Together for Preaching

Our Lord, we ask that you would prepare our hearts to receive your word this morning, and that you would break up any stony ground or unbelief in our hearts. We ask that you would plant your word deep inside of us and cause it to bear fruit, that you would open up our ears to hear the truth. We ask Lord that this morning that you would show us Christ, and that you would reveal your glory through the preaching of your word. That every heart this morning may confess Jesus Christ as Lord.

For where else can we go, Lord, you have the words of eternal life. This we pray in Christ's name. Amen. I'm teaching a course right now on Sundays, called the Church is One Foundation.

We're doing a survey of church history and one of the interesting parts of church history is the development of what we call the monastic movement. It's basically this movement in the church where some believers began to grow disenfranchised with the gathered church, the local church. They began to see worldliness in the church. They began to see lots of problems, people coming into the church and bringing their sin and bringing their worldliness and bringing their lusts and desires.

And so there were a group of people that began to move out away from the local church and began to go live in the desert. These were early on called desert hermits. later on, they referred to them as, as monks. one type of monk.

Let's see here. I'm not getting any response. From this year. OK.

All right. So I, we, let me just describe these pictures that I have is one particular monk called an Anchorite type of monk is the guy that would just go out and live by himself in the desert. And to get the mind of these Western monastics, imagine you're watching a kung fu movie, and the eastern guy, the Buddhist monk that's just up on this hill. and you have to travel through the jungles and you have to travel, hundreds of miles and go up all of these steps, and you find some guy with a long beard who just lives by himself continuously up in this place, right?

And the awe of just being able to meet this man that's been living by himself for so many years. That's the idea that we have of these desert monks. I'm sorry, I'm just not getting any. Response from this little modern device.

It frightens and confuses me. OK, good. Thank you. This is what we have in the early churches, you have a guy like Anthony, who was a very famous desert monk, would go off into the desert, he's living by himself.

Resisting the world, he's by himself, he's facing and fighting demons, having these battles with the world, the flesh and the devil off by himself. And then people become very enamored with this type of story. It was, it's almost like, the way we might be enamored with, when I was growing up, cowboys and Indians or, cops and robbers, that type of thing. Back then, if you were a little kid, you would play this game called Monks and Demons.

And the idea was that somebody would play the part of Anthony, and he's this poor monk, and then there'd be kids that'd be hopping around him, and they're the demons going after him and trying to tempt him and harass him, and Anthony off by himself in this hill would just be casting these demons away from him through prayer and through his quotations of scripture. And this is just a wonderful vision that people had of the truly holy lifestyle, this life lived alone, apart from the world.

One problem though is as people began to evaluate this lifestyle against the scriptures, they realized, how do you practice the one another's alone? How do you love one another when you're living for 40 years by yourself in a cave?

So the solution that some people had is we'll take all of these monks and put them together in monasteries. They call it the Cynebitic lifestyle. So now we're going to have people who live alone are now going to live alone together, right? And you live largely by yourself.

You're praying by yourself, you're reading the word by yourself, but you're in this little community of men or community of women. But the idea is that you're moving yourself out from the world into these walls in order to read the word and to pray and to work and so on and so forth. One of the sad footnotes of the desert hermits is that these guys were away from communion. They were away from the priest word and so they lived often in ignorance of the scriptures.

And when heresies arose like the Aryan heresy, the Aryan heretics would go out and find these rock stars in the desert and win them to their position. If you could get Anthony or some particular desert monk to come over and ascribe to your particular form of doctrine, in this case Arianism. Then everybody would say, wow, if that desert hermit believes in Arianism, then why should I believe that Jesus Christ is God? Maybe he's just a man who was exalted by the Father to the right hand.

And so these monks didn't really have the sophistication or the teaching to be able to evaluate these arguments, and so they would fall into false teaching themselves. And then you have one of the most strangest types of practice in the monastic movement, and that's what we call stylites. These were like men that would actually live on top of a pillar by themselves for years. Daniel the Stylite lived for almost 60 years on top of a pole by himself.

