Please take your copy of the Scriptures and turn with me to 2 Corinthians chapter 3. Before Pastor Meister comes once more, we will read from God's Word, beginning in 2 Corinthians 3 verse 12 through chapter 4 verse 6. This is God's Holy Word to us this afternoon. Since we have such a hope, we are very bold, not like Moses who would put a veil over his face so that the Israelites might not gaze at the outcome of what was being brought to an end, but their minds were hardened. For to this day, when they read the old covenant, that same veil remains unlifted because only through Christ it is taken away. Yes, to this day, whenever Moses is read, a veil lies over their hearts. But when one turns to the Lord, the veil is removed. Now the Lord is the spirit, and where the spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And with all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. From this comes the Lord, who is the spirit Therefore, having this ministry by the mercy of God, we do not lose heart, but we have renounced disgraceful, underhanded ways. We refuse to practice cunning or to tamper with God's word, but by the open statement of the truth, we would commend ourselves to everyone's conscience in the sight of God. And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled only to those who are perishing. In their case, the God of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. For what we proclaim is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, with ourselves as your servants for Jesus' sake. For God said, let light shine out of darkness. has, for God who said, let light shine out of darkness, has shown in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. Let us pray. Once more, Holy Father, blessed God, Trinity, we do thank you and we praise you and we ask you now to come meet with us by your spirit. Open your word to our minds and hearts May we see Christ, may the spirit move within us to point us to Christ, to exalt Christ, Lord. We thank you for your servants who have opened your word to us this weekend, and we pray that you'll bless Pastor Meister now as he comes to proclaim your truth. We pray this in Jesus' name, amen. We might skirt around a little bit from there, but mostly meditate on this significant passage. And in many ways, picking up in much of what Dr. Fesco just said about our future hope and where we ended our first talk this morning in the illuminating work of the Spirit, we want to think of the light that the Spirit gives as we come to worship the Holy Spirit and our worship. Music has always been something that connects me to God. That's how one singer in a top-selling worship group, if I named the group, I'm guessing all of us would know, explained their work. Another wrote this, music is so we can connect with God and enter into a state of worship. Now I want you to consider the assumptions made by these two statements, that our emotional response to music is our connection to God. And it is, in fact, a state that we enter that is worship. Now, most professing Christians, I believe, agree with these assumptions. That's why singing is almost exclusively referred to as worship in most Christian circles. We worship, then we pray. We worship, and then we preach. But when God speaks to us in his word or we answer him in prayer, apparently that's not worship. Musicians are called now worship leaders. That title didn't even exist 100 years ago. Martin Lloyd-Jones made the observation as it was beginning in his day a generation ago, and he said this, you have a song leader as a new kind of official in the church, and he conducts the singing and is supposed to produce the atmosphere. But he often takes so much time in producing the atmosphere that there's no time to preach in the atmosphere, which is quite in line with the doctor. Our modern praise music movement arose out of Pentecostal and charismatic circles, and it effectively has established a new priesthood, worship leaders and bands. And the new sacrament is the song that mediates God's presence, connects us to God, as they said. And an atmosphere of God's presence, in essence, is human emotions and feelings. This is why in multi-site churches, the band is never live streamed. Do you notice that? The band is always present because you have to be present to receive the sacraments. The sacrament is always live. Well, what should we say of this new spirituality? Let's begin where we need to agree. Do we need an atmosphere to worship? Absolutely. You see, you and I both live by breath alone. You're doing it right now. That's why you're alive. You and I entirely depend on air outside us to have life within us. And what's amazing is we think about God the spirit, which as we said earlier, can be translated wind or breath. It effectively means moving air. What's amazing is that God says he has spirit at all. God has moving air. God is spirit, but the God who has spirit and is spirit needs nothing. He only gives. As the psalmist says in Psalm 36 verse 9, with you is the fountain of life. Paul writes in his benediction of 1 Timothy, 1 Timothy 6.16, he alone has immortality. He alone gives life. God, we have life and breath and need it. God is life and breath. We only have life as we breathe by God who is breath. The spirit who, as we said, brings all of God's work to completion. Churches often will begin corporate worship, sometimes with a prayer or something like this. The Spirit of God, you are welcome in this place. And what that often forgets is there would be no such place if the Spirit