This past Sunday I preached on 1 Chronicles 29:1-20, and in that passage David refers to the people of Israel as "aliens and strangers" in God's sight (v. 15). Although in that context the phrase has a different connotation than what we typically understand it to mean, this is common language in the Bible, both in the Old and New Testaments. The most common reference in the latter is probably found in Peter's letter (1 Pet. 2:11).

While I think this idea is certainly helpful for us to keep in mind (given that it is a biblical metaphor), there is also a danger in such a perspective leading to an eschatology shaped by escapism. Indeed, many evangelicals are quick to say that we are pilgrims in this world on our way to heaven. "We're just passing through," is the common catch-phrase of those who adhere to the sentiment.

Here's the thing, though – in one sense, we're not going anywhere. As I've said before, the history of God's redemption of his people is a pattern of God coming to us. The future of God's people is not some disembodied, ethereal existence. Our new Promised Land is "the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God" (Rev. 21:2). As Peter says, on the day of the Lord, "the earth and everything in it will be laid bare" (2 Pet. 3:10) in preparation for this Holy City.

In what sense are we aliens and strangers and pilgrims, then? One way of understanding this does tie the physical world, despite what I've just said. While this world is our home, we are aliens and strangers in it at the present time because our home has been occupied by a foreign enemy. It has become a wilderness; the presence of sin and the kingdom of darkness has obscured the inherent goodness of God's creation and made it unrecognisable. But we don't wait to escape from this wilderness. We wait instead for the Promised Land that God brings down to us after he purifies his creation from sin.

There is a spiritual element to this as well, though. We are pilgrims on a journey to a spiritual destination. Through the death and resurrection of Christ, we have new life (Rom. 6, Col. 3). By the power of the indwelling Spirit, we are given strength to put to death the old self, and to live holy and righteous lives (John 14:15-31, Rom. 8). On the day that Christ returns, we will be glorified – made like him (1 Cor. 15:51-57, Phil. 1:6).

Right now we remain in the wilderness of sin, wandering through it in the pursuit of holiness, longing and yearning for the fulness of Christ's redemption as we see sin wreak havoc in our lives and in our world. As Peter reminds us in 1 Peter 2:11, we need remember who we are so that we do not fall into sin and allow ourselves to be comfortable in this occupying kingdom. Instead, we follow the lead of our God towards that day when he fulfils his promise to forgive our wickedness and remember our sins no more (Jer. 31:34), and to wipe every tear from our eyes. "There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away" (Rev. 21:4).

The Promised Land that awaits us is God's good creation restored and glorified, a place where his people will dwell in his presence forever and where they, having been glorified, will be free from sin and flourish as they live the life that he intends for his people.

That's a Promised Land to look forward to. That's a pilgrimage worth making.

David Jackman, in his book, Spirit of Truth, writes of the Holy Spirit's work in opening our hearts and minds to the truth:

He does not reveal new truth, but leads us into the whole truth which is already set forth in Jesus, above whom there could be no fuller revelation of God's truth.

The Holy Spirit does not set us free to wander into new realms of 'revelation', secretly given or privately received. For the power of the Spirit is not revealed in secret, mystical messages given to a few super-spiritual people. His power is seen in the proclamation of Jesus Christ as the way, the truth and the life.

Just as Jesus says in John 14:26, "But the Counselor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you."

Discussing Christ's office of Priest in one of the essays in Knots Untied, the late-19th century bishop, J.C. Ryle, offers these words of encouragement and hope to those who may wonder about the efficacy of prayer:

We need not doubt that Christ, as our Priest, presents the prayers and services of His people before God, and obtains for them hearing, acceptance, and favour... This is a great mystery, no doubt, but one full of consolation. It is hard at any time to understand how any word or deed of sinful creatures like us can ever come into the presence of God, or do us any good. But the Priesthood of Christ explains all. Placed in His hands and endorsed by Him, our petitions, like bank-notes duly signed, obtain a value which they have not in themselves. A young Christian once said to an old one, 'My prayers are so poor and weak, that I cannot think they are of any use.' The old Christian replied, with deep wisdom, 'Only place them in Christ's hands, and He makes them look so different in heaven that you would hardly know them again.'

What joy we have with Christ as our Priest. And more, what comfort we have too from Paul's words in Romans, that not only Christ, but also the Spirit comes to our aid in prayer: 'We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express. And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints in accordance with God's will' (Romans 8:26-27).

We have just begun to read John Stott's little book, The Living Church, together as a staff team at our church. In the first chapter, he writes about some of the defining marks of the early church as recorded in Acts 2:42-47, one of which was a strong committment to evangelism.

The fervor the early church manifested in fulfilling its mission to be witnesses to the gospel of Jesus Christ is no secret, and Stott highlights the fact that the Lord blessed their efforts by "adding to their number daily those who were being saved" (Acts 2:47). He notes that "those early Christians did not regard evangelism as an occasional activity...[but] their witness was as continuous as their worship" (32).