And only came down twice. One time to confront a ruler, another time to answer the objection that some people thought he had given in to the Aryan doctrine. But for basically 60 years he lived on top of a pole. We call those guys stylites, and it's a sad, sad period, particularly with the monastics that live on these poles up away from the world, away from the sin in the local church.

And away from the preaching of the word of God by the pastors of the local church and away from the gifts of the body and away from communion and away from fellowship and away from the corporate prayers. And as strange as this may seem to us today, I want to suggest that we actually in modern Western Protestantism suffer from a modern type of monasticism. This type of monasticism where we all will gather. A corporately in our respective churches, but we come in as consumers and we want to take a little bit of this sermon and well we don't really like the music of this church, so maybe we'll take the sermon here but we'll go singing somewhere else.

Maybe our fellowship group will be Another church, maybe we'll just get all of our preaching online through MP3 or iPod podcasts, and maybe we'll just come to that church because they've got good music and then go get our preaching elsewhere and we'll type of roam around and just go around doing the smorgasbord thing and and walk into services as consumers and be as it were Siskel and Ebert's sermon tasters. Rather than people that are gathered to meet and worship God Almighty.

When we look on the pages of church history, the preaching of God's word has historically been the pinnacle of worship. And I believe that the church, the early church and the Reformed Church, got this concept of preaching being the pinnacle of worship, not just from the invention of their own minds, they got it from the pages of the Word of God itself.

So basically this morning my sermon has one point. And that is this, we need to hear God's word preached together. OK, let's pray. I'm joking.

We need to hear God's word preached together. That's the only point I'm going to make this morning. And then I'm gonna try to answer some questions and objections, to figure out how we can flesh this thing out as a community. We need to hear God's word preached together, because the triune God is pleased to meet with his people in this place as we gather, and he feeds his sheep through his shepherds, as we worship.

This is not just a lecture. This is not just a classroom. This is a worship service, and God is pleased to meet with us as His temple. His temple people are gathered together for the preaching of God's word, which, if we're correct, is really the height of worship.

Let me give you some preliminary concepts before we get into the meat of our message. What do we mean and what we don't mean? What do we not mean by preach or preaching or preacher? I don't know about you, but before I became a Christian, when I heard the word preach, I thought of that in a very negative way, right?

Don't preach at me, or that type of concept. The idea that would arise in my mind is someone that is standing over another person and judging them. But I don't want you to see that term in this way this morning. When we look on the pages of Scripture, Scripture views preaching as a very positive thing.

It's a heralding. It's a lifting up of Christ. It's a lifting up of the gospel, a lifting up of God's word before God's people and before the world. So preaching, we should view it as positive.

And so as I'm using the word preach this morning, try to get your mind to see the positive aspect of connotation of that word. Secondly, I believe that this proposition this morning is irreducibly complex. Actually, I was going to skip that, but now that I'm into it, let me tell you what. I believe that this proposition is irreducibly complex, which means this you can't take any point out of that and still have the whole concept hang together.

If you guys have ever seen this documentary called Mysteries of Life, it basically involves trying to demonstrate that God is the maker behind all things by looking inside of the inner workings of a cell, and you have this little thing called a flage. it's this little very complicated piece of machinery that has all kinds of dozens and dozens of parts that all have to work together and if you pull one part out of the flagellum, the whole thing doesn't work. It's called irreducible complexity, scientific concept.

One little piece is pulled out, the whole thing doesn't work.

Therefore, evolution could not have happened with the flagellum because it's irreducibly complex. Makes sense. This sermon, I believe that the point here this morning is irreducible, irreducibly complex. We need God, but that is not sufficient in and of itself.

We need God's word, but that is not sufficient in and of itself. We need to hear God's word, but that is not sufficient in and of itself. We need to hear God's word preached, but that is. Sufficient in and of itself.

