How the Regulative Principle Can Free You

Ligon Duncan: I wasn’t just thinking about leading the people of God. I was thinking about worshiping God while I lead the people of God in their worship of God. I did not want to miss out on that while I was leading other people. One of the reasons that coming to God on the terms that he proposes is so important is because how you worship God will determine who the god is that you worship, and if you, if you try to invent your own ways to come to God, you’ll end up worshiping something that isn’t God.

Matt Smethurst: Welcome back to the everyday pastor, a podcast on the nuts and bolts of ministry from the gospel coalition. My name is Matt Smethurst.

Ligon Duncan: And I’m Lig Duncan

Matt Smethurst: And today we’re going to be talking about the teeny tiny topic of Sunday worship. I don’t know if you’ve seen Have you seen the quarterback documentary on Netflix chronicles the life of a quarterback each day of the week. This would this. This conversation is the equivalent of their episode on Sunday game day. That’s that’s everything is aimed toward Sunday for NFL quarterbacks, and in many ways, that’s the case for us as pastors. Of course, we’re pastoring throughout the week, but the high water mark of the local church is when we come together as God’s people on the Lord’s Day. So let’s think a little bit together just about the the glory of Sunday and and how we we best prepare for it. And let’s start before we talk about preparing the church and structure and all the rest, let’s just talk about preparing our own hearts as pastors. So you pastored for upwards of 20 years. How did you prepare your heart for Sundays? Well,

Ligon Duncan
first of all, I loved the rhythms of life in the local church as a pastor that were good for my own soul. So yes, there were elder meetings on Monday nights, and there was Wednesday night prayer meeting. And there were other things in this in the week that added structure to my life. Nothing structured my life more than the Lord’s day, and I looked forward to it, even though it was in many ways the most demanding day of the week for me, and even though at the end of a Lord’s day. I was often exhausted. It was the happiest exhausted of my whole week. And so I really looked forward to the Lord’s Day. And so preparation for the Lord’s day, both in terms of the sermon and the rest of the service, was a regular part of what was happening during the week. And and by the time Saturday night was there, I was I was rare and ready to go for the Lord’s day. I get up early on Sunday, my wife let me go to the church early so she would get the kids to church. That was a great gift to me, because I know a lot of pastors that have family conflagrations on the way to church. You know just the kids well, for whatever reason, they’re worse on the way to church than at any other point, absolutely. And

Matt Smethurst
let me just say that, like there will be rewards in heaven untold for pastors wives who quietly sacrifice to free their husbands up to be undistracted, or less, just no one’s undistracted, but less distracted, distracted than you would be on the Lord’s day. Yeah,

Ligon Duncan
very much. So, so I would start early, and that helped me just get my head together. I just needed some time where there was nothing coming into my ears, nothing that was filling my thoughts except preparation for public worship and ministering to God’s people and then fellowshipping with the Lord’s people on the Lord’s day, so that that I love that rhythm of life. How about you, Matt? How do you do it? Is you’re so preparing to lead. Honestly,

Matt Smethurst
I’m still trying to figure this out. Yeah, I’ve, I’ve been a lead pastor for, you know, two and a half years, and because it was a church plant, I’ll confess. I mean, I’m sure there are more capable, coddly people than me that wouldn’t have struggled in this way, but I, I really struggled in the early months not to be preoccupied with all of the logistics that we were figuring out for the first time. Now that’s not to say I didn’t have immense help. I did, you know, and sometimes I am bashful to give church planning advice to other guys that don’t have much help, because I was able to lean on really competent and sacrificial people, and yet, you know, just wanting things to be smooth and to be just right, I have found that that the evil one can really kind of sneak in And slither in question to distract me on Sundays and get me more focused on service preparation and sermon preparation than spiritual preparation for myself. And so, yeah, some Sundays are better than others, and sermon prep for me, it still kind of feels like a race to the finish. It’s not that I’m leaving at. All to Saturday night and Sunday morning. But as I, you know, the ink is still wet as I as I step into the pulpit, and in a sense, that can be a good thing, because I’m having to more consciously lean on the Lord, but it also doesn’t give me the kind of unhurried time in prayer with the Lord that I want to grow toward as a pastor. So honestly, I’m still trying to grow in this area.