were not always present. The only reason there is places is because they live and move and exist in the presence of God the Spirit. And if you are breathing now, it is because the Spirit has given you life and breath through the Son who made all things from the Father. So as it is in creation, so also in revelation, the Spirit gives us life from God we said through the Word. And so we understand the Spirit's work. He gives us life through the Word. His Word comes to us and is received by us because of the Spirit of God. And His Word resides in us and is returned from us in our prayers and praises by the Spirit of God. You see, we do need an atmosphere for worship. We need air. We need, we shall say more precisely, life. And we get life from the spirit of God. He is the life, the Lord and giver of it that we need for worship. So Paul writes here in this remarkable passage in 2 Corinthians 3 verse 17, the Lord is the Spirit. And by Lord there, he's referring to the divine name that's testifying that the Spirit is God. And what's striking is that in verse 16, he writes and alludes to Exodus 34, 34. where Moses goes in before Yahweh. So he says in verse 17 that the Lord is the Spirit. That is, Yahweh is Spirit. In this remarkable passage, Paul identifies in verse 15 Christ and verse 17 the Spirit with the One who is who He is. With Yahweh. The God who is, how is He? He is the Father who begets the Son and with the Son breathes the Spirit. That's how the one who is, is. That's why as Christians we're baptized into the name singular of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. So to worship our triune God, our worship must be Spirit-filled. It must be. And we must need, verse 17, freedom from the Spirit of the Lord. And when we hear this verse, and many of us have probably heard it quoted, we intuitively think of freedom as personal spontaneity. We think of freedom of expression. We think of an authentic thrill or experience, perhaps even something kind of raucous. But what Paul is addressing here is really the bad expectations the Corinthians had of spirituality. And he's contrasting in this remarkable chapter the greater glory of ministry and worship in the new covenant fulfilled in Christ. Now this is strange considering all the pyrotechnics of the Old Testament. Wouldn't you have loved to see them? Wouldn't you have loved to see Mount Sinai? Wouldn't you have loved to see the radiating glory on Moses' face? But Paul says earlier in this chapter, in verses 6 and 7, that that letter killed. Paul here is not denying that the letter was born by the Spirit, as we saw earlier. That it's not God-breathed Word. But it didn't change the hearts of those who heard it. Because it was without the illumination of the Spirit. So, the ministry of the Spirit, Paul refers to in verse 8, has more glory than all the firepower of Sinai and Moses, which is a remarkable thing to consider. Moses' ministry, Paul says in verse 9, brought condemnation. Verse 11, it was impermanent. It was being brought to an end. And with Moses' glowing demeanor from intimacy with the Lord when Moses was in his presence, Moses had to veil his face. And he says in verse 14, why? Because their minds were hardened. Their minds were hardened in unbelief. That's why Paul says in verse 15, the veil remains in lifeless worship. When Moses is read, the veil lies over the hearts. Hearts are separated and blind to the glory of God. And this blindness that Paul refers to, he goes down in chapter 4, verse 4, attributes to not just the flesh, but the God of this world, the prince of the power of the air, the evil one, who is blinding the minds of all those who do not believe. Now, Paul here refers to reading Moses. He refers to chapter 4, verse 2 of open statements of the truth. He refers to the gospel. He refers to knowledge. In verse 5 of chapter 4, he refers to what we proclaim. So in this whole section, Paul is talking about the public reading and preaching of the Bible. He's talking about worship. He's talking about the gathering of people, at least visibly in the name of God, to worship. And he talks about what's not worship, what's veiled, what brings death. And when Paul says something is not worship, notice he doesn't say it's because people are not enthused or unexcited, the band is flat or they don't jump around or shouts. There was a lot of jumping around a golden calf at one point in the Old Testament that was not worship. Another reason Paul identifies it's not worship, It's because in verse 15, the blinding veil of unbelief remains. The word is read and it has no effect because it's not believed. And it's only believed through Christ when one turns to the Lord. And in those in Christ who turn to the Lord, verse 17, where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. Freedom from the veil. Freedom from separation from God. And remarkably, Moses here identifies the freedom that Christians have through the Spirit of God with the intimacy Moses had in the tent with Yahweh beholding his glory. Paul says that by the Spirit, Christians behold the glory of God in the Word incarnate by the Word inscripturated through the Word of God. And all this, the end of verse 18, comes from the Lord who is the Spirit. So what I want us to do in this chapter is consider the freedom to behold the glory of God in Christ in His Word by the Spirit. the freedom that Christian worship beholds to behold the glory of God and Jesus in his word by the spirit. And I want us to make three observations. The freedom of Christian worship