Part of the reason they devoted themselves wholeheartedly to this task was because they had this eager expectation that the Spirit was actively at work drawing people to himself and believed that they were his instruments to gather the people of God from every nation, tribe, and language. They were animated by the conviction that if they faithfully proclaimed the gospel of Jesus Christ, they would see their efforts bearing fruit by the power of the Spirit.

In the West as we continue to witness the rapid decline of Christianity, it is easy to lose hope in ever seeing this kind of result in our day. And our disillusionment plays a part in leading us to neglect our call to bear witness to the risen Lord. We also lose confidence in work of the Spirit, and in some instances, may even be tempted to think that the Spirit has left the church. As a result, we turn to devising all kinds of plans and methods and programs to get people to come into our churches, and hope that in the process, the Spirit comes back.

But the Spirit already came at Pentecost, and the reality is that he has not left the church! We can rejoice in this truth, and root ourselves in the knowledge that he is always with us. Jesus promised in Matthew 16:18 that he will build his church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. We are living in a time where most of his work to build his church seems to be going on in other parts of the world, but the staggering growth of the church around the world alone should remind us how amazing the work of the Spirit can be.

Let us recover the eager expectation that characterized the early church and pray that God would work powerfully through us to gather his people to himself.

One of the problems that has kept surfacing as I have been thinking about worship over the past little while is our selfishness. When we look at the music of worship as a stimulant, as Stapert suggested we often do, we are looking for something that will make us feel good. When we make the music the primary aspect of our worship, we are acting on the premise that what we say is more important than what God says to us. And, of course, there are many other ways that we make worship a thoroughly self-centred act.

The thing is – and we know this to be true despite our actions often being to the contrary – worship is not about us at all. The image of worship we get from Revelation 4 and 5, for example, makes perfectly clear that the focus of worship is the Lord. All that his creatures do in the picture John paints for us in those chapters is to praise God, ceaselessly. They have seen the glory of the Lord, and they fully understand the purpose of worship.

William Temple, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, in his book, Readings in St. John's Gospel, had this to say about worship:

Worship is the submission of all our nature to God. It is the quickening of conscience by his holiness; the nourishment of mind with his truth; the purifying of imagination by his beauty; the opening of the heart to his love; the surrender of will to his purpose – and all this gathered up in adoration, the most selfless emotion of which our nature is capable and therefore the chief remedy for that self-centredness which is our original sin and the source of all actual sin (68).

Temple understands the purpose of worship. Deep down, I think we all do too. But there are countless idols competing for our worship and adoration (some of which may even be disguised as true worship) and our sinful nature is all too eager to serve those idols. Indeed, the god we seek to worship most often is ourselves. I believe it was Luther who said that pride is the first sin, and the root of all other sins.

It would be easy to say in response that changing this is just a matter of setting our hearts on God. True as this is, it is much easier said than done. It requires the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit, who empties us of ourselves and fills us with himself. For this reason we must constantly implore the Spirit to be present in our worship, because unless he is among us, there can be no true worship.

Using a portion of Calvin R. Stapert's book, A New Song for an Old World, in my last post, I discussed how our worship, and especially the music we use in worship, has become characterised by a singular expression of something approximating joy. It raised the question of why we have become unable to express many of the feelings and emotions that are part of the worship of Scripture.

From Stapert's perspective, the problem is that we have become confused about the purpose of music in worship. He writes,

While suppressing the 'doleful' countermelody leads to a trivialization of the joy theme, a tendency toward a pagan kind of epiclesis¹ leads to a perversion of it. Those misled by this kind of epiclesis think – or at least act as though – 'we convene ourselves [for worship] and then wait for God to show up because we have said the magic words or cranked up enough volume in our praise.' They also inevitably blame the music when they feel worship to be joyless and spiritless. They see music as a stimulus to rather than a vehicle for the expression of joy, an enticement for the Spirit's presence rather than a grateful response for it, as though the Spirit were at the beck and call of our music. Granted, the border between a response and a stimulant is obscure. In addition, as Augustine and other church fathers attest, music can be a legitimate stimulant for 'inflaming' our piety and devotion. Nevertheless, it is as important for us as it was for the church fathers to keep the distinction clear, and to remember (1) that response, not stimulation, is the fundamental role of worship music; (2) that 'inflaming' can easily degenerate into manipulation; and (3) that not all that is called 'spiritual' is of the Spirit, or, as Plantinga and Rozeboom put it, 'not all that moves us is of God.' I am convinced that there would be a marked and salutary difference in the church's music and worship if we would maintain the central focus of our 'new song' to be a joyful response, offered in humble gratitude, not a stimulant 'to excite every nerve...and to create as many...synthetic passions as possible' (to quote Thomas Merton) [202].

