the pre Kuyperian or pre-Enlightenment tradition. Now listen, I don't want you to hear me killing Abraham Kuyper. I have an immense respect. James Bratt's biography of Kuyper is fascinating, by the way. It's wonderfully written. He's very gifted as a writer. It's a great story. Kuyper is astounding. I, in some ways, have tried to emulate Kuyper. in as much as his industry is inspiring. Two newspapers, a religious newspaper, a church newspaper, and a political newspaper. A university, a denomination. He wrote his dissertation in Latin. He published a modern edition of Franciscus Unius. You probably don't care about that, but that's amazing. And that's just scratching the surface of what he did. So don't hear me killing Abraham Kuyper. I have my disagreements. I have my issues. But he's Abraham Kuyper. So I'm not killing Kuyper. But I do have my problems with his successors and his epigonees. I do have my issues with his successors and his epigonees, some of them, many of them, maybe most of them. One of the things that comes out of this, not only does it lead to prioritizing cultural pursuits over cultic pursuits, meaning religious, is that we tend then to marginalize lords they worship. One of the dirty little secrets that people don't know about Abraham Kuyper is that he was so busy that he didn't always attend to the due use of ordinary means on the Christian Sabbath as a minister. He was so busy redeeming and working and serving that he felt compelled. And honestly, I understand that compulsion. People write me constantly. We publish a lot of stuff, and I'm trying to get people to read that, but they would rather ask me and make me tell them individually, would you please write an email for me that summarizes you know, 100,000 word volume or something. I understand that people are busy. But the pressure to respond to all this stuff and to do all these things that need to be done that are worth doing, I understand how he got there. But God gathered his people at the foot of Sinai. And he constituted them his covenant people. And he descended on the top of the mountain. And he revealed something of his glory, and his majesty, and his holiness, and his awesomeness. And he said, don't anybody touch this mountain. And anybody touches this mountain, he has to die. He said, my ark is holy. And only the people I've authorized are allowed to touch this ark. Anybody touches this ark dies. And as my friend Andy Kamiga said, There must have been some Dutch woodworkers among the Israelites, because they made a really nice cart. Yeah, well, they worked on it, and they sent it, and they put it together, and they put the arc on it. And then they hit the bump, and the arc fell. It went in the air. And Uzzah made this great ESPN top 10 saving catch. but then God killed him. Because as R.C. Sproul said, he thought his hands were cleaner than God's earth. So it seems to me God takes the gathered worship. Do you know where, according to the book of Hebrews chapter 12, Jesus is? Hebrews takes us up the mountain, as it were, and then in chapter 11, and then that great cloud of witnesses. And then you get to chapter 12, and who's at the top of the mountain? Jesus. Do you know who was at the top of the mountain at Sinai, thundering, and who said, anybody who touches this mountain dies? To put a fine point on it, Jesus, speak using the same kind of language that Jude 5 uses, that Paul uses in 1 Corinthians 10.4, that rock was Christ. There's one covenant of grace, multiple administrations, one savior, one mediator, it's always been, ever been. So it seems to me God prioritizes the cultic. What happens if you break a cultural norm in the Old Testament? Well, depending on what it is, not necessarily death. Break a cultic norm in the Old Testament and see what happens to you. And so another bad outcome is that by making all of life worship, it seems to me that worship has become therapeutic. This is just Christian Smith's insight, very important insight. I think he's absolutely right. Therapeutic moralistic deism, I don't know what the order is, but therapeutic. I've been in congregations where it was clear the minister had been given marching orders by his elders, deacons, whomever, that he was to make sure that everybody left feeling better about themselves and about the world, and that was his job. Not meeting face to face with a living God who calls us into his presence, constitutes us the covenant assembly, puts his name on us, and deigns to stoop over and speak to us, but rather 30 minutes of euphoria producing songs and now increasingly 22 minutes of therapeutic talk. That's where we've, but all of life is worship. It's become entertainment. And too often it's become indistinguishable from the prevailing culture. All right, so let's assume that's right, that those observations are correct. Maybe they're not correct, but let's assume it for the sake of discussion. And then let's ask, how do we move forward? First way that we need to move forward is to recover