Ligon Duncan
I think there is a difference in preparation for Sunday for pastors that have to lead the whole service, and then pastors who have somebody else helping them, because I found that in some ways, the non preaching parts of the service demanded more of me in preparation, so many moving parts, correct? So even knowing what you’re going to say before the service, I loved I loved preparing scriptural calls to worship that that was an enjoyable part of service. Preparation for me, preparing to pray was a demanding thing I wanted. I didn’t want to read a prayer, but I wanted to study ahead of time to do scriptural prayer and so,

Matt Smethurst
and we’ll talk about that in a future. We love your public prayers, and I want to hear how you prepared for that.

Ligon Duncan
I and that’s again, I attribute people that have have helped me in that area, in my life, but in Britain, most of our you know, if they’re British pastors, listening to us, England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, typically, they are leading the whole service. And that’s that. That’s work. When I go to a church and I just preach, I feel like, okay, I’ve been on vacation. Leading the whole service is a, it’s a it’s a very challenging and demanding thing to do well, and so I, because I had multiple pastors on my staff, they shared service responsibilities with me, and we switched off in different parts of the service. I didn’t like to just hand off the pulpit prayers, because I loved to be able to lead the people of God in scriptural prayer, but I also had some pastors that were really good at pulpit prayer. Derek Thomas was on staff with me for about 12 years, and I loved his pulpit prayers, and my people loved his pulpit prayers. So no matter what your responsibilities are in the service, preparation for the Lord’s day, just sort of dominant, dominated my life. It was always in the back of my mind all week long. And that was a good thing for me, right? And as you just said, I wasn’t just thinking about leading the people of God. I was thinking about worshiping God while I lead the people of God in their worship of God. I did not want to miss out on that while I was leading other people in worship. I’m supposed to be worshiping God there too. And if you’re not really well prepared ahead of time as a pastor, that can get lost because you are thinking about 100 details going into the service, and you’re thinking about serving your people and helping your people, but you don’t want to forget to worship God yourself.

Matt Smethurst
Yeah, one thing I’ve found helpful from time to time, is just reminding myself what I am not on a Sunday morning. So I my job is not to be an entertainer. It’s not to be a spiritual guru. It’s not to be a life coach and just get people kind of revved up for another week. It really is to represent the Lord Jesus Christ to His people, to stand in the gap between heaven and earth and proclaim His truth. As weighty as that is, there is something liberating about it as well, because you realize that ultimately you’re not offering the people yourself, and if you’re not feeling if you’re feeling kind of crummy as a husband or a dad or a Christian, you can, I think John Piper once said, If no one lives up to their preaching, if you do, you’re preaching too low. And I think it, you know, of course, we don’t want to tolerate hypocrisy, but we have to be aware that we have clay feet, that we’re we’re we’re we’re broken and fragile and struggling sinners. And I think it’s helpful when our congregation sees that, you know, we’re struggling to worship our way through the sermon and to worship our way through the service at times. So now you’re, you’re not a senior pastor, but you’re training pastor, so when you commend wisdom advice to pastors, what would you encourage them to avoid in terms of getting ready for Sunday morning? Anything that you would just say, hey, beware of this occupational hazard. Well,

