All right. So this evening, what I'd like to do is I'd like to give a postscript to the ordinary means of grace. So as you know, we spent seven Sundays going through the means of grace, talking about different dynamics of the means of grace, how they work, what they are, what they do, what they don't do. And providentially, we find ourselves in Catechism questions 94 to 96, where we are once again dealing with the means of grace. So think of this as an after-dinner mint to the means of grace, okay? You've just had a whole meal, seven courses of the means of grace. Now you're gonna have this after-dinner mint, a postscript to the ordinary means of grace, all right? And my goal is to give you a very brief thumbnail sketch of what that is, and then hopefully, Lord willing, just give a few moments at the end for any questions that you have about the means of grace. So I'm hoping that even right now, your wheels are turning about any questions that you have, and that doesn't necessarily have to be limited to the ministry of the means of grace here on Sunday morning or Sunday evening, but even in your private Bible reading, your family worship, no holds barred, any question that you have, And it would be for me and Pastor Ken and Pastor Brendan. So I'm not the only one that's going to be answering. We want to give a time for you to do that. OK, so just so you're ready, we're in catechism questions 94 to 96. So you could find that in your catechism when we will be cracking our Bible as well. So three of the greatest Ivy League schools in America are Princeton, Yale and Harvard. And today they stand as bastions of humanistic, godless rationalism. I actually know some graduates from Yale. And you may get a prestigious law degree from one of these institutions, and this law degree or bachelor's degree might give you a leg up in your vocation, but you will not hear about the Christ of Scripture, at least as he is explained from Scripture. You will not get Christ explained in a redeeming way. You may hear about him as a historical figure, a religious figure, but you will not hear about him as the center of your salvation. Now in a pluralistic society, perhaps one would argue that hearing about Christ in the college classroom is not the purpose of the modern student's intellectual formation. Now that may be right, it may be wrong, but that's not so much my point in bringing up these three Ivy League schools. What's curious to me, and many of you know this, is that all three of these schools started as Christian institutions that were established for the express purpose of training men and women for the purpose of ministry. All three of them. In fact, Jonathan Edwards, the famous revivalist and theologian, some might even say the greatest theological mind in America, shortly before his death was named the president of Yale University. It just gives you an idea of the kind of person that they were looking for to serve as the head of the institution at Yale University. But what's interesting, even more so, is that each of these schools have an official seal. You've seen this, right? Each school has a seal or a crest, and usually it's some type of maybe two tablets of stone, and it has something written in Latin or Greek or something like that. Each of these schools have an official seal. For Harvard, the official seal says Veritas. Does anybody know what Veritas means? Truth, that's Latin for truth. The Princeton seal says, de subnumine viget, which in Latin means, under the protection of God, she flourishes. The seal for Yale has something both in Latin and in Hebrew. In Latin, it says, Lux et Veritas, light and truth. And in Hebrew, it says, Urim Vethumim. You can probably hear that in English, right? The Urim, Urim and Vethumim, those divining stones, not divining stones, but those stones that were used by the priests of Israel to discern the will of God. So what these institutions proclaim so proudly to uphold in their official seals, they actually stifle as they instruct young and impressionable minds of the future. Now how does something like that happen? How does an institution get so far away from its established purpose in the beginning? How does it get away from its core commitments? I would submit to you this evening that it gets away from those things by compromise, by forgetting, and by disbelief. Because here's the thing, every new generation comes along with its own set of fresh ideas, right? The latest philosophical ideas, the latest political ideas. And every generation has its own particular zeitgeist. Now this is a German word that simply means the spirit of the age. And we could probably sit around and figure out what the spirit of the age today is, right? There's many ideas that constitute what the spirit of our age is. And it's interesting because you could come as a rational person and make an argument against the spirit of the age, whatever the most popular idea is, and even though you would articulate it in cool reason and logic and make a rational argument, the very fact that