our distinctions, and there are a couple of distinctions that we need to recover. The first is the distinction between narrow and broad. So narrowly, all of life is not worship, that's my argument. Broadly, we could perhaps say that in some sense it is, but now, as I say, we're not using the word worship in the same sense. narrowly, properly, to use the old language that our Reformed would have used, Francis Turretin would have said properly, all of life is not a stated worship service. And the intent of the Reformed synthesis of sola scriptura and the second commandment is to distinguish what happens on the Christian Sabbath when we gather twice on the Christian Sabbath to exercise the means of grace. where God comes as it were and dwells with us. Do you know what Paul says to the Corinthians? He says, be a little careful about some of the things you say and do in corporate worship because, now listen to this, because of the angels. I should say that the way Billy Graham used to say it, angels. because of the angels. What does that mean? Now, children, I know there's some little ones here. I want you to listen for me just a second. When the minister calls you to worship on the Sabbath, it's like this. You could do this in CGI, maybe. It's like the roof opens up. And we go up, and heaven comes down, and we're in an assembly. of all of God's people, all time, before the face of God, in public worship, in corporate worship. I don't know, do you do this? Do you raise hands? Some places, people don't raise hands. It makes them nervous. But in our tradition, we raise hands. That's a formal declaration from God. In fact, according to Bob Godfrey, you have to cup your fingers so the grace doesn't get away. You have to aim it. So actually, if you watch carefully, he cups one, he leaves the other one open. I haven't figured out, he has something against those people? I don't know what that means. But when I raise my hands as a minister, I'm making a formal declaration on behalf of God with his authority. Now, a lot of important things happen in cultural life, but nobody In that same sense, nobody, not the president, not a king, not anybody, certainly not a congressman, speaks for God that way. There's no cultural figure that speaks for God that way. So we know there's a difference. And what we did in the Reformation is we said, look, God has revealed himself in the second commandment to forbid certain things and by implication to require certain things. And we combine that understanding of the Second Commandment. And if you haven't read the standards on the Second Commandment or the Heidelberg Catechism, which is the document that I work with most often, 96 through 98, on the Second Commandment, you should do that. You should do that today. It should be a great day to do that. Get one of the apps. I just got a Westminster Confession or Westminster Standards app. I don't remember how much it cost or anything at all. You can get it on your phone. You read what we say and that's what we do. We're basically saying that this is how God has said we are to regard him and how he is to be approached. And that's why the confession is so clear about the word norming what we do. We do that and only that, this is the way I put it, that God has commanded in his word, in public worship. No session or consistory has the right or the authority to impose anything on a congregation that God himself, in public worship, that God himself has not imposed. And that's sola scriptura. That's the ruling authority. Calvin spoke of the rule of worship. I think Mr. Murray it was who expanded it to the regulative principle of worship, which is fine. Regulative, regula is rule. Calvin spoke of the regula culti, the rule of worship. And it's that God sets the rules. And we only do what he says. And if he hasn't said it, we don't do it. And it doesn't matter how much you like it. God doesn't care, by the way. I love you, and I don't mean to hurt your feelings. But God doesn't care what you want. And this is a hard, so my job here is to break the hard news. I'm the bad guy. This is bad cop, good cop. I'm the bad cop. These are the good cops. That's my sort of lot in life to be the bad cop. To warn you that don't touch that ark or God will kill you. I mean, they went, put two fingers on Aziz's neck, right? Nothing. God did that because he's holy, which among many other things means he's not like everything else. We're going to come back to that. That's really important. He's not like everything. I love this clock. It doesn't move. That's awesome. I have so much time. That's fantastic. This is the best preaching clock ever. You guys must really love preaching. That's fantastic. I once even refused seriously to consider a call because they said only 20 minute sermons. My introductions take 20 minutes, I'm sorry. If all of life is worship and we're using the same word at the same time in the same way, what are we talking about? Everything is the ark? I don't think so. We'll come back