Well, good morning. It's good to see you this morning. Glad you can be with us in the Lord's house. There's a lot of illness, sickness going around in the community at large and even in our assembly. So I'm so glad that you're well enough to be here and that we can fellowship together today and be under the authority of the word together today. We're gonna continue in our series introducing our church to one another and to those in the future who may inquire. And so let's turn to Ephesians chapter five this morning. Ephesians chapter five. And we're gonna read from chapter five of Ephesians, and then we're going to flip over to Colossians and read a similar passage in Colossians. So Ephesians chapter five, and we'll begin here at verse 18. Let's go back to 17. That's a better place to start, I suppose. 5.17 of Ephesians. This is God's word. Wherefore, be ye not unwise, but understanding what the will of the Lord is. and be not drunk with wine wherein is excess, but be filled with the Spirit, speaking to yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord, giving thanks always for all things unto God and the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, submitting yourselves one to another. in the fear of God. Now I'm sure it's been pointed out to you, the structure of that little section, it's pretty easy to see. You have a command at the end of verse 18 to be filled with the Spirit. And then the next three verses all begin with an I-N-G word. So these are the three marks of being filled with the Holy Spirit. So what do Spirit-filled people do? Well, they They're speaking and giving and submitting, right? And the speaking in verse 19 has to do with singing, and then the giving thanks, and then the submitting to one another. And if we ask, okay, what does it mean to be filled with the Spirit? That seems kind of mystical. What does it mean to be filled with the Spirit? Well, the Colossians passage will answer that for us. If you turn over to Colossians, in chapter three, you have a very similar passage beginning at verse 16. So Colossians 3, 16. The word of God says, let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom, teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord And whatsoever ye do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God and the Father by him. And then you go into the different relationships in the Christian life and the wives submitting themselves unto their own husbands. So you see the similarity there. You have really all three elements of the ING words from Ephesians are also present in Colossians. You have the singing, and you had the giving thanks, and you had the submitting. In Ephesians, all of this flowed out of be filled with the spirit. What's it flow out of in Colossians? Letting the word of Christ dwell in you richly. So what does it mean to be filled with the spirit? It means to let the word of Christ dwell in you richly. There's nothing mystical about being filled with the Holy Spirit, somehow getting yourself in the Spirit or some kind of nonsense like that. It just means submitting and obeying God's Word, giving it a rich dwelling in your life, being guided by, submissive to, yielded to the Word of God. That's what it means. When you're yielded to the Word of God, well, the Word of God is the things of the Spirit. And so you're filled with the Spirit when you're filled with the Word of God. So I point out those two passages because those are our two New Testament primary passages on singing in the local church, singing in the Christian life, and eventually here we'll get to that in our lesson. Let's seek the Lord's help now, let's pray. Our Father in heaven, we thank you for your kindness to us through Jesus Christ and the mercies that sinners like us know in him. We thank you for a full atonement and that you are completely satisfied with him and therefore you accept us as we are in him. And we thank you that you have forgiven us, that you've given us your spirit and your word. And we pray that the Lord Jesus himself would be our teacher today, that he would be our prophet revealing unto us by his word and spirit the will of God for our salvation. And may we be submissive to our Savior's voice today in the hours of instruction and worship. We pray in Jesus' name, amen. So last week we were talking about our philosophy of ministry here at our church, and said that we would take several weeks in doing this. A couple weeks ago we did our distinctive of theology, and now our philosophy of ministry, and it often is in a local church that the philosophy of ministry is, kind of takes up, is kind of a lot of what the culture of the church is, And so wanted to talk through on the things that we view as important and non-negotiable, the way we go about ministry, why we do what we do. And so we started last week with the most important thing that we do as a congregation. And we even said that how you answered that question reveals a lot about your philosophy of ministry. What is the most important thing we do as a congregation? And it is gather for corporate worship. gathering for corporate worship. And so