Worshiping God in God’s Way

How will we worship—according to the whims and preferences of the world or according to the direction of God’s Word? Today, R.C. Sproul urges us to maintain confidence in God’s way for doing His work.

We're living in strange times, in terms of how the church functions. We have been caught up with a fierce desire to find a way to relate to this culture, this crazy world out there that has been immunized to Christianity. We're trying to find new ways, new methods to reach the lost, and that motivation is a righteous one. Because we should have compassion for the lost, we should have a zeal for reaching the lost. The danger is, when we ask the lost how they want to come into the kingdom of God, how they want to worship God, and how they want to hear the Word of God, and then tailor our strategy and our method to their tastes and their preferences.

Friends, that's fatal. And sooner or later the church must come back to confidence in God's way of doing God's work. Because the Bible does give us a blueprint for evangelism, it gives us a blueprint for reaching the lost, and it gives us a blueprint for generating spiritual growth among the people of God. And that blueprint is not a matter of rocket science or of Madison Avenue technology, it is a blueprint that God guarantees will not be fruitless. Because in the first instance, it is to be accomplished by the method of proclaiming the Word of God. Because as Peter is spelling it out for us here, that power that changes lives, that power that purifies the soul is the power of God, the Holy Spirit, working in and through the Word of God.

And God has established a church, a fellowship and communion of believers to gather for mutual support and edification and encouragement, to be a group of people who, in their assembly, experience an extraordinary kind of love, and that that grace that comes through the preaching of the Word is confirmed by the sacraments that Christ has given to His church, and strengthened by the discipline of prayer, personal and corporate. Whatever else we try to do to make the message attractive to a fallen world, we must never, ever, ever negotiate those fundamental biblical methods of worship, and of preaching, of evangelism, and of spiritual growth.

Again, I want to plead with you that the constituent nature of human beings has not changed with Generation X or with the baby boomers. Television changes culture. Technology changes the way that we do things, but the fundamental constituent nature of your humanity remains the same as it was when God created Adam and Eve. That the way to the heart is through the mind, and mindless Christianity never really produces the purification of the soul. The purification of the soul comes through obeying, the truth of the Word of God, through the Spirit of God. There aren't any substitutes for that, there aren't any shortcuts. There's no such thing as sanctification in three easy lessons.