to that. Westminster Confession 21-1. Now listen to this. I didn't make this up. I'm old, but I'm not that old. Darryl's almost that old, but I'm not that old. But the acceptable way of worshiping the true God is instituted by himself and so limited to his own revealed will that he may not be worshipped according to the imaginations and devices of men. Imagine if we started applying this and we said, no, your imaginations and your devices are out. How worship across the globe, but particularly in this country, would be transformed. No more blue lights, for example. Gone. Those are the devices of men. By the way, no pictures of Jesus. What did Jesus look like? The correct answer is, children, you don't know. Every picture that everyone's ever made of Jesus is an imagination. I've seen Hawaiian Jesus. I've seen Afro Jesus. I've seen Hispanic Jesus. And of course, Salman's portrait, that pale fellow hanging up at every Swedish pietist's home all across the plains where I'm from. That guy's not Jesus. Jesus is not translucent. I'm translucent white guy? That's an idol. By the way, I've given lectures on the Second Commandment standing beneath a 15-foot idol in Presbyterian churches that confess the Westminster standards. I had the minister say afterwards, I was kind of hoping that you or somebody would throw a rock through that window. And I said, well, this was in Mississippi. And I thought, I'm not from Mississippi. A boy could disappear down there for doing that. I don't know, we had a fella down here and he'd given a talk and somebody threw a rock and we never saw him again. The gators did look pretty well fed though, it seemed. or the suggestions of Satan under any visible representation or any other way not prescribed in Holy Scripture. We don't apply, that doesn't tell you what mechanic, to what mechanic you should take your car. Heidelberg 96, what does God require of the second commandment? That we in no way make any image of God nor worship him in any other way than he has revealed or commanded, commanded in his word. It was never intended, that rule, to govern all life. If you try to apply the rule of worship to all life, you make it absurd. And if you try to apply it to all life, you end up binding the conscience. Zacharias Ursinus, the principal author of the Heidelberg Catechism, the authorized commentator on the Catechism, distinguished between the kingdom of God considered broadly and the kingdom of God considered narrowly. Not everything, again I'm going to go after another neo-Cyperian, neo-Calvinist axiom, Shibboleth, that everything we do is kingdom work. No, listen to her sinus. The kingdom of God is that in which God alone rules and exercises dominion over all creatures, but especially does he govern and preserve the church. The kingdom is universal. The special kingdom of God, that which he exercises in his church, consists in sending the son from the father from the very beginning of the world, that he might institute or preserve the ministry of the church and accomplish his purposes by it, that he might gather a church from the whole human race by his word and spirit, rule, preserve, and defend it against all enemies, raise it from death, and at length, having cast all enemies into condemnation, adorn it with heavenly glory, that God may be all in all and may be praised eternally by the church. So there's a general sense, but there's a special sense. So there's a general sense in which we might say all of life is worship, but not in the special sense. He goes on to say, from these things it is apparent that the kingdom is not worldly, but a spiritual kingdom. This is taught in many of the parables of our Lord as well as in the declaration that he made to Pilate. And I've been accused of pietism and defeatism and other isms for quoting these words. My kingdom is not of this world. We are here taught and commanded to pray that this kingdom may come, increase, and be defended. I'm sorry, friends, my kingdom is not of this world, it's the word of God. It's the word of God. All right, another distinction that we need to recover is the distinction, and I've been hinting at this, it's the distinction between the sacred and the secular. Between the sacred and the secular. One of the first things I learned as a young Reformed person is that's a terrible distinction, it's just awful, it's made up by a bunch of pagans or bad people, I don't know, people we don't know and like and we don't ever say that. All of life is sacred. Well, if all life is sacred, then none of life is sacred, by definition. The whole Christian tradition distinguished between sacred and secular, and the Apostle Paul did as well, and I'll get to that, until the late 19th century. The whole Christian tradition. Now, maybe they were all wrong. I mean, that's possible. A lot of the church was wrong about some important things. Everybody thought that the Earth was at the center of the universe until Kepler and Galileo, et cetera. So they were all wrong about