is to believe Christ, behold Christ, and become like Christ. Believe, behold, become. So let's think first about the freedom to believe Christ. Now Christians often mistake verse 17 where the Spirit of the Lord is there as freedom because they misunderstand our bondage. Too often it's just taken for granted that we're generally good people in need of a lift. Whereas the Bible says we're bad people in need of life. And the shift in our culture from ethics to experience has not had no small impact in the church and it's impacted how we view worship. And our bondage and sin was typified in the Old Testament with Israel's slavery who was liberated for worship. It's popularized Let My People Go with Charlton Heston and other movies, but we remember the real cry that came from God was let my people go that they might worship me and serve me. It was liberation for the presence of God. And we see later in the Old Testament that in his tabernacle and in his temple, the cloud of the glory of the Lord filled it. In Numbers 11, verse 25, the Lord coming down in the cloud to Moses is identified as the Spirit. Isaiah 63, verse 11 says that he put in the midst of them his Holy Spirit. The presence of God in his temple was the Spirit of God, and that presence was made to dwell in Jerusalem. the temple of God where his spirit dwelt, and there God's word went forth as the priests read his law to the people and interceded for them, and people sojourned to the presence of God in the temple in Jerusalem. Yet God himself in the sun assumed humanity, and when he did, he dwelt on earth, the gospel of John tells us, as the temple of his body. And he explained then that Jerusalem's temple had an expiration date. So in John chapter four, Jesus was conversing with a Samaritan woman at a well at the base of Mount Gerizim alongside the well. And this woman wanted to know and asked Jesus whether Mount Zion or Mount Gerizim had been appointed by God to be the place of worship. Now she was not changing the subject. She was not distracting Jesus. She was actually getting to the heart of things because Jesus had just demonstrated to her that he was a true prophet of God by telling her all she'd done. And so she wanted to get to the heart of the matter about the heart, which is, where does our heart find rest? How do we seek God? Is it here or in Jerusalem? And Jesus answered in John 4, 23 and 24, the hour is coming and is now here. when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth. For the Father is seeking such people to worship Him. God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth." Now think about that answer. The Father is seeking worship in spirit and truth. Now Jesus had just told Nicodemus that he needed to be born of the Spirit if he were to see the kingdom of God. And he will say that he is the way and the truth. No one comes to the Father but by him. And God is Father, Son, and Spirit. So worship must be in spirit and in truth. That is, by the Spirit, through the Son, who is truth, to the Father. This is the freedom of the spirits. Our bondage is that we are separate from the holy presence of God. And the good news is that Jesus, the true and perfect worshiper, our great high priest, has fulfilled God's justice and satisfied sin's penalty. And all the sacrifices and all the temple and all the priesthood was always pointing to him. They're fulfilled in him. And so through him, we can come to God. And we come to him by his spirits beginning in Jerusalem. So after Jesus died and rose again, he instructed his disciples to remain, in Acts 1 verse 4, in Jerusalem. Why? Because Jerusalem was the center of God's presence. Jerusalem is where you travel to worship. Jerusalem is where you sought to meet God. And now, beginning in Jerusalem, how everyone seeks God is changing. Rather than the nation streaming to the center of the temple, the temple is now going to the nations. The disciples would receive power by the spirit to testify to Christ to the ends of the earth so that worship would be in spirit and truth in every tribe, tongue, people, and nation. So the New Testament says to us in Galatians 4, the Jerusalem above is free, our mother. Or Hebrews 12, verse 22, you have come to Mount Zion, to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem. Or in Ephesians 2.22, the church is called a holy temple in the Lord. It's the first fruits of the new Jerusalem that's come down from heaven, that's come, will come at the end of time. Now what this means for us is we think about Pentecost. is that Pentecost is permanent and unrepeatable. The day of Pentecost was not a really good church service, as if, you know, that could be repeated. If your pastor and the band got their act together, we could have Pentecost again. No, there are no little Pentecosts. Pentecost is as permanent as Bethlehem and Calvary. It is the fulfillment of the promises of God to dwell among his people. It is what it's all been moving to. And many Christians and many traditions have poorly mistaken this. If Roman Catholicism wrongly claims to repeat Calvary in every mass, many Protestants wrongly believe that Pentecost can be repeated in every service. But it is as once as for all as Calvary. By the Spirit, we are now the temple of God. We are in the new Jerusalem above. Pentecost will never be repeated, but it will be extended. Abraham Kuyper had a great illustration. He said, the day of Pentecost is like the digging of a reservoir to satisfy a city. How many times do you build the water reservoir for a city? Well, just