we talked about how we view our Lord's Day gatherings as the assembly of believers for worship. And we deny that Lord's Day gatherings are for maximizing the attendance of unbelievers in order to share the gospel with them. That is not the reason for our gatherings on the Lord's Day. We deny that the Lord's Day gathering is primarily just for instruction or edification. That will be a byproduct of what we do, but that is not the reason that we're together. We're not together to learn something new together. We are together to worship, as believers to worship the Lord. It doesn't mean we don't invite unbelievers. We invite unbelievers. We're happy to have unbelievers. We expect that we have unconverted with us every time we gather, and we pray for them. We pray for conversions. We pray that people will come to know the Lord through the preaching of the word. But it's just not the primary focus to gather as many worldly people as possible into the building so that we can minister to them. That's not why we're here. We're a gathering of believers for corporate worship. And so that means that we're here to give and not to get. We're here to give devotion unto God. We're not primarily here to get. We're not primarily here to, like I said, learn something new, or to receive encouragement from somebody else. Those are byproducts. The primary reason for our gathering is to give unto the Lord, and then secondarily to each other. We give, not get. And our primary audience when we worship is God. And what matters is his pleasure. What matters is not how people feel about the worship service or whether they receive it or not, whether it was fun or not. What matters is God, his pleasure. He is the audience. We are the worshipers, he's the audience. It's not that the people on the platform are the worshipers and the congregation is the audience. The whole sanctuary are the worshipers and God It's the audience. So we talked through our typical order of worship with some comments about why we do what we do and how our typical order of worship involves the five commanded elements of worship. There's singing, and there's giving, and there's praying, and there's the reading of scripture, and there's preaching. Those are the five commanded elements of worship. And we talked through the order of why we do what we do and the emphases that we give. We talked about how worship must be word saturated. It's got to have large doses of God's word because worship is always responsive. We don't initiate worship. God initiates it. We respond to him in worship. And so lots of scripture. There ought to be lots of praying in worship. Again, worship is responding to what God has said in his word. So lots of praying. Unfortunately, when you are on vacation or visiting family and you find yourselves in other contexts of worship services, it tends to be almost appalling how little scripture is read, how little scripture is ministered, how little praying there is. And when there is praying, it's praying at the end of the sermon, and you can't really tell whether the guy's talking to God or talking to the audience still. You know, so lots of scripture, lots of praying. We talked about how the whole service is worship, not just the music part. It's not like, you know, you do your worship for the first half hour, and then you have the preaching time. Right, actually the preaching is the most central act of worship. The proclamation of the word is the foundation and the central act of worship. The way that we respond to the word is the height of our worship. It is more important than our singing. It's more important than the bowing of our heads and our posture or whatever else in the room. How we're responding to the word in our hearts. Our tenderness of heart is real, sincere worship in spirit and in truth. Right, so the preaching of the word is central to our worship service. And we talked, yeah, we talked about how the whole congregation's called to worship, not just the people on the platform. Worship is not a spectator sport, right? It is participatory. And so as we closed, it reminded us of how Pastor McKnight has taught us our aim that strikes the right balance in worship, and how we have all benefited from His giving us this balance in our worship with those four phrases. We're trying to strike a balance of joyful sobriety. Joyful sobriety. So in our worship, there ought to be the dominant note of joy. That should be the dominant note of our worship, joy. Because of what the Lord has done for us and our gratitude to him. but not just a happy-go-lucky kind of a joy, a joyful sobriety that we are appearing in the presence of God and we are doing the most important thing there is for a creature to do. So joyful sobriety, reverent enthusiasm. Right, so reverence before the Lord, the fear of God, and I was gonna read, maybe at some point we'll read, and I know we'll get to it in 1 Corinthians sometime, but in 1 Corinthians 14, we get a little window into a worship service. It's in the middle of the speaking in tongues section of 1 Corinthians, but he talks about how when you gather together, it ought to