If you have a conversation with evangelicals about worship, most of the time the debate centres around which style of music they like best. Besides the problem of such a narrow definition of worship, which sees it as nothing more than the music, it also proves Stapert's incisive observation – we want worship to be a stimulant, to make us feel something. If the music doesn't satisfy our own subjective tastes, we believe that somehow the Spirit won't be present in our corporate worship; indeed, we believe we haven't worshiped.

So how do we get the congregation to understand that worship is fundamentally an act of response?

In the first place, we need to make our worship gospel-centred. I know that this is one of evangelicalism's many buzzwords, but it is true. A proper, holistic understanding of the gospel must be at the centre of our worship. Too often the gospel is stripped down to mean nothing more than the fact that Jesus has saved us. Well, yes, of course. But saved us from what? We need to understand the counterpart, the state we were in before Jesus saved us. Praising God for our new life in Christ means very little if we don't understand our old life.

The most obvious way to do this is to saturate worship with Scripture. Don't just have Scripture read before the sermon, but take your call to worship from Scripture. Have call and response readings and prayers based on Scripture. Very important here as well is to ensure that the lyrics of the songs you sing in worship are Scriptural. In his latest book, Why Johnny Can't Sing Hymns, T. David Gordon writes about his efforts as a pastor to keep the songs used in his church theologically accurate. To that end, he went through the church's hymnal, which contained more than 700 hymns, and found over 500 of them to be lacking. Needless to say, it is remarkably easy to pen careless or even unorthodox lyrics when your primary concerns are things like rhyming, or evoking warm feelings in those singing your songs.

This is, I think, one of the biggest problems with contemporary music as well. Too many songs give the pretense of being Scriptural, using phrases here and there from the Bible, but often they are carelessly constructed. I could give a number of examples, but there is a twofold point to be made here. First, the church confesses what it sings, so biblical and theological accuracy are vitally important to the music of worship. Second, and related to this, is the fact that one of the easiest ways to memorise something is when it is set to music. At the end of the day, the congregation will be walking away from the worship service singing the music. Every effort must be made to ensure what they are singing is true to Scripture.

In addition to making worship gospel-centred, we need to have a structured liturgy if we are to teach people that worship is an act of response. For this, we need to ensure that a number of elements are present in our worship. A call to worship reminds the congregation that we don't come to worship to feel good, but because God calls us into his presence, to assemble before his throne. In response, we should sing songs of praise to him, recognising that he is the almighty God. Coming before his throne also requires that we lay our sins before him and seek his forgiveness and assurance of pardon, corporately and individually. In response, we should sing songs of lament for our sin, that seek his forgiveness, and that remind us of his grace and mercy. After hearing God speak through his written Word and the preached Word, a song of response should follow that fits with the theme of the message. In the Eucharist, the gospel is made visible and grace is imparted to us, and our song should be a song of praise to the Lord for his salvation and his faithfulness to us. When we hear the benediction, we are hearing God himself bless us, and so our song can be nothing more than a resounding 'Amen!'

David Watson, in his book, I Believe in the Church, writes, 'It is...God himself who initiates worship. It is simply our response to all that God has shown us of himself and done for us in our lives' (181).

God initiates, we respond. It is a pattern that cannot be reversed, for when it does, it ceases to be worship. Our concern that worship be joyful, then, is wholly contingent on our recognition of who God is and what he has done for us. But when we begin to grasp on to that, to truly start to understand the reality that the Lord of heaven and earth has called us to be his own, our worship will take on dimensions that we never expected, and we will say with the Psalmist, 'Come let us sing for joy to the Lord; let us shout aloud to the Rock of our salvation!' (Psalm 95:1).

Music certainly plays a very important role in our worship. In fact, it is one of the unique aspects of Christianity that our faith evokes from us a response of song. But we need to do a better job of thinking carefully about the music of our worship. The so-called 'worship wars' have missed the point, to a degree; the issue is not so much the style of music used in worship, but the role that music plays in worship. Using Stapert's terminology, is it a stimulant or a response?

Incoherent as these ramblings are, I thought it fitting to conclude by citing R.B. Kuiper, who in his book, The Glorious Body of Christ, had this to say about worship:

When God's people assemble for worship they enter into the place where God dwells. God meets them, and they meet God. They find themselves face to face with none other than God himself. Their worship is an intimate transaction between them and their God.

If the church were fully conscious of that truth, what dignity and reverence would characterize its worship! (347)

May that indeed be true of all our worship.

¹Epiclesis is the Greek word for 'invocation'. In worship, it refers to the invocation of the Holy Spirit.