Ligon Duncan
one is just having your heart ready for worship, an older minister who was in Jackson when I first got to Jackson, not as the pastor of the church, but as a young professor, a man named John Reed Miller, one of my senior colleagues at the seminary, told me, when I got to Jackson, you were. Going to take John Reed Miller out to lunch every week, and you were going to learn from him. And I said, Yes, sir Dr Kelly. And so I did that for for almost the remainder of reed Miller’s life. And he had been a very significant evangelical in the southern Presbyterian Church. He Harold John ochingay performed his marriage. He was an intern to Clarence McCartney in Pittsburgh. These are big names in northern Presbyterian evangelicalism in the mid 20th century, and Reed was a giant. But he really cared about Lord’s Day worship, and he really prepared his own heart for Lord’s Day worship. And I’ve had, I’ve had elders of that church that new Reed who walked into his office on Sunday morning and found him on his face, on the floor with his sermon notes, just prostrate, praying to God. So he really worked hard to prepare his heart to lead the people of God in worship. It’s really easy to get out of that and get into a routine of you’re not, you’re not thinking of yourself as a performer, and you’re not thinking of yourself as an entertainer, but you do go into this kind of workman like mode where you’re just sort of working through the next thing, the next thing, the next thing, because it’s there are 52 of these a year, and you know it pastors vary how many of those that they preach and lead, but at first press Jackson, it was 46 weeks a year that I was doing that, and you can get into the grind mode. And I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to worship

Matt Smethurst
well. And the most dangerous thing is when you can also get away with it when you start to be able to lean on gifting right and get away experience or experience and get away with you know, not right, preparing your heart or preparing your message as you ought to have, knowing people are still going to be helped, but not as much as they would have been if You had really been before the face of God. Yeah, sometimes in my pastoral prayers, I pray that the Lord would guard me from just being a professional sermon deliverer and guard his people from just being professional sermon listeners. Yeah. So again, as we think about what a church ought to do when they gather, is, is anything up for anything on the table? I mean, how should churches think about what is and is not appropriate for Sunday worship on the

Ligon Duncan
building? Protestants have thoughts on this, and have had thoughts on this for 500 years. And you know, going back to the first generation reformers, there was a real concern to see worship made biblical again. The Reformers felt that man made tradition had dominated the way that worship was done in the Middle Ages, and they wanted the Bible to have the final say, so that God could have the final say in what we do, and so that you will find all the first generation reformers writing about this, Calvin will say that God disapproves of all forms of worship that are not sanctioned by his word. And there was a real concern for word ordered worship in the church. And so, in fact, when Calvin writes his little pamphlet concerning the necessity of reforming the church, where he’s writing to the Emperor Charles the fifth, the same guy that that tried, Martin Luther at the at the Diet of Worms, Calvin’s writing to him before the Diet of SPIRE. Now, Charles, now needs the Protestants.

Matt Smethurst
You mispronounce fire. I did. No, I’m just kidding.

Ligon Duncan
Continue, and Calvin’s writing to him to tell him why there needs to be a reformation. And you’re thinking, Okay, so the first thing he’s going to say is sola scriptura, because the Bible alone is our rule of faith and practice, or justification by grace, alone through faith, alone in Christ alone. No, the first thing he says, the reason why we need a reformation is worship. So the Reformers really cared about how we worshiped. And Calvin said this, if, if your worship has become idolatry, nothing else that you do matters. You know, because we, we are creatures created to worship. That’s what we’re put here for. We’re put here to glorify God and to enjoy him forever. And so if our worship is turned into a big E on the eye chart, yeah, yeah. And so, so the Reformers really cared about this, and I happily, Matt, I am seeing a generation of folks in the evangelical Protestant tradition that care about worship more than maybe 50 years ago. They really do care about what we do being according to the Word of God. So the first thing I would say is the Bible not. Does teach us what we are to do in worship, and God does care about what we do in worship, and that our our worship needs to be according to scripture. Everything that we do in worship needs to be warranted by Scripture. There may not be a specific command due x, but there is a warrant from scripture that says we ought to do this when we gather to worship with the people of God and all of us, I think need to be dialed into that.

Matt Smethurst
Okay, so that’s that seems important because Earlier you used the phrase word ordered worship. Yeah, and I wouldn’t imagine any Christian pastor worth his salt is gonna say, Yeah, I want the word to order my worship. What else would I and yet, that may not actually be the case. There might be a kind of blend between the word and human wisdom or ingenuity with the best of intentions that is actually dictating what happens in the corporate gathering. So that was helpful. As you started to unpack, you’re saying that that scripture has to warrant that is either command or the language of the Westminster Confession, or by good, something by good and necessary consequence has to warrant something an element of the service in order for it to be there. So, you know, this may seem like a distinction, kind of in the weeds for listeners, but actually, I think it’s important distinguish between what historically, people have meant by elements and forms, and why that distinction matters. Well,