be that someone from the outside enters the sanctuary and then leave saying of a truth God was there. Reverent. Enthusiasm, right? It's not that we're all, you know, drinking goblets of embalming fluid and we're just, you know, walking around with just great gravity and frowns or whatever, right? It ought to be with enthusiasm and energy that we worship. that when we sing or when we join with the amen at the end of a prayer or, you know, there ought to be with enthusiasm that we worship, with energy, not just going through the motions, not just trudging along because, you know, it's another Sunday morning. Reverent enthusiasm. Humble boldness. Boldness because we have a great high priest who has passed into the heavens. Boldness because he has opened for us a new and living way through his flesh. Boldness because of the blood of Christ that cleanses from all sin and the promises of forgiveness. But humble boldness, recognizing that we still fall so far short and we haven't arrived and we're so weak and we need him every hour. We need him. So, joyful sobriety, reverent enthusiasm, humble boldness, dignified simplicity. There is something dignified about simplicity. And the worship of God ought to be dignified, considering who it is that we're appearing before. There's to be a dignity about this. And then it's dignified with simplicity. It's not ornate with rituals and changes of posture and all the different traditions that we could bring in. A dignified simplicity. It's the word of God responding to the word of God. That's worship. We believe that worship services should be deliberate and not rushed. We should not be in a hurry in our worship. We shouldn't. We shouldn't be in a hurry. You know, the congregation has provided me a little clock on the pulpit. And it's actually part of the pulpit. There's a little hole in the pulpit. And the little clock can come out. You can change the battery. You pop it back in. It's right there in the middle. So there is a clock there. And that's necessary. But we're not driven by time as if we've got something better to do come 1230, or 1220, or whatever it is. We're not in a hurry. We're not in a hurry. We want to take our time. God deserves our time. If you think about the amount of time we spend in corporate worship compared to the rest of the week, it's not that much. Two and a half hours. How many hours are in a week? I don't know. Seven times 24, whatever it is. Two and a half hours, not even a tithe, not even a tithe of our time. So we can spend that time. And so, not in a hurry. Something dignified about not being in a rush in the presence of God. And we believe that worship is best when it is planned and deliberate, not spontaneous and impulsive. Now, here's where we run contrary to much of our culture. Our culture, for whatever reason, has come to view spontaneity with authenticity. That something is authentic if it is off the cuff, if it is impulsive, it's real and it's genuine and it's authentic. And if it's planned and rehearsed and deliberate, well then it must be fake. If you had to plan it and you had to reverse it, then it must just be fake. that the mark of authenticity is spontaneity. That's probably because of the overemphasis on the emotions and on the feelings in our culture. Less emphasis on truth, more emphasis on feelings is then going to give our culture the impression that, you know, spontaneity is the mark of authenticity. and that something planned and rehearsed and deliberate is just fake and phony. We don't fall for that. God deserves a worship that is thought out and planned and deliberate. And our musicians, they rehearse. The choir rehearses. Right, I think through the entire worship service. I produce a little half sheet for myself every Lord's Day. Right, it's got the same elements on it, you know, the call to worship, and the announcements, and the requests, and the hymn, and I put notes on here if I want to do, you know, if we want to do one of the, if I want to announce that we're gonna do a certain verse without the instruments, or sometimes I leave that to Wesley to do, and you should see Wesley's bulletin. Wesley's order of service has arrows all, down, right, and, you know, wrote notes to himself on his order of worship as well. We're just, we're not, it's, spontaneity is not the mark of authenticity. Rather, we think through deliberately, we're thoughtful about our worship. We don't, we're not just off the cuff and doing whatever just strikes us in the moment. All right, so those are just some wrap-up comments from what we talked about last week. What I wanted to do this week, and this is going to be impossible to really do well in 10 minutes, but I want to briefly touch on some of the principles that inform our music standards for our worship services, for our corporate worship. This is not an apologetic for these things. Obviously, there's no way I can go through and argue for these things and turn up scripture for every one of them and everything like that. And it's not to say, you know, we don't, we're not ever saying that the music standards that we have decided upon for our