you are arguing against the zeitgeist already marks you as somebody who's wrong. because you picked the wrong side. You're towing the wrong line. But as these new ideas come along, as the zeitgeist comes along, what happens is the leaders of the institution, they say, well, you know, everybody's going with this. We got to go with this. I mean, this is what everybody's doing. We got to get on board. And so they get further and further and further away from truth. But as one philosopher said, and I'll never forget this, he who marries the spirit of the age soon becomes a what? A widow. He who marries the spirit of the age soon becomes a widow. Because what happens? That zeitgeist dies and then a new one comes along, right? And you just got to keep up with the latest and the greatest. And history has demonstrated this truth time and time again as intellectual institutions boarded the hamster wheel of the zeitgeist. And as Paul says in 2 Timothy 3, 7, They're always learning and never able to arrive at a knowledge of the truth. Now, this distinction, this dereliction of truth also happens in the churches, and we continue to see that played out, for example, in the Roman Catholic Church. We see that played out even in Protestant mainline churches. But now, coming a little closer to home, the dereliction of truth tempts us even as individuals, doesn't it? Abandoning God's truth, God's promises doesn't happen overnight. It happens through incremental moments, incremental moments of peeling away the confidence and comfort that we have in God's word. And for this reason, God gives us outward means to counteract those incremental moments of temptation with incremental moments of worship and fortification. And this is where the means of grace comes in. And we spent seven Sundays on the means of grace on Sunday morning. And this week, as I was preparing for the Lord's Day, I thought, oh, no, we're going to talk about the means of grace again. And I was tempted to pass it up, but as I prayed and thought about it, and I thought about my own soul, how it's prone to wonder, prone to leave the God I love, I knew that I couldn't pass up a moment to remind us once again how word, sacrament, and prayer are the consistent, incremental means that God uses to not only keep us in the faith, but to cause us to flourish in the faith. Plain, old, regular, ordinary means. So tonight, I wanna leave you with three thoughts Three thoughts that serve, as I said, as a after-dinner mint to the means of grace, and then we'll have a few moments of questions, okay? So here's the first thought. Number one, pound upon the shell to get the nut. Pound upon the shell to get the nut. Let's look at question number 94. What are the outward means by which Christ communicates to us the benefits of His redemption? And we answer, the outward means by which Christ communicates to us the benefits of redemption are His ordinances, especially the Word of God, baptism, the Lord's Supper, and prayer, all which means are made effectual to the elect for salvation. My grandparents had an almond and walnut farm. And so growing up in the Central Valley, every harvest season was full of dust as we picked up the nuts, the almonds, and the walnuts. But once they were all picked up, we filled up these burlap bags, and we brought them to the porch in the back of my grandfather's house, and we had a nut-cracking party. And, you know, the kids were over there with hammers trying to hammer them. And every now and then you'd hear a scream because they'd hit a finger instead of the nut. And the more sane people had those little nut crackers and they were cracking them. But the fact of the matter is they had to work hard. It's not just cracking the nut, but then it's separating the shell from the nut. And it's a lot of work. But you've got to pound upon that nut or that shell to get that nut. And we saw in Acts 2.42, this is something that we looked at extensively. It tells us what the early church was consistently devoted to. It says in Acts 2.42, they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and the fellowship and the breaking of bread and the prayers. This is what the church was given over to, that we're devoted to. It has this idea of being sticky or sticking close to, close at hand. attaching oneself, persisting in something. It's not just something that they just kind of did from time to time. It's something that they did every week, sometimes in the early church, every single day. In fact, we read about that in Acts, do we not, that they met in their homes daily to consider the word, the apostles' teaching, to have the koinonia, the fellowship, and to pray. So think of the means of grace as the shell. They are the outward means with the nut of the spiritual benefit inside. And so as you think about that analogy, it's not so much that I'm just sitting under the word, and maybe I'm on my phone and I'm playing, I don't know, some game. What's that game that everybody plays that... Yes, that came, yeah. That was so popular for so long, okay? And