Ligon Duncan
the typical terms that have been used to talk about that are elements and circumstances and then and then forms is a is a more recent term that has been used in Protestant circles. So elements of worship would be preaching, singing, praying, the administration of the ordinances of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, the reading of Scripture. Those are elements which the Bible indicates to the people of God that they are to do when they gather for worship. Circumstances are matters that are related to how you do the element. So what time on the Lord’s day are you going to meet? I’ve always been fascinated, and I’ve never gotten an answer. Maybe I need to ask somebody like Scott manage. But in Geneva Calvin, worship their early their morning worship services was at 6am and I’ve always wondered, why in the world were you worshiping at 6am now in America, in you know, the mid 20th century, probably 11 o’clock on Sunday morning. Was this the classic time for Sunday morning worship? But that’s a circumstance like, when are you going to do this? When you gather on the Lord’s Day? That when you decide, okay, the congregation is going to gather to worship God. You have to decide, when are you going to do it, where are you going to do it? Forms often speak to the question of how you do the circumstances. So you know, are you going to have a you’re going to have a grand piano in the room assisting you in the singing? Are you going to have guitar, cello and flutes in in the room, assisting you in your singing, what, what is exactly going to be the nature of the musical style, etc. So there are, there are a range of practical considerations that that are involved in how you do the elements of public worship that are circumstantial, and then the forms of those circumstances can vary from place to place. My little motto is there’s not only one right way to do public worship, but there are more wrong ways to do it than there are right ways to do it. So it’s not a one size fits all. Elders are going to make different judgment calls at different places? You know, I go to Capitol Hill Baptist Church, that worship service is probably going to be about two hours long. I could not get by that. With that at first President Jackson, you know, the the elders have a different expectation on the circumstances. There are you going to have hymnals? Are you going to project the the words on a screen? Are you? Are you gonna have a bulletin or not? You know, all sorts. Are you gonna have pews or chairs? Are you gonna stand? I mean, think a lot of people in in the 20th, 21st centuries don’t realize that most Christians stood for public worship for maybe the first 1200 years of the church, whether you were in a home, or you were in a basilica or a cathedral or a church, most Christians stood the whole public worship service. Said that that’s a circumstance. There’s nothing that, okay, fine, you want to stand the whole worship service. That’s great. Want to sit that there’s that’s a judgment call. You’re not told. You have to do it. Right one way or another. There and different Christians can make different judgments on that. Yeah,

Matt Smethurst
that’s a an important point, because when we lose sight of the forms of the circumstances, then we can be overly restrictive. Triply, who people may know as, yes, triply, the Christian rapper. He has an article you can look up online called must all regulative principle, churches look the same by regulative principle, that is what we’ve been talking about. That just means that the word ought to regulate how we work on Sunday morning. One way

Ligon Duncan
to put that would be, the Bible should supply both the form and the content of what we do when we gather as the people of God? Yeah,

Matt Smethurst
exactly. So in this article, his answer is no. So he holds to the regular people. He agrees with everything you said. But he talks about, you know, going to churches in Africa and various parts of, you know, other countries, obviously various parts of the states. And he says there’s a beautiful diversity, yes, there is and a freedom that comes with knowing what God does require and what is left up to our sanctified common sense. Yes, one passage that may not be may not seem immediately relevant to this conversation, but it is. Is Leviticus, chapter 10, the first few verses we read this now Nadab and Abihu, the sons of Aaron, each took his censer and put fire in it and laid incense on it and offered unauthorized fire before the Lord which he had not commanded them, and fire came out from before the Lord and consumed them, and they died before the Lord. Then Moses said to Aaron, this is what the Lord has said among those who are near me, I will be sanctified, and before all the people, I will be glorified. Now, of course, there is we’re in a different redemptive historical era. You’re not going to get smitten, likely if you if you don’t hold to the regular principle, and yet, notice they are punished not for a lack of sincerity. For all we know, Nadab and Abihu were trying to worship the Lord sincerely, what they’re punished for is bringing before God a kind of fire that it that was unauthorized, yeah, meaning they had made it up. God hadn’t made it up. They were worshiping God on their own terms, not worshiping God on His terms. And so I think it’s a huge danger, especially in modern evangelicalism, to to worship in accordance with how we feel, rather than worshiping in accordance with how God has said he wants to be approached, right? And