once, but as the city grows, you lay new canals and new pipes to get the source of life to the rest of the city. And he's exactly right. So new pipes are laid from Pentecost, but Pentecost has come. And this is the freedom of the spirit that Paul writes about here. The spirit gives life, freedom from a veil, a living heart of faith before God. Freedom in the presence of God through Christ who's opened the way to him. The freedom of the spirit in verse 17 here is not freedom from self-control. That's a fruit of the spirit, is self-control. And the fact we don't have it is the whole problem. It's the tyranny of our own independence. That's the bondage we're liberated from. The imprisonment of our sin that separates us from God. The Spirit brings the freedom of faith in the presence of God. To believe Christ and by His righteous holy life to have access to God. Open and free to come with boldness. But none of us can remove a blindness to which we are blinded. It has to be removed for us. And who does that? The Lord who is the Spirit. Verse 18, all this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit. By the power of the Spirit, we have the liberating grace of faith. And He joins us to the incarnate Son, communion with the Father, which He poured out by His Spirit upon His church to give us this liberty. Basil of Caesarea in the 4th century put it like this, it's impossible to worship the Son except in the Holy Spirit. It's impossible to call upon the Father except in the spirit of adoption. This is the freedom the Spirit brings us, faith in Christ to come to God. In Matthew 15, verses 8 and 9, Jesus rebuked his own day with the reproof of Isaiah, This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me. In vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men. To recite the truth and not believe it is a great evil. It's the evil of hypocrisy. But hypocrisy is not corrected by idolatry. You don't fix vain worship with false worship. or arid rationalism is not fixed by mindless enthusiasm. The answer to false worship is worship in faith, worship in truth, worship believing Christ by his spirit. And worship in faith we see here is a gift from the gift. It is grace that is granted through the Son by the Spirit to bring us to the Father. The early church said he is the ladder of ascent to God. Or Basil again said the way of the knowledge of God is from the one Spirit through the one Son to the one Father. In Ephesians 2 verse 18, Paul puts it like this, for through him, that is Christ, we both have access in one Spirit to the Father. Now this helps us correct some tendencies in the way we speak about worship at times and words matter because words create conception and conceptions are the holding places and the stepping stones of our communion with God. Let's think about worship team. Our worship team is actually not a team at all. It's the Trinity. Our worship leader is not a guy with a guitar. Guys with guitars are good. They're not worship leaders. Our worship leader is the spirit of God. Whenever I meet someone who tells me they're a worship leader, don't say this out loud to them. It doesn't win friends or influence people. But in your mind, I always think, oh, I'm the worship leader. Dude, that role's been filled by the spirit of God. You're the guy with the guitar, for which we are thankful. You're not the worship leader. God leads his own worship. God is not only the object of our worship, God in the spirit is the subject or mover of our worship, gracing us with the faith to make worship possible. It's sometimes said, don't go to church to get, but to give. And I understand the well intentions from that and committing to serve our brothers and sisters. But beloved, let me encourage you. You go to worship to get. You come to receive. And this is our great God. God has no need. He has no need even of our worship. God has never had a human-shaped hole in his heart. He designed worship for you and I. He made us literally for it. He calls us to worship as a duty, yes, but it's a duty to bring us delight, to bless us in his presence. Augustine said this, God has no need. Whatever right worship is paid to God profits not him, but man. For no man would say he benefited a fountain by drinking from it or to the light by seeing it. And that's what we come to do. We come to drink from an inexhaustible fountain, light that will never be extinguished. We bring no benefit to God by our worship. We rightly acknowledge who he is and he blesses us. Edward Lay in the 17th century put it like this. He said, God is to be blessed by us, which blessing adds nothing to his blessedness, but is required of us that we may somewhat enjoy his blessedness. They say God who is blessed forever, his blessedness does not increase by our blessing him. That's impossible, he's infinite and perfect. But yet he calls us to bless him that from his infinite blessedness, we might be blessed as we are blessing him. And that is only true of the God from whom and through whom and to whom are all things, the God who is Father, Son, and Spirit, and by the Spirit brings us through the Son to the Father that we live in the Trinity as we gather to worship Him. He has liberated and freed us for it by the Spirit. What makes our worship real, beloved, is not whether every thought or thing we do is spontaneously coming from us, but whether God has really revealed Himself by His Word and whether we really trust Him and Jesus to come to Him. We have freedom by the Spirit to believe Christ and to worship the only true God. It's