that. Everybody thought that there has to be a state religion. Pagans and Christians alike assumed there had to be a state religion. That was a universal assumption until the 18th century. I think the 18th century guys were right. I think we can make that case of scripture. Now, the early Christian church also, by the way, knew that was right. Another thing I've learned from Darrell, read that book, A Secular Faith. And he quotes Bernard Lewis. The Christians invented the distinction between sacred and secular. And Lewis is exactly right. read the early fathers, particularly the 2nd century fathers, but 3rd century fathers, they regularly distinguish between sacred and secular. What they asked of the Romans in the second century, and particularly in the third, because the third century, we were under persecution continuously. And we were being murdered continuously right up until the time Christianity was legalized, which is, by the way, really most of what Constantine did was legalize Christianity. It wasn't until Theodosius in 380 that Christianity was instituted as the state religion. I mean, it became the de facto state religion under Constantine, but not officially. Paganism was still legal under Constantine. They distinguish between sacred and secular in this way. They said, listen, we're not asking you to change anything. We're simply asking you to stop killing us. We are no threat to you. Read Justin's writings on this. He says, look, if any of our people, meaning Christians, are found to do anything against Roman civil law, don't punish them. Send them to us. We'll punish them worse than you could. I've often wondered what he had in mind, because the Romans were not sissies when it came to punishment. They crucified people. I mean, that's a pretty rigorous punishment. But they never said, you know, emperor, you really ought to institute Christianity. You can't find that in the second century or in the third century that I found. Maybe there's somebody in there. So if you find that, email me at heidelcaste at heidelblog.net. I'll be happy to correct what I've been saying. But I haven't seen it. And I'm confident nobody in the second century is asking for that. And by the way, nobody in the second century is talking about transforming anything. They just don't want to get killed. or redeeming anything. The only thing they know about being redeemed is sinners being redeemed by Jesus Christ through His righteousness, His blood, and His Holy Spirit. So where do we get sacred and secular? Well, as I say, it's in the Christian tradition. It's in the Bible. We'll get there in a second. But the word sacred comes from a Latin word, sacer. And there are, a sacerdos is a priest. Sacerdotal, you might know that word, that adjective. A sacerdos is a priest. And a sacerdos is one that handles sacred things as distinct from common things, secular things, profane things. In the old sense of profane, it didn't mean wicked, it just meant common. And common isn't dirty, by the way. Common isn't dirty. Common isn't dirty. It's just not sacred. You know, a sacrament, a sacramentum, was originally a sum of money set aside in a financial escrow. So it's set apart, and that came to be applied to military oaths. When you went into the Roman military and you swore an oath, So sacred is something that is set apart and specifically devoted to God, and you see that in scripture. Exodus 20 verse 8, remember the Sabbath day to do what? To keep it holy. Now, if the Sabbath day is particularly holy, what does that say about Monday? It's different than Sunday. Sunday is distinct. It's right there in Exodus 20, verse 8. I'm not pulling any rabbits out of any hats. Look, I'm just a kid from Nebraska. I'm actually not really, as you well can tell already, not very smart. I just like a donkey. They put me on a treadmill and I just go round and round. But eventually, it dawned on me after a few decades, Exodus 20, verse 8, distinguishes between one day as holy and the other days as dirty. Wicked? No. Ordinary. Secular. So I really regret that Bill O'Reilly made the seculars and secular a really bad word. It's not. Cyclum just means, it means in scripture, in the Latin Bible, it means age. When you say world without end, we say world without end, that's cyclum cyclorum. Age of Ages. And it's just Latin for Ion, Ionion. Forever. It just means forever. And the encyclical came to be applied to this world. So it's this world as opposed to the other world. It doesn't mean wicked. It doesn't mean dirty. It doesn't mean unclean. So listen, one of the things we did in the Reformation was we said, look, if you're a baker, That's a good vocation. That's an honorable vocation. You want to pursue that as unto God. That's a secular vocation, because it's not a sacred vocation. You're not called into ministry. But it's a good, it's a clean vocation. It's a good vocation. And you ought not to be ashamed about that. Prior to the Reformation, there were priests who had the vocation. And