Ligon Duncan
I think, I do think you’ve hit the point sincerity. You know, if you’re not driven by pragmatism, or you’re not driven by a desire to attract people through, you know, some sort of a seeker approach to what you’re doing in worship, oftentimes people will think, Well, then all that matters, given that I’m not doing those things, all that matters is that I’m sincere, right? And you know now some people might say back to you, yeah, but Matt, that’s Leviticus. That is the old covenant that’s under the mosaic administration that does not pertain to today. And what I say is, Hey, have you looked at Paul in First Corinthians, 11 to 14 recently, Paul really cares about what happens in the Lord’s day services in Corinth. So the drive is when you come together as a drive. This is what you do. And he says, In First Corinthians, 1433, as in all the churches of the saints. So he’s, he’s really concerned that these things be done in such a way in all the churches. So that’s not just an Old Testament thing. That’s a New Testament thing. God cares about how we worship in both the Old Testament and the New Testament. It means more than just having our hearts, right? It doesn’t mean less than that, right? We, God does not want insincere worship, and so Amen to my brothers and sisters who are saying, You gotta have your heart, right, but God also wants you to do what he tells you to do. Because right here’s, here’s the bottom line. How do you worship a God who is Spirit and has not a body like we do. And the the only answer to that question is, however, he tells you to. I mean, how do you how do you know how to approach God? You can’t see him. You only can DO what He tells you to do. So worship is a word mediated encounter between God’s people and the living God, and you can only do that the way he tells you in His Word. So I love the there’s an Anglican scholar who taught it Oak Hill in England for many years, David Peterson. And he wrote a little book called Engaging with God. And in that book, he gave this definition of,

Matt Smethurst
well, let me just say it’s not. Little less, maybe a. Lincoln’s definition of little lose our listeners when they go to get on Amazon. Yes, engaging theology of worship.

Ligon Duncan
His definition is worship is engaging with God on the terms that he proposes and in the way that he alone makes possible. So it makes it clear you can’t just come to God in any old way. You have to come to God on the terms that he proposes. And that’s revealed in his word and in the way that he alone makes possible, and that is through Jesus Christ. And so public worship ought to represent both of those things, we can only engage with God on the terms that he proposes in the word and in the way that he alone makes possible, that is through the gospel of the of the Lord Jesus. Yeah,

Matt Smethurst
maybe we could think about it like an ambassador doesn’t set government policy. An ambassador just faithfully applies it right? And likewise, we don’t get to write the script for what we do on Sunday mornings, we we are called to faithfully obey the orders from our King. Two quick things I want to touch on before we land the plane here. One, just to get practical, we’ve talked a lot about making sure God’s word is setting the agenda for the life of the gathered church. So what is out of bounds are what would be things that might be treated as elements that are actually not that you see appear in evangelical church services these

Ligon Duncan
days? Well, let me, let me go back and pick on my generation for a second one, one thing that I saw happening a lot during the 70s and 80s, when sort of the seeker kind of stuff was was hot, was you would have people say, scrap the sermon, do a do a practical talk, you know, a short practical talk, and do A drama instead. And I like to tell people, there are only two dramas that are commanded for public worship, for Christians, baptism in the Lord’s Supper. That’s the drama that God has commanded us to do when we gather together and and so that that would be an example of well meaning people think, Okay, that’ll connect to people well. And that’s not something God has commanded, reading the Scripture and proclaiming the Scripture, not doing skits and dramas in a public service that was very popular in the in the 70s and 80s. Not so much now, right? You know, but what you will often see happen now is actually the elimination of certain important elements of worship like an almost defined streamline, or even in the sense of Wow, unbelievable. We want to be we want to be sensitive to unbelievers. We’re not trying to order the public service according to what they want or don’t want, but they don’t understand some things. So unbelievers, they’d understand prayer. So we’re not going to do much or any prayer in a public worship. No, no, you don’t get it. But Jesus said, My Father’s house is house of prayer. You can’t eliminate prayer from public worship. You can’t eliminate singing praise to God in worship.