by faith, but it's not insensible. And that's what we see next. We not only have freedom to believe Christ, but to behold Christ. We have a sense of Christ through His Word. Let's linger around verse 18. To be unveiled is to be freed, to be beholding the glory of the Lord. Now, this word here for beholding is a unique term. Translations vary at times in rendering it, because it means seeing indirectly. So the New American Standard even renders it beholding as in a mirror. It's to see a reflection, an indirect image. Well, that's what he says in verse 18, we are beholding the glory of the Lord and being transformed into the same image. So we're beholding the glory of the Lord, but indirectly we're beholding an image. What is an image of the glory of the Lord? Who is the image of the glory of the Lord? Look at verse four of chapter four. The God of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ who is what? The image of God. Or verse six, in a parallel statement, the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. We behold the glory of Christ by the Spirit through his word. The mirror of Jesus, the word about him from his spirit. But he's not visible, is he? Paul here is using visual language for what's invisible. He'll do it through the rest of the chapter in chapter four, even looking at verse 18 at the end of the chapter, he talks about looking at things that are unseen. Well, dear apostle, bear with us. How do you look at what you can't see? Well, have you ever said I could almost taste it? Or they could almost taste victory at the end of the fourth quarter. When an experience is so sensible, you use another sense to describe it. So Paul here talks about in chapter, verse 18 of chapter three, beholding. In verse four of chapter four, the light of the gospel. And in verse six, the light of the knowledge. He's using visual language for what is an audible experience. Now, by our physical sight, how we see is that the lens of our eye focuses light so that an image appears in our retina. That's how we see. That's how God created us to see. And by the same spirit of verse 6, who said, let light shine out of darkness in creation, By that same Spirit, He is giving us light of knowledge in our hearts. So just as created light brings images to our eyes, the Spirit's light gives an image in our mind and heart, and we see what is there. The Spirit of God puts eyes in our ears, as it's been said, and we have a sense of the truth of God and Jesus by His Word. God with us illuminates God the word incarnate through the word inscripturated. It's an assurance of his presence, which is why Paul says in verse six of chapter four, the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus. Isn't that curious? What did Jesus look like? We have no descriptions in the Bible. We don't have a description of it beyond that he was bearded and he had no beauty that we desire him. Remember the Aaronic blessing in number six that Moses commanded? The Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face shine upon you. To have a face is to have the blessing of presence turn towards you. be looking upon you, the best blessing of his benevolence. To behold the glory of the Lord in the face of Jesus is to have the presence of the one giving you sight among you. It is God with us to show God for us through God inscripturated in his word. Basil again said this, our mind when it is lit by the spirit looks up to the sun and in him as in an image beholds the father. The Spirit shows us Jesus in the Bible, that through Him we behold the only true God, in God the Son for us, Jesus Christ. He is the fountain of life. Or as the psalmist says in that same verse, Psalm 36 verse nine, in your light do we see light. In your light, in your light, which comes from you, we see light. Out of light comes light, and it's beheld by light. Out of the light of the Father is the only begotten Son, who is beheld by the light of God, the Spirit, the illuminating light of the Spirit. What the Spirit does in worship, it gives us a sense of God the Son, that we might through him come to God the Father. Is it any wonder that Christian worship is by the Word and Spirit? And I want us to think about that important relationship in four ways. I want us to think about the elements of worship, prayer, singing, and Bible translation. We'll get there. Let's think about the elements of worship. We come to God by faith in Christ. And the means of faith is, Paul says in Romans 10, hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ. So worship is hearing the word by the spirit to illumine the truth to us. It is worship in spirit and truth. And since the Reformation, we have called this the regulative principle of worship. That is, through his word, God regulates how we worship him. But you know as I do, when Christians hear the regulative principle, it doesn't sound worshipy, does it? The regulative principle doesn't set your devotional liver shivering. But all we're saying, all we're saying is that the Word revealed by the Spirit must be the medium by which the Spirit gives us sight of the subject of His Word, who is the Son, who brings us to God. So Benjamin Keech says the spirit hath its proper bounds, and he always runs in its spiritual channel, the word and ordinances. The reformer Martin Luther called them the bridge of the spirit. He said the very bridge by which the Holy Spirit comes, namely the outward ordinances of God, like the bodily sign of baptism and the preached word of God. That is to say, God the Spirit has spoken