Dennis E. Johnson, in his book, The Message of Acts in the History of Redemption, makes some good observations on the lack of conviction among Christians that God is actually at work in our churches. He traces it back to the deistic worldview that dominated the American churches from the outset. An extended quotation:

Deism...enjoyed the perks of a doctrine of creation—meaning, intelligent design, and order in the universe, and even a theoretical basis for morality—without the uncomfortable meddling of a God who intervenes in history through miracle, judgment, or salvation.

Deism as an ideology passed from the scene long ago. It was only an unstable halfway house on the way to the naturalistic determinism that seized the intellectual centers of the West by the middle of the nineteenth century, only lately to be challenged by waves of neopagan spirituality. More persistent and more troubling was the practical deism that had wormed its way into the churches of colonial New England, paving the way for theoretical deism and Transcendentalism to follow. Such practical deism is alive and well today, even in churches that take their stand on the Bible. However correct their statements in Bible studies or Sunday school classes may be, in practice many Christians really assume that God's "interference" in people's lives pretty much came to a halt sometime in the past—perhaps in the apostles' time, perhaps at the Reformation or some revival of bygone days, but surely before our time.

Would we say this out loud? Never! But our meager prayer lives, our anxiety, our dependence on novel techniques in evangelism, our hope in technology to solve spiritual problems, our doubt that loving discipline can restore wandering brothers and sisters to repentance and reconciliation—all these testify to our unspoken assumption that God's real action is in the past and in the future, but not in the present (16-17).

The point of Johnson's book is to demonstrate, using the lessons of the book of Acts, that the Spirit is still at work in the church today and to help us recover that conviction. A renewed belief that God is actively at work would have significant implications for the life and ministry of the church.

While I am a big fan of John Calvin and his theology, his example as a pastor leaves some things to be desired. He was, in a word, crazy. The amount of work he undertook was far too much for one man and contributed to his early death at the age of 54. The following is a paraphrase from my church history notes from this semester, illustrating the amount of work Calvin assumed while working in Geneva.

It was Calvin’s normal practice to preach five times a week. He would preach twice on Sunday, and then Monday, Wednesday, and Friday throughout the course of his ministry in Geneva. He preached directly from the Greek and Hebrew, as per his academic character. On Sunday morning he would preach from the New Testament, Sunday afternoon from the Psalms, and throughout the week he would preach from the Old Testament. But Calvin didn’t just preach five times a week. He also typically gave three different theological lectures per week. On Thursdays, he would preside over the consistory of the church. On Friday evenings, he would lead a Bible study for pastors in the canton of Geneva, teaching them how to read and understand the text so that when Sunday came they could preach it more effectively. In addition, he had all the other pastoral duties to contend with as well. There are records from 1550-1559 that state that he performed two-hundred and seventy weddings and fifty baptisms. As a theologian, he wrote commentaries on almost every book of the Bible, authored many different theological treatises, as well as his famous Institutes of the Christian Religion, which he revised and expanded seven times until it got to be the size it is today. He translated the entire Institutes into French three different times. Also, in the archives in Geneva, there are eleven massive volumes filled with the myriad of letters that he wrote in his lifetime. Without rhetorical exaggeration, it can be said that Calvin pastored himself to death.

This kind of thing is why I am so supportive of the idea of associate pastors. Shepherding a flock, especially once they start to grow larger than a couple hundred, is far too much work for one man. Calvin should not serve as an example for pastors in how much work they should be doing.

However, Calvin as the preacher is another story, and much can be learned from his example, not in the quantity of material preached, but in the quality. Calvin stressed the need for a great deal of preparatory work. The unfortunate tendency amidst all the other work of a pastor is that this key aspect can be neglected. Calvin argued, however, that if you have the audacity to proclaim, “Thus saith the Lord,” you had better have done sufficient preparation. Further, he maintained that preaching must always be rooted in the text, lest your preaching become merely your own opinion. Ultimately, his goals in preaching were twofold. First, he maintained that the congregation must be edified by the preaching. If they were not, he simply stated that the preacher had not given an adequate sermon. Secondly, though, he believed that the preacher himself must be touched by the Word. A pastor who was not moved by the power and truth of the Word of God could not preach with conviction to the souls in the pew.

What I like most about what Calvin says about preaching is when he talks about the “hidden energy” at work in the preacher. Calvin once said, “It is certain that if we come to church, we shall not only hear a mortal man speaking, but we shall see that by a secret power, God is speaking through that man.” He believed that once he did his preparation and got up into the pulpit, the Spirit would send the Word forth from his mouth and into the hearts of those present.

Too often, I think we look at the man speaking to us, and divorce the words that he is speaking from the Word of God. We would do well to remember that the preacher is communicating to us not just words, but the Word. God uses them as his instruments to speak to us. When they surrender themselves and their words to God, that hidden energy of the Spirit can work in powerful ways. Calvin recognized this, and so should we. The Word of God is living and active, as the writer to the Hebrews says. Let us pray that the Spirit of God would penetrate our hearts with that Word.