the constant competition of preachers. So it's not just sitting on your phone and playing that or answering an email, but you're engaged, you're diligent to listen to the word as it is preached and do the hard work of application. Because I hope I don't need to remind you that it is certainly the job of the preacher to try to apply the message to the people. But at the end of the day, we've got to do the hard work individually of applying it to where we are specifically. Because as much as your elders do know about you, there's so much that we don't know about you. We don't know exactly what's going on in your heart. And so you must take that word, you must wrestle with it, you must pound upon the shell and get the spiritual benefit of the nut. As I said this morning, Martin Luther, that's what he did with Romans 1, 16 and 17, right? He beat upon Romans 1, 16 and 17 to figure out what does it mean that the righteousness of God is revealed and how is this good news? And he beat and he beat and he beat. And finally, it dawned on him, and it was good news indeed. And this is not a one-time thing, just a one-time experience, but it's a daily thing. It's a weekly thing as we beat upon the means of grace to get the spiritual nut. Let me take you to Hosea 6. I know it's another minor prophet. I have a fixation with the minor prophets lately, but Hosea 6. You could do this one of two ways. You could start with the major prophets and work forward, or you could start with the New Testament and work backward. But either way, get to Hosea chapter six, verses one and following. This is what Hosea says. He says, come, let us return to the Lord. He has torn us that He may heal us. He has struck us down and He will bind us up. After two days, He will revive us. On the third day, He will raise us up that we may live before Him. Now look at verse 3. Let us know. Let us press on to know the Lord. His going out is sure as the dawn. He will come to us as the showers, as the spring rains that water the earth. Remember I was talking about this morning and even tonight, the promises of God. Here's one of the precious promises in your bag of promises that you could pull out. The Lord says if we press into him, if we press in to know the Lord, even if our emotions are not there, and let's be honest, a lot of times our emotions are not there, right? Whether you're getting up in the morning to read your Bible or to pray or even to lead your family in worship or even come into church on Sunday morning or even right now in the evening, sometimes your emotions are not there and you're trying to get your emotions to play catch up with where you want your heart to be. In those moments, here's a precious promise for us. Let us know. Let us press on to know the Lord. His going out, listen, is as sure as the dawn. Isn't it wonderful when the Lord condescends to us in very simple illustrations to show how He works? He takes an example from nature. You know that at, right now, what, 7 a.m.? The sun's gonna rise, the dawn's gonna come. You believe that. Even atheists believe that. It's gonna come. And as surely as the dawn comes, so also if you press into the Lord with all of your heart, He will come to you. As the spring rains come, He will come to you, pounding on the shell to get the nut. This is a promise that He makes effectual to His elect. So that's the first lesson, pound upon the shell to get the nut. Now let's consider secondly, go to where the action is. Go to where the action is. Look at question 95. How is the Word made effectual to salvation? And we answer, the Spirit of God makes the reading, but especially the preaching of the Word, an effectual means of convincing and converting sinners and of building them up in holiness and comfort through faith unto salvation. So we have the means of grace, right? The Word of God, whether it's preached, whether it's read, whether it's meditated upon, whether it's heard. We have baptism that reminds us of that line of demarcation, what we once were and what we now are. We are a new creation. We've been brought into the family of God. We have the Lord's Supper which continues to nourish us with the spiritual sustenance of being connected to Christ. And then we have prayer, that holy wrestling with God that as we've been looking at Habakkuk, we've seen exemplified before our eyes as he wrestles with God. He takes hold of God as an expectant prophet, believing the promises. These means of grace are meant to fortify us, but here's the thing. If you want to feel the warm beams of the sun on your face, what do you need to do? You need to go outside. You need to get away from your PlayStation. You need to get away from your phone. You need to get outside the house and let those wonderful rays of sun beat upon your face and feel the warmth of God's creation. Well, so also, if you want to hear from the Lord, if you want to be strengthened by His grace, you must go to where the grace is. Word, sacrament, prayer. You got to go where the action is. You can't simply expect grace to come