the means by which he will bless us with his presence and show us the Son that we would come to the Father. And it is through his word. His word preached, his word read, his word prayed, his word sung, and his word shown in baptism in the Lord's Supper, which are visible words. Baptism, Peter tells us, is a pledge. Paul tells us the Lord's Supper is proclaiming the Lord's death until he comes. Now, does that make worship inauthentic? I would say it actually protects its authenticity, its true spirituality. If you wanna know how to worship the only true God, ask his spirit, and he's told us in his word. When we seek to be creative, when we add elements to God's worship, we inevitably distort God and the truth. That's why Calvin said, such is our folly when we're left at liberty, all we're able to do is go astray. And when our goal is to be true to ourselves in worship, we've lost the plot. As we are to come to be true to the God we come to behold, to worship Him, not ourselves. So he lays out by the Word and Spirit the elements of worship. Let's think of a couple of those. Let's think about prayer. We pray the Word. My favorite succinct definition for prayer is simply answering God. What is prayer? It's responding to the God who's spoken first. We answer Him. To pray in the Spirit, as the Bible says, is not ecstatic, but to pray according to all the Spirit does in giving us life through the Word. It's to pray according to the promises of God in His Word. And the Spirit illumines us even in this, and even in our weakness. Romans 8.26, Paul says, the spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. How do you pray when you don't know what to pray? How do you pray when you don't know what to say? When you know your deep need, but have no idea what you need from him now specifically. Well, good news, dear Christian, your father has thought of that too. And his Spirit helps you with groanings. These aren't his groanings, as though the Spirit is convulsing. The Spirit is not a creature who groans for us. God, the Spirit, empowers and enables us to groan even inaudibly, to pray. He is more inward to us than our own minds and guides us even in our longings for God, even when they're inaudible in our weakness. The Spirit brings us to God, and we have confidence, because Paul says in the very next verse, don't worry, the Spirit knows the will of God, and He will lead you to Him. He is the mover of all our worship, even our praying. And that brings us, thirdly, to think about another element, which is singing. Now, as we started, we're obsessed with singing, we're obsessed with music in our generation. But the theme shows up in scripture, at least in the New Testament, in a relatively minor sense. And in Ephesians 5, verses 18 and 19, we're told this. Do not get drunk with wine, for that is debauchery, but be filled with the Spirit, addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with your heart, giving thanks always and for everything to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Now, this verse is often read individualistically. But the context here in Ephesians 5 is corporate worship, much of the chapter. Paul begins the chapter in verse 4 with thanksgiving. He gives warning in verse 6 about deceptive words in the body. Ephesians 5 is a congregational exhortation. Be filled with the spirit. We could translate it, y'all need to be filled with the spirits. You all, everyone. And we're addressing one another. And I want you to help you navigate the Christian bestseller list. There are no conditions to being filled with spirit. I don't know if you noticed when I read it, but he does not give six or seven steps for how to be filled with the spirit. So when you find those pamphlets or booklets or blog pages, you can dismiss them. You've lost the plot. Paul did not give you a step-by-step instruction to keys to unlock the spirit's filling. We do not have to bring ourselves into any state to invoke the spirit. That's what pagans do. The Spirit is present. That's the whole point. Paul has said earlier in Ephesians that we are the dwelling place of the Spirit as his temple. And just as unity is born of the Spirit but must be maintained, so filling of the Spirit is what we receive by God's grace. But we must not reject it. You see, what Paul is contrasting here is how the Spirit leads proper Christian worship in contrast to pagan worship the Ephesians would have been familiar with. Pagans lose their minds in inebriation and drunkenness and call it spirituality. They enter an altered state. But we are in the Spirit, and He brings us to behold Christ so that we respond to Him by the sight of Him in His Word, and then we speak it to one another in our right minds. because he brings us to the truth that it would come forth from us in singing, making melody to the Lord Jesus and giving thanks to the Father. Being filled by the Spirit as a church is submitting to the Spirit's leading and giving us freedom and sight of Jesus according to his word and responding properly to one another as we sing to one another the truths about Jesus and make melody to God the Father as we do so. That's what it means to be filled by the Spirit. And it is by the Word, because Paul will make the very same point to the Colossians in a parallel epistle, but in Colossians 3.16, he'll word it like this. Let the Word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs with thankfulness in your hearts to God. Well, Paul, so what is it? Are we to be filled by the Spirit, or let the Word of Christ dwell among