Matt Smethurst
I doubt what the New Testament had in view when it commends prayer commands. Prayer is just a transition, so the worship team can

Ligon Duncan
Exactly, exactly, you know, we need 15 seconds so we can get back up on the platform.

Matt Smethurst
Yeah, right. And also, I would say reading scripture, right? The public reading of Scripture first, Timothy, 413, until I come, Paul writes to Timothy, pastor of First Baptist Church of Ephesus. Until I come, devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture, to exhortation to teaching. We have the exhortation in the teaching in churches, but the public reading of Scripture, often you have to go to a Roman Catholic, that’s right, an Anglican church.

Ligon Duncan
That’s very true. Sometimes liturgical churches with with a, you know, with not the same embrace of the gospel of God’s free grace through justification will have more reading of scripture in their public worship services than an evangelical service

Matt Smethurst
will have. So so it shouldn’t just be word ordered, but word saturated, yes. So to summarize, I think the rubric I’ve heard from you before is in the Sunday morning gathering every church, every Sunday ought to be singing the word, praying the word, reading the Word, preaching the Word, and it may not have to happen every Sunday, but in the ordinances of baptism, in the Lord’s Supper, seeing the world. That’s what it means to be a word centered church. That’s right. And finally, ligand, why is all of this not restrictive, but actually liberating for the conscience? Why is good? Why is this actually should be. Be kind of a message of freedom for pastors and their people.

Ligon Duncan
Partly, I want to remember I have no authority over the consciences of my people. Only God has authority over their consciences, and I cannot add or take away from anything that he has said that they are to do. And so I have to be very careful, as a pastor that I am not asking them to do in public worship, anything that he has not asked them to do in public worship. And that sets them free from me. All I can do is what God told me to tell them to do beyond what I can Yeah. And so that is actually a freeing thing. The other thing that it’s so important

Matt Smethurst
restricts us. It does. It help people exactly in order to liberate the

Ligon Duncan
leaders of the people of God cannot just do what they want to do, and they cannot just impose however, however spiritually motivated they are. They cannot impose things on the people of God. And that does set the people of God free, but it also sets you free to worship God as He is and not as you have made him up in your imagination. One of the reasons that coming to God on the terms that he proposes is so important is because how you worship God will determine who the god is that you worship. And if you if you try to invent your own ways to come to God, you’ll end up worshiping something that isn’t God, and that was the Reformers concern.

Matt Smethurst
What you just said is profound, but at this point in the episode, maybe someone missed it. Say that again and explain how

Ligon Duncan
you worship God will determine who the god is that you worship. So you’ll have read Greg Beals book, you become what you worship, which is a story of others have written about this theme, that in the Bible, idolatry, you know, you become like the idol that you worship. So only if you worship to the true God will you be what God intended you to be, because you become what you worship. That’s true, but it’s also true that you become how you worship, because how you worship will determine who you worship, and so if you don’t worship according to God’s word, you’ll end up worshiping what the reformers and the Puritans called it, will worship. You’re worshiping your own will. You’re worshiping what you want to do, rather than worshiping who God is. And so when you come to God by His Word, you’re assured that you’re actually coming to the God who is, who’s revealed himself in the Word. And that is a freeing thing. That’s not a restraining thing. It frees you up to actually come into the presence of God as He is. That’s

Matt Smethurst
good. In another episode, we’ll talk even more practically about liturgy, why an order of service is important, how a pastor might think about making big changes in terms of the structure on a Sunday morning, especially if they’ve inherited some kind of traditions, but we’ll wrap it up for this episode. Friends, if you found this episode of the everyday pastor helpful, and we hope you have, please share it with a friend. Subscribe. Help us get the word out, and may God help you find fresh joy in the work of ministry.