if you don't go to where the action is. And I would submit to you, as I've said time and time again, that the Lord's Day is the apogee, the apex, the climax of the means of grace. That is where the means of grace are set out on a broad and spacious table. Spiritual food, wine, grapes, meat, all these luscious dishes of spiritual nourishment just waiting for you to take advantage of them. But we have to go to where the action is. It is the spirit of God who makes the word of God effective in your life. So here's a very practical tip. Go to where the spirit's voice is most amplified. Now, don't get too mystical, okay? But can the spirit be in nature as you're canoeing down the river? Well, of course he can. But always remember this, the Spirit of God has a track record of working in tandem with one thing. And what is that thing? You guys tell me. Spirit works in tandem with the? Word of God. Word and spirit, spirit and word. That's how people are converted. That's how people are sanctified. That's how people are glorified. That's how healing takes place, if it does take place in God's providence. Spirit and word. So don't get too mystical, you know. I'm just gonna go out into nature and listen for God's voice. Well, the voice of God in nature is all law, okay? The voice of God in nature, according to Romans 1, is you're a filthy, miserable sinner as you compare yourself to the grandeur of the waterfalls and the oasis and the mountains, and you are unworthy. You need another word, and that word is gospel, and that word comes to you through word and spirit on that spacious table laid out for you on the Lord's day in the house of God with his people. Go to where the word is, go to where the spirit is, and on the Lord's day, that's where you will find it. You need to be hungry, right? You need to be hungry if you're going to be fed. You need to be hungry for words, sacrament, and prayer. But here's the thing. What do you do if you're not hungry? There you go. That's a wonderful thing to do. If you are not pray, if you're not, listen, here's the paradox of it. If you're not hungry for words, sacrament, and prayer, pray. Isn't that kind of funny? It's like there's a huge pizza and I'm not hungry. Just eat pizza and you'll be, no, it doesn't work that way. But in prayer and word and sacrament, it does work that way. Because what God does is he has this funny way, this curious way of priming the pump as we do get down on our knees. And where there is no appetite to seek the Lord's face, he will give that to you as you start to seek his face, as you start to get in his word. I can tell you countless stories of my wife and I, how we've been angry at each other and we wanted to rip each other's throats out, metaphorically speaking, sometimes literally. And instead, we would go to the word as, you know, obstinate as we were, and the Lord would start to soften our hearts toward one another. And for the Lord to soften my wife's heart towards me, I mean, that's bordering on a miracle. But that's what the word does, you see. So when we're not hungry, we go to the things that we want to be hungry for to gain a greater appetite for them. Now, we can pray, but here's another thing. Preach to yourself. Preach to yourself. Now, if that seems odd to you, I just want you to, I want you to understand something, okay? There are voices preaching to you every day. The world, the flesh, and the devil. They're preaching to you every day. They're whispering in your ear things every second of the day. And they have a sermon, and they have a pulpit, and they have a stage upon which they're standing. And the only way you're going to counteract that is if you preach against those things. If you preach to yourself and remind yourself of who you are in Christ, if you preach to yourself and remind yourself of the promises that you have that are antithetical to or opposite to what the world, the flesh and the devil are preaching. I mean, think of it this way if you want. It's very similar to how Jesus was in the wilderness being tempted by Satan. And what did he counter with? Satan comes with, Satan even came with the word and told him, if you throw yourself off, Psalm 95, angels will take you up. And he comes back with the word and says, do not tempt God. He comes back with the word and says, man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of the Lord. What is Jesus doing? He's preaching to himself and he's preaching to the enemy that's trying to make him succumb to temptation. You must preach to yourself. Sometimes I'm in the shower and my wife comes in and she's like, who are you talking to? I'm preaching to myself. I've got to talk to myself. Sometimes I've got to talk myself off the ledge. I'll never forget that scene in Pilgrim's Progress where Christian was being tempted to get away from the path that leads to the celestial city and to go to the city of destruction. And all the pleas for him to come were very rational in the world's eyes. But what did he do? You guys remember what he did? He stuck his fingers in his ear and he screamed at the top of his lungs, life, life, life forevermore, and he ran away. I don't care if people think I'm crazy as I'm standing in the line at the supermarket trying to avert my eyes from the scantily clad women on the magazines. If I'm talking to myself, preaching to myself, I would rather look like a lunatic and not succumb to temptation than to try to look like everybody else and succumb to it. You preach to yourself. 