corporate worship have to be the standards where you draw your lines in your own lives and in your own homes as a family or a couple. That's not the case at all. but wanted to go through some of the principles that inform our choices in music. And I do, though, want to go ahead and assure you that those of us that are leaders in this area, myself, Passion McKnight, Wesley, these actually are our personal convictions when it comes to sacred music. It's not like I'm just maintaining a tradition that was handed to me. If I started a church somewhere, it would look just like this. If my family existed on an island and somehow had access to music, it would look like this. I mean, this is actually where I am personally. It's not just, you know, the maintenance of what we've always done kind of a thing. All right, so here are some of the principles that inform our standards in music and where we draw lines and things. All right, so I think I've got five of these, yeah, I've got five points. The first one I just call theology, and it should go without saying that our music has words that are theologically accurate. And we aim in our worship, in our corporate worship, in the limited time that we have together, And we only get so many hymns to be able to sing together as a congregation. We aim for theologically rich content and content that is explicitly drawn from scripture. That's what we're aiming for in our lyrical content of our music. The New Testament, in these two passages we just read, speaks of psalms and hymns and spiritual songs. And for ages, those words have been debated as to what they're referring to. Do they refer to three different genres? Do they refer to three different types of psalms, like the exclusive psalmody people say? There's been debate about those three words ever since they've been written. My personal thinking, I wouldn't be dogmatic on this, but personally, I believe that the word Psalms refers to the book of Psalms. And the word hymns refers to sacred music sung to God. And then spiritual songs refers to sacred music sung about Christian experience. So if you think about those three categories and you just think about the hymns that we have planned for today. This evening we're going to be singing Psalm 139c about how God searches us and knows us and we're asking him to do that and to try our hearts and see if there'd be any wicked way in us. And so that would be in the category of Psalms. And we want to be singing the Psalms. Singing the Psalms is not something I grew up with. It's not something I ever even saw done until the first time I was ever in this sanctuary on a Wednesday evening in in March of 2004, the first time I ever saw somebody sing a song before, which is pretty pathetic, actually. Having grown up in a Christian home, in a pastor's home, and done four years at a Christian college, it's pretty pathetic that I had never seen someone sing from a psalter until that night. But I've grown to appreciate it, and not just appreciate it, but feel convinced that it's the right way to go. That our singing ought to include the psalms. We have commands that this ought to be done. And the psalms are what's going to keep us balanced in our singing. Because if it's left up to us, we'll choose only certain themes to sing about. And the psalms cover the whole gamut of Christian experience. You can easily, in corporate worship, give the impression that Christianity is just happy, happy, joy, joy. And the psalms keep you from that, don't they? The psalms of lament, the confessional psalms. And so they keep you grounded and they keep you balanced. And so the psalms. We sing hymns, so today we're singing the first hymn, And Can It Be, that I Should Gain an Interest in the Savior's Blood, and the chorus is addressed to God, Thou, my God, shouldst die for me, so it's a sacred hymn addressed to God, it's a hymn. We're singing this evening, Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise, so a classic hymn in that genre. And then we sing spiritual songs, songs about Christian experience. And so this evening we're singing I Know Whom I Have Believed, which is a scripture song, but it's also a song about Christian experience, right? I know not how the spirit moves convincing men of sin, right? But I know whom I've believed, right, and am persuaded, so psalms, hymns, spiritual songs. We avoid hymns that contain theological errors, or that we know were written by heretics and avoided certain theology. So I'll give two examples of psalms that I personally avoid. They're actually in our hymn book, but I avoid them. I will not sing them and won't choose to sing them. One would be the typical hymn sung at Easter time, He Lives. If you think about that hymn, That is a hymn that is teaching, that is not teaching the bodily resurrection of Jesus. It is talking about some kind of theological liberal concept of a resurrection in my heart or something, right? So, I serve a risen savior. He's in the world today. I know that he is living, whatever men may say. How do I know he lives? He lives within my heart. There's enough people that take that view on the