everybody else was dirty. And in the Reformation, we said, that's not true. Your vocation as an auto mechanic, as a teacher, as an airline pilot, whatever it is you're doing, however it is you're fulfilling the vocation that God's given you in the world, that's a good vocation. You go do that under the glory of God. That's a secular vocation. And that's not bad. Secular is good. Exodus 28 makes a distinction between the sacred and the secular by implication. In the Latin Bible, it says sanctify it. Make it kadosh in the Hebrew Bible. Therefore, the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it Kadosh, he sanctified it. Aaron's priestly uniform, Exodus 28. Actually, I started looking at Leviticus, and I thought, you know, there's more about this stuff in Exodus. That was unexpected. I thought, well, Leviticus, you know, priests and utensils and Levitical code. But no, it's Exodus that really sets the paradigm, which I thought was interesting. About Aaron's priestly uniform, you shall make a plate of pure gold and engrave on it, like the engraving of a signet, holy to Yahweh. Sanctum Domino, it says in the Latin Bible. Why does it say holy to Yahweh? Because he's being set apart and distinct from the rest of you schmucks. That's why Uzzah, who meant well, by the way, he meant well. He meant well with all his heart. He said, it's the ark. I can't let the ark hit the ground. Set apart. Sacred. Daily life is secular life, right? The Sabbath is sacred. The Sabbath is distinct. The Sabbath is unique. A union assembly is a valuable assembly where important things get discussed, benefits, wages, et cetera. It's not a sacred assembly. It's not a sacred assembly. It's distinct. It's not neutral. I know that's a sin, right? I know the neokyperian thought form. We can't have anything that's neutral. I'm not advocating neutrality. The whole world belongs to God. There isn't any such thing as neutrality. The secular world belongs to God. It belongs under His general providence. Nature is a thing. The secular is the sphere of God's general providence and operates under the rules that God has established for general providence. Football doesn't need to be redeemed. Football is what it is. Footballs do what they do because they are what they are. You kick a football, it does what it does because of the shape and because of the materials and because of all the other properties that belong to it and because of the wind and the kicker. You're either a good football player or you're a bad football player. Either you play within the rules or you don't play within the rules. It doesn't need to be redeemed. I'm going to come back. I got to close this out. We set apart the elements of the Lord's Supper, don't we? We set apart the elements for the Lord's Supper. Somebody makes bread or somebody buys bread. When I was a pastor, we used to go to the grocery store and buy Mogan David. Go to the OPC. Daryl got them using some really good communion wine. It's quite, I don't know what we're drinking at the Escondido URC, but it's not good. I don't know what they do to it. It's just a very little bit, so I choke it down. It's a holy communion. The apostle Paul says, look, you can go to anybody's meal, some pagan. All the meat in Corinth was offered to the gods. You understand that. There's no meat that's not offered to the gods. And so some people said, I can't eat that meat. I used to be one of those pagans. Now I'm a Christian. If I eat that meat, I'm going to go back to being a pagan. Paul says, fine, don't eat that meat. You're free. But the ones who said, yeah, I know those gods don't exist. And Paul says, those gods don't exist. Then if you can eat that meat without falling back into paganism, go ahead and eat that meat. Pagan comes over, and Pagan invites you to a meal, and you sit down, and you say, well, thank you very much for your hospitality. He says, by the way, this meal's been dedicated to the gods. At that moment, Paul says, you have to get up and you have to say, thank you so much for your hospitality. I'm so grateful for your kindness. I can't eat this meal. I only eat one sacred meal, and that's the Lord's Supper. I can't participate in your religious meal. Remember, all that meat had already been offered to the gods. But the moment they say and invoke the gods and make it a sacred meal, you can't eat that meal. But you can eat a secular meal in our forms. We say in the United Reformed Churches through this sacrament by your own word and spirit, may these common secular elements now be set apart from ordinary use and consecrated by you. We consecrate ordinary elements and then they become sacred for sacred use. Not magic. I didn't say magic. I didn't say transubstantiated. I didn't even say in, with, and under. I just said set apart for sacred use. Calvin uses secular as a category without prejudice constantly. Institutes 1, 8, 2. I can't read it to you. I'm running out of time. But he's always exhorting people, read the secular writers. He