2 Corinthians 10 5. We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God and take every thought captive to the obedience of Christ. Preach to yourself. Jesus, I want this, but I know I don't want this. Help me. I believe help my unbelief. So we want to go to where the action is. We want to preach for ourself. And here's the third and final thing. Sharpen the axe. Sharpen the ax. Question 96. How is the word to be read and heard that it may become effectual to salvation? And we answer that the word may become effectual to salvation. We must attend thereunto with diligence, preparation and prayer, receive it with faith and love, lay it up in our hearts and practice it in our lives. A wise man once said this. Give me six hours to chop down a tree, and I will spend the first four sharpening the ax. Isn't that wise? You could take a blunt ax and chop away and exert all your energy for six hours, and the guy that sharpens his ax is probably gonna get done before you, because he prepares. He prepares. I trained for a triathlon last year. I probably shouldn't have, but I did. And, uh, what that required is I had to get up a lot of mornings, very early in the morning and go, um, bike or swim or, uh, run. And at the end of the previous day, a lot of times I would, I would be so tired that I didn't want to get all my gear ready. I just didn't want to do it. I was tired. And I told myself, like we're accustomed to do, I'll just do it in the morning. I'll just get everything ready in the morning. Right. So, I get up at 5.30, I've got to be out, I get up at 5, I've got to be out the door at 5.30 or Scott Jones is going to be texting me saying, where are you? We're about to get going, okay? So, I get up at 5 o'clock and I need to be out the door at 5.30. I start to make my breakfast, I start to make the coffee, and I'm trying to be quiet because if I wake my kids up, you know, I don't want them to wake Christine up because she needs her sleep. So, if I wake the kids up, you know, I've got to stay. So I'm trying to get breakfast ready. I spill my coffee on my shirt. I'm trying to get my gear together, get my bike on the car, getting all these things. And, you know, it's 525. I've got five minutes left, and I still have about 30 minutes of things to do. And all of a sudden, I hear Caleb crying. So I go in, and I'm thinking, if I just make him a bottle, if I just make him a bottle, he's going to go back to sleep. But I come in, and he's wide awake. Hi, Daddy. And he wants to play, right? I'm like, oh, no. So I'm like, OK, I'm just going to make a bottle, get him back to bed. And so I get the bottle. I go back into the room. And now Cohen's up. Hey, Daddy. And he wants to play. I'm like, it's over. I'm just not going to go. And I just say, I can't do it. Well, I didn't prepare. I didn't prepare. If I would have prepared the night before, I could have gotten out without a peep, but it takes preparation to make something happen. Anything that's worth doing takes preparation. So if preparation is the key in these things, how much more in spiritual things? I think sometimes we just kind of slough off spiritual things, like my Bible reading, my prayer, and even the Lord's Day, you know? And it takes a back seat. Well, I've got other things to do. So that can be sacrificed, but these things can't be sacrificed. Let me just give you a few thoughts of how you can prepare, not only in your spiritual life as you read your Bible, pray, but even more importantly for the Lord's Day, okay? Just send me six thoughts, all right? The night before the Lord's Day, get everything ready the night before. do your ironing, prepare any food that needs to be prepared, make sure you have gas in the car so you don't have to... And you say, well, these are kind of real, real super, like almost too practical. Well, how many times have you been driving to church and it's like, well, we don't have any gas, I got to get gas? How many times have you started to iron five minutes before you have to leave? Okay, so just get everything ready. It makes the next morning a lot easier. Number two, read the text of scripture the night before. You know, I send out an email every week preparing you for what we're going to be thinking or preaching about. It's good for you to prime the pump of your mind and heart by Looking at the passage and if you have a family doing it with your family so that we can be expectant About what to hear and how we can think about applying it and if I could just make this suggestion Husbands if you can even think about if you have small children or even large children or