us? Exactly, yes, because what does the Spirit do? He brings the word of Christ to dwell among us that we see Jesus through his word and sing to him and one another. Beloved, when you and I sing, we are not invoking the presence of God. We are responding to it because we see his glory through his word and it pours forth from our mouths and our hearts in praise and exhortation to one another. That is where singing belongs in the corporate worship of the church. And the last element of this means of worship I want to address is Bible translation. Now that may cause in your mind seem like a skip on a record. Worship and Bible translation, well, it's actually pretty important. In fact, you and I are using one right now to worship I trust and the natural environment. The purpose of Bible translation is to worship. That's where we actually see it show up in the Bible. In Nehemiah 8.8, as Ezra reads the Law of God, we're told that he reads it clearly. And literally, that means it's broken up. It's paragraph by paragraph. It's an idiom for translation. That's how the Christian Standard Bible translated it. They read from the book and translated it. Remember, Ezra was reading the law to return to exiles. They'd come from a couple generations being in Babylon and then Persia. The laws in Hebrew, they largely spoke Aramaic. And so the law had to be translated, had to be explained to them in worship. And then the day of Pentecost in Acts 2, God who divided the human race into languages at Babel, he redeems it in Pentecost. And so the diverse human languages speak the word of God in harmony with the gift of languages, more commonly called the gift of tongues. No longer will nations assemble in Jerusalem to hear the word of God in Hebrew. Jerusalem is now going to the nations and God's word will come in their languages. That's what, again, to worship God in spirit and in truth. And worship is actually how our confession motivates us to translate the Bible into common or vulgar languages. In the Second London Confession, Chapter 1, Paragraph 8, we read, scripture is to be translated into the vulgar or common language of every nation into which they come, and know why. that the word of God dwelling plentifully in all, they may worship him in an acceptable manner and through patience and comfort of the scriptures may have hope. Why is the Bible to be translated in the nearly 7,000 languages of the human race currently? that God would be worshiped as the word dwells among them in the language of everyone's hearts. And they might see Jesus by the spirit and respond to him in their language. It's by forgetting this point, this theological grounding for Bible translation, that modern translation has in many ways lost the plot. This drives how we decide about where we translate. Brothers and sisters with no Bible to worship, should they not have priority? This also drives decisions about how we translate. You see, when you conceive of the Bible as an individual's book that is read privately and individualistically, you will be tempted to translate paraphrastically and to make all the difficult places plain and to over-translate it so there's no need of corporate communion or a preacher and teacher. But in the Bible, the Bible is the word of the covenant community of God and is intended for worship. And so it is to be translated that it may be used in the reading, the preaching, the singing and praying of his word in church. Beloved, we could say a lot more, but if you care about worship and spirit and truth spreading across the globe, you have to care about Bible translation. There's no getting around it. And we need to recover Bible translation of part of the mission of the church to see worship extend where it is not to our great God. And there are still over 6,000 languages that don't have a full Bible. And many other majority languages have only one or two poorly translated Bibles that are in desperate need of revision. God must be worshiped, so his word must be translated. I'll end it there, but if you want to know more, go to the Bible Translation Fellowship booth on the break. We come by the Spirit to worship in the freedom of believing Christ, beholding Christ, and thirdly and finally, to become like Christ. To become like Christ. In the beginning, God brought life by His Spirit and through His Word. The Spirit was hovering and God spoke. God created by what Irenaeus said, his two hands, the Son and the Spirit, who made man in his image and put him in his garden temple. So when the new creation begins by the Son and Spirit, even worship in the temple, that is the church, as we behold the glory of Christ in his word, what happens? Verse 18 of chapter 3. We are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. were being conformed into the image of God, being conformed to the image of his son, that he would be the first fruits of many brothers. And all this, we're told, comes from the Spirit. The spirit who shaped man through the word now shapes us into the image of the word incarnate. He grants us to behold the glory of the face of Jesus so that as God speaks, his spirit would shine and we'd be renewed more and more to look like that image. Holiness, beloved, is not a thing. It's God. And as we reflect holiness, we only do so by our proximity to the Holy One. who are beholding of Him. We were made to image God and become what we behold. And one day we will be like our Savior fully and finally, because Scripture says when He appears, we will be like Him because we shall see Him as He is. Well, now