means the pagans as opposed to the Christians or people writing about secular matters. Why am I saying this? Because we're not Anabaptists. And so I've got to get to nature and grace. That's the last distinction. We have to learn to re-distinguish again between nature and grace. One of the first things I learned as a young Reformed person was the nature-grace distinction is bad and will do bad things to your brain and bad things to your theology. No, it won't. Actually, it helps you a lot. I can help the Gospel Coalition a lot, right? They're constantly trying to figure out the spiritual messages in various films, including apparently Taylor Swift's new film. No, how about we just think about Taylor Swift's new film as an artifact of nature. And you say, what is the nature of a film? Is this a good film? Is it a bad film? Does it live up to the nature of film? Is it well shot, well edited, well considered? Not, what spiritual lessons can I learn? No, you don't need to learn your theology from Taylor Swift. I shouldn't have to tell you that, by the way, who I think is adorable and talented and all of that. But I don't learn my theology or my spirituality from the Coen brothers or Taylor Swift. I love the Coen brothers. Daryl got me started on the Coen brothers. I always say, most of what I say is what Daryl would say if he had thought to say it. And more, most of what I say is stuff he's already said, and I'm just ripping it off. So we don't need to talk about Christian softball. Who was it that, I can never remember the book. Everybody, every Christian college student had to read that book at, what is it? What is the book? The worldview book, Christian softball. It's in my notes. I can't find it. I'm running out of time. Well, anyway, there's a famous, oh, Al Walters, Creation Regained. I'm not going to let him off the hook. There's no such thing as Christian softball. There's no such thing as Christian football. There's no such thing as football that's played consistent with a Christian worldview. Either you can put your shoulder into someone's chest and drive them into the ground so that they don't want to get up again. Either you can pick up a blitz or you can't pick up a blitz. Either you know how to turn and go up field and hit the hole that you're supposed to hit, or you can't. That's football. Now, you should play football within the bounds of Christian charity. You should not actually try to kill people. That's murder. Murder is forbidden. I think we know that. You should love your neighbor as yourself. It's fine to be a good sport and help the guy off the ground. And taunting is bad form, bad sportsmanship. It's ungracious. You look ugly and stupid when you taunt. But we don't need to redeem football. Sinners need to be redeemed. Football doesn't need to be redeemed. We just need to stop talking like that. So why am I telling you all this? So there's nature and there's grace. The Anabaptists said, look, grace needs to transform, wipe out, obliterate nature. And all the Protestants said, no, it does not. We agree. In effect, what they said is, we agree with Thomas Aquinas. grace perfects nature, it does not destroy nature. Now, we might have meant that in a somewhat different sense than Thomas, but we agreed with him, and our guys quoted Thomas on this against the Anabaptists. Here's my argument. The Kuyperians, when it comes to nature and grace, are ultimately Anabaptists. If you don't distinguish it, grace ends up wiping out nature because you end up transforming, redeeming. That's just Kuyperian talk for an Anabaptist idea. It's not our theology. These aren't our categories. It's not the way that we talk. What does all this have to do with worship? Football doesn't need to be redeemed, but you do. Football doesn't need to be redeemed, but you do. Football doesn't need to be redeemed, but you do. You'll forgive me if I go into preaching here a little bit. Jesus didn't die for football. Again, I shouldn't have to say that. He died for sinners. And he instituted the due use of ordinary means. He instituted the covenant assembly, a sacred covenant assembly. And you're called out of your daily secular life into this sacred assembly where God speaks to you. Well, if only God would speak to me. Well, show up on Sunday mornings and Sunday evenings and He will, I promise you. And God uses that announcement, the Apostle Paul says in Romans 10, 14, 15. How do people come to faith? They come to faith through hearing. Hearing what? Hearing the gospel preached. Heidelberg 65, through faith alone, from where does this faith come? The Holy Spirit works faith in our hearts through the redeeming of football and softball and culture and politics. The Holy Spirit works faith in our hearts through the preaching of the holy gospel and confirms it through the use of the holy sacraments. Those are sacred, sacred gospels, sacred sacraments. You can tell I love football. I have a bad football team that I cheer for, but I love football. We used to be