tall children, whatever and and your wives Giving them specific questions that they can ask to apply the passage to their heart as they're listening to the service It'd be a wonderful thing for you to do. Thirdly, pray that the Lord would soften your heart. How many times have you come to the preached word of God and your heart's kind of like this? You just don't want to hear it. You've heard Josh's voice all morning, and that's all you're hearing is Josh's voice. You're not hearing God's voice. We need to pray that the Lord would help us hear what he's trying to say to us. Number four, put on hymns or worship songs in the morning to just kind of prime the pump. You know, a lot of times I'm listening to hymns as I come to church, or even in the morning when my mind's not there, and it just kinda pushes me a little bit closer to that place where I need to be. Number five, try not to plan things on Sunday, okay? Now, I don't wanna get in trouble here, but I want you to think very carefully about answering this question. What is my priority on the Lord's Day? What is my priority on the Lord's Day? Or another way to put it, what is the center of the Lord's Day? Is the center of the Lord's Day the means of grace, or is the center of the Lord's Day getting done other things that need to be done, and the means of grace take a back seat? Ask yourself that question, and I hope that the answer is that the Lord's Day and the means of grace, being with God's people, word, sacrament, and prayer are the center of the Lord's Day. And then finally, and this is, you know, nothing groundbreaking, but rest on Sunday. You know, Monday through Saturday, I know you guys like me, we're just going, you know, 100 miles an hour. Remember that the Lord's Day is a day not only for spiritual nourishment, but for physical rest. If you can give your body physical rest on that day, you know, moving things from Sunday to other days of the week, you're going to feel so much more refreshed on Monday morning and ready to hit the the rat race a little more prepared. So the means of grace are meant to strengthen you in your faith, but their ultimate end is to lead you to Jesus Christ. And so I would just say, at the end of any Lord's Day or at the end of any time that you've spent in the Word or in prayer, just ask yourself this question, do I love Jesus? Do I love Jesus? Am I grateful to Christ for covering my sin by opening up his veins and dying on the cross? Am I grateful to Christ for giving me his perfect life through faith? covered sin, perfect righteousness, acceptable to the father. Does that do anything for me? I hope it does. The ultimate end of the means of grace is for us to make much of Jesus. And if you love Jesus more after a good dose of the means of grace and the means of grace are doing what they were intended to do. All right. Any questions means of grace, family worship, anything? Yeah. Yeah. Any other questions? And if I'm sitting here and my role is humility, humility and all this has been discussed very well this evening, but just my humble approach to the music is it's not automatic. Right. And you receive something from that. God in his amazing grace will even go against us. Sure. Absolutely. It's helpful. Any other questions, thoughts? Hmm. Hmm. Praise the Lord. Okay, let me just end with this before we pray. I just want all of you to know, especially heads of families, we think family worship at home is important. We think it's helpful and edifying to you and your family. And if any of you struggle with that, like maybe you don't know what goes into family worship or the frequency of it or how much is too much, how little is too little or what resources. Please, first off, don't be embarrassed by that because it's not something that's just kind of in the water in mainstream evangelicalism. But secondly, just know that your pastors are here to answer any questions that you have about that, not as if we do it perfectly, we'll confess to you, but it is something that we endeavor to do, and we would like to help you with any question that you have. So I just want to throw that out there, any advice that you want, and there have been people that have come to us and said, hey, here's what I'm dealing with, how do I implement family worship in a more effective way? And we love getting those inquiries. Just want you to know you don't need to feel embarrassed. You can come to us afterwards or anytime, email us, text, whatever, and we'd be more than happy to serve you in that way. Let's pray. Father God, we thank you for these means, and as one divine has said, they're neither to be neglected nor worshipped. But Father, they are simply channels. Channels that lead us to the great high priest, your son and our Lord Jesus Christ. And Father, I just pray that you would build us up through them in this place. I pray that our people, we would all make diligent use of them, and that Father, we would draw closer and closer to you through the Son by the power of the Spirit, for it is in your triune name we pray. Amen.