we see Him. We see Him by His Word through the illumination of His Spirit. So as we behold Him through the Word and by His Spirit, A spirit who unveils our hearts to behold the glory of Christ conforms us more and more into his image until faith one day becomes sight. What is the main thing about worship? It's quorum Deo, beholding the face of God. contemplating and communing with Him, beholding Him in His Son. What separates the corporate worship of the church from a pep rally with a TED Talk is to behold the beauty and weight of the God who is, the God who has spoken, the God who has come in His Son, the God who shines the glory of His Son by His Spirit, the one that you and I were made to behold. And what this means, beloved, is that our change and our growth and we trust our increase in joy is rooted in our worship. And I do believe, beloved, our greatest problem in the fight against sin, the flesh, and the devil, where we go astray most frequently is missing this. I don't think it's unrelated that as the visible church in our generation has become more and more like an entertainment center, There's become more and more need for churches to create counseling centers. Now don't misunderstand me, I'm not saying you make it to every worship service, you'll never have problems in your life. I don't think that. But at the root, God has not just given us principles to apply in our life, he's given us the person of his son to behold, to worship, to become like, and that is how we grow more like him. And at the root of whatever problem is bothering you the most, at the root of all our lust and our covetousness, our anger and our pride, is our need for communion with the Holy One through His Spirit, by His Word. And beloved, this means significantly, presence matters. Access to sermon and talks are wonderful things by technology. But never think that the audio or video of a sermon is in any way a substitute for worship. because we're not just downloading information, something you can easily do while you mow your lawn. We are meeting as the temple of God and God himself dwells among us and fills us that we would behold him in his glories and be made more like him. This is why you can go to 500 services and remember very little and yet be an entirely different person. After a thousand encounters with God in his temple, you will not be unchanged. And it is concerning that in our day we worship about half as much as we used to, because evening worship is that dodo bird in the Christian church. And it's even worse than that. It's not just half as much because now they're saying that regular attendance patterns even of members is sometimes twice a month. So we worship a quarter of what we used to. Is it any wonder that the church sometimes seems twice as worldly as she's ever been? Because her experience with the Holy One, she has set herself outside of. Beloved, there is no way to grow in Christ outside the gathering of the church. There's no way. There is no counselor. There is no podcast. There is no YouTube channel. There is nothing that will replace the word and spirit in his temple, worshiping in communion with God. And we have to be present where the power of spirit is joined by his bridge, by his bounds, in the means of grace in his word. If by the Spirit we believe Christ, and by the Spirit we behold Christ, to become like Christ, then we worship in spirit-wrought faith, not worked-up feelings. And beloved, that ought to liberate us. The idea that music connects us to God is to live under the burden of emotional legalism. That somehow our feelings bring us to God, Well, then what do you do, dear Christian, when your feelings aren't right and you don't feel as you ought? How often have I sadly heard from a confused Christian, I didn't come to church because I didn't feel right. Well, let me ask you, dear brother, do you think you could ever feel right enough to answer to the presence of the Holy One? No, we enter by faith in the Son. So we ought to never think that our discouragement, our doubts, even our depression, disqualify us from worship. One writer put it like this, feelings are great liars. If Christians worshiped only when they felt like it, there would be precious little worship. In fact, I would put it like this, did you know that not feeling right isn't actually a great time to worship? Because you come to worship in freedom. and freedom in the faith of Christ, believing Him, the freedom to behold Him, and the freedom to become like Him. And dear Christian, none of it depends on how you feel. It all depends on faith wrought in us by the Spirit of God. And when it feels inauthentic at times, remember it's because we are not in the truth as we should. So we come again that the Spirit of God would show us God's truth and make us more and more like His Son until we see Him as He is forever. Amen, let's pray. Our Father, we thank you for your grace to us in your Son and your powerful presence with us by your Spirit. We ask in Jesus' name that you would cause us to have renewed zeal for your face and presence in worship. We pray that every church represented in attendance here would be revived and renewed by your Spirit to seek your face together. And we pray as we worship you by your word and spirits, you would be glorified, and in your kind glory, you would bless us by your blessedness, that our delight would be in our duty and devotion to you. Make us more and more like your son until the great day that the blessed vision of him is ours. And we pray this in Jesus' name.