good. And I'm very conscious that I'm in Michigan. I saw all the maize and blue. Football was great. College football was great. By the way, my team's on a bye week this week, so that's why I'm here. Otherwise, it's problematic. But it's not the means of grace. By the way, this isn't even exactly, in the same sense, the means of grace. This is great. But tomorrow morning, that's when God has promised to draw near to you and to lift you up to him. Do you know what Calvin said about the Lord's Supper? That at the table, when you come to the table, it's as if Jesus is there and you're with him at the table. He lifts you up. and you're seated with Him, and He feeds you, this is what we say in the Belgic Confession, on His proper and natural body and blood. That's astounding. That doesn't happen on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday. They all belong to God, they're all His, but they're distinct. All life isn't worship in the same sense. So here's what I want to finish. I'll finish with this. So how do we do this? We need to recapture these categories and use these to analyze things so that we don't make a mess. The gospel of James Kennedy was wrong. The gospel's not in the stars. This is what happens. He wrote a booklet. He gave a sermon. The gospel's in the stars. No, it's not. It's in the Word of God. The heavens declare the glory of God, but the gospel is not in the stars. The gospel is in the Holy Scriptures. That's why we need to distinguish sacred and secular, general and special, nature and grace. Grace alone contains the gospel. The gospel is not in nature. We need to distinguish between general providence and God's special saving providence. We need to understand that when we gather, we're assembling as the kingdom of God in his embassy. He's called us to his embassy. This building is an embassy from heaven. And you're citizens, if you're in Jesus Christ, you're citizens, and you're in his embassy, and he comes, the king comes to meet with you personally. Go to an embassy and try to see the ambassador, see what happens. It's not gonna happen. Jesus Christ, the King of kings, Lord of lords over all things, he comes to meet with you personally and to feed you with himself and to give you new life and true faith and to strengthen your faith. We've got to grasp these things or we will end up like everyone else in America. singing verses about sloppy wet kiss. There is a special divine law for worship because that is where God the Spirit gives new life and true faith to his elect and strengthens them by the use of the Holy Sacraments. And it's out of that that we live and that we enter into our secular life again, Monday through Saturday. Your good life, fulfilling the vocation that God gave you to his honor and his glory under his lordship as citizens of his kingdom. But this is where the kingdom convenes. Thank you. Can I pray? You want to pray? Thank you, Dr. Clark. Just a few announcements before we let you go to remind you. Stuff at the back. The bookstore is open for the break. There is the table for the Heidelberg Reformation Association. And so check that out. Take the stuff that they have on offer. forms in your lanyard for Q&A. So if you have a question that's occurred to you from this one or from the lectures to come, fill that out on the form and drop it in the box in the back. And before I pray, I want to give you two questions to think about over the break, just to ponder and discuss with the time we have. The first one, I guess to ask a question about nature, is the Taylor Swift movie good? I'll leave that to you. Second, more significantly, if there are all of these important things that we would hope to do, Things that we would love to see done. The world made better, our culture improved, aligned more with justice and righteousness. There are these good and important things to be done. And we can do them as Christians and do them to God's glory. But, but we may not succeed. We may not succeed. And there are places around the world where that sort of idea does not even compute, given the resources they have, the type of society they might have. And so, here's the question in light of all that. If there are these good things that we may not and possibly cannot achieve, how kind is the Lord? that he has set aside a time and means promising that we can do the greatest thing that he made us to do, commune with him. How kind is our God to give us that provision? Let's pray. Father God, we are thankful for the things that we've just considered, that there are special things like a day, like a particular book, like water, bread, and a cup that's been prayed over. And you've blessed them in a special way to make them profitable in our hearts and minds. And so help us to treasure them up all the more, that whatever you might give us to do in life to your glory, You certainly give us the vocation to assemble as your people for fellowship with you. We pray that we might learn all the more the beauty of that reality.