resurrection, denying the actual bodily resurrection of the Lord, and take that view of the resurrection, that theological liberal view. Yeah, he lives, he lives. He lives on in people's hearts as they follow his teachings. That's how he lives, right? So, don't sing that hymn. We don't sing the Christmas hymn, It Came Upon a Midnight Clear. I came upon him in eclairs written by a Unitarian who denied the deity of the Lord Jesus. You read through all four standards of that hymn, it never references the Lord Jesus. It's a Christmas hymn that doesn't have Jesus in it, right? It's just about the angels and about, you know, stuff and nothing about Christ, nothing about him because the person who wrote it denied his deity. So we don't sing that one. So, you know, we aim for, you know, theological accuracy in what we sing. And we avoid also hymns that make arrogant assertions. Like, my Jesus I love thee, I know thou art mine. For thee all the follies of sin I resign. Kind of sounds like Peter. Kind of sounds like Peter, right before he denied our Lord. So we avoid those kind of hymns, too, of personal experience that make those kind of assertions about our faithfulness to the Lord. So all of that in the context of theology. All right, second, though, we do believe that the music communicates, that the music itself is not amoral, non-communicative, That it's just kind of up to personal taste, how the music goes. That music communicates actually even more than the words. Because music has the capacity of communicating with efficiency and with undeniable clarity, feeling, and emotion. And so you have to be very careful about the music. The music is not indifferent. It's not just as long as the words are okay, the music, you know, anything goes. The music communicates as well. And the idea often on the music side of things is, well, beauty's in the eye of the beholder, but that's just not the case. God has revealed what beauty is. You look at him, you look at his creation, and God has revealed that beauty has to do with with symmetry and balance and orderliness and purity and clarity, the kinds of things that are spoken of in Philippians 4.8, right, that's, it's not beauties in the eye of the beholder, but the standard for what beauty is. And so our music must communicate what is beautiful. It should be orderly. It should be pure. It should be clear. It should be appropriate to the words that are being sung and to the mood of the poetry. The music ought to communicate that as well and back it up and enhance the words. The music ought to serve the words, not distract from the words, but serve the words, serve the truth. And so there's that element of the music communicating. That leads to a third issue, which is how it must be distinctive. Our music has to be distinctive. It cannot be like the world's music. It cannot arouse sensuality like the world's music does. It cannot sound like a top 40 station. There's got to be a difference. And when we've talked about this often, when we were in Exodus and Numbers, the Golden Calf and Balaam, and the applications that we made in those Sunday evening services, When you take the sights and the sounds and the atmosphere that is associated with the world's idolatry and you bring it into the house of God, God views it as idolatry. You don't have to have a golden calf in order for it to be idolatrous. When the Apostle Paul applies the golden calf incident to the church at Corinth, He warns them about idolatry and he doesn't say, so therefore don't make a golden calf. What he points to is how they rose up to play. That's what he refers to. So that which was associated with the idolatry becomes idolatrous itself. so that if you bring the sights and the sounds of the atmosphere that is associated with the world's idolatry, and we know what the world's idolatry is. Like I said when we talked about it on that Sunday evening, there's even a show on TV called American Idol. So we know what the world's idolatry is. And if you bring those sights, those sounds, that atmosphere into the church, it's idolatrous. You don't have to have a golden calf in order for there to be idolatry taking place. Associations matter. It has to be distinctive. Our worship has to be wholly devoted to the Lord. I'll just say the last two things real quick, we're out of time. But the fourth one is modesty. Worship music has to draw attention to God and not self. So modesty, not attention-getting. Which is what we so much loved about Mrs. Wassell's organ playing. Right, there's nothing that drew attention to herself, nothing that distracted from the words. It was modest. And then there is the fact that it must be congregational, participatory, that we want our singing to be able to be joined in with the entire congregation. And so that's why we use hymnals, and we'll probably just pick up there next week. I'll give a little apologetic for continuing to use hymnals. And then we'll go on to another topic when it comes to why we do what we do. All right, so thank you for your attention. Happy to hear your feedback on any of that. But for now, let's prepare now for our prayer time.