We need to hear God's word preached together. We need all of that together, and I'm going to try to demonstrate that from the word of God this morning. And this is a need. This is not something that's optional.

Here's a suggestion for Pastor Mike, and maybe, maybe you could take it, maybe you could leave it. I'm going to be proposing this morning that this is a must. This is a need. So let me just break apart this one point.

into basically 5 expositions of this point. First of all, we need God, right? Everybody agree with that? We need God.

We need him. We have been made to need God. We are creatures. He is the Creator.

We need him every day for our very life and sustenance. He is everything to us. And when we say we need God, we don't just need to know something about God, we need to know God relationally. We need to have a relationship with God.

We need to relate ourselves to God. Psalm 42, David says, as the deer pants for the water brook, so pants my soul for you, oh God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and appear before God?

David is expressing really the heart of all mankind that we have something in us that needs and yearns for God. And without that yearning being met, we go off into oblivion. We are like that deer. We need our thirst quenched.

I don't know if you've ever been without water for any length of time. I was backpacking, taking a group of young, vigilante boys from LA on this backpacking trip, this boys camp we used to work at. And we were backpacking 26 miles, actually 42 miles round trip, and we got up to this place called Farewell Gap. We'd run out of water.

We'd been hiking without water and food for quite a long time. We each took one bite of tuna and one bite of applesauce in the morning and then hiked to the top of Farewell Gap, and on the top of Farewell Gap there was a spring and an onion patch, and I just laid down in the spring face down. And I just drink water out of the spring, and I grabbed onions and just started chomping on onions. And it was delicious.

And it quenched my thirst. It's like I needed that water. And we need God. But just the fact that we need God is not sufficient in and of itself.

God, I can go out and look for God in the forest. I can go up into the high Sierras and these beautiful mountains and say, I need God, and cry out. I can look up at the stars and say, God, I need you. There's something within our own hearts that has been built inside of us, where we have this certain consciousness where we know God in some respect, and we can look inside and say, I need God.

But that is insufficient in and of itself. If God does not choose to reveal Himself, we are lost. We are hopeless. And so we need God, but we need God's word.

God is so kind and loving that he has revealed Himself to us. He has revealed himself to us through the prophets, through the Lord Jesus Christ, ultimately, and through God's written word. And so we have a great need for God's Word, because we need God, right? Peter, was, with Christ and Christ had just given some very difficult sayings and many supposed disciples walked away.

Jesus turns to Peter and says, Are you also going to walk away? And Peter, filled with the Spirit says, Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. Jesus said in his high priestly prayer, sanctify them by your truth.

Your word is truth. And so all of us have this need in our hearts. We know that we need God. And we can look out into nature and look within ourselves and see that God is there, but we grow for Him and we cannot find Him in and of ourselves, and God in His love reveals Himself, specially in special revelation here through the Word of God.

And so we have the written word of God today where we can now get to know about our God, but not just know about Him, we can know God relationally. Because God has revealed Himself. And so we're thankful for God's written word. But what, it's not enough.

We talk about the sufficiency of Scripture. But if we understand what the the scriptures say about themselves, is the Bible by itself, sitting on my shelf, or even me just having my own little personal quiet time on an island is not sufficient in and of itself. The 3rd component here to our proposition is that we need to hear God's word. We need to hear God's word.

We need God's word to somehow make its way into our minds and into our hearts. When the Bible talks about hearing, this is somewhat of a metonym. It's a figure of speech, not just for the physical act of hearing, but for the Bible making its way into our consciousness and actually making its way into our volition to where now we begin to make decisions on the basis of what we've been exposed to. That's why when the Bible says in in Deuteronomy 6, it says, Hear, O Israel, it's not just saying, hey, listen up.

No, here, lend your ear with a volitional bent, so that God's message can come into you and have its work in your life. That's why Paul can say in Romans 10, faith comes by hearing. In hearing by the word of God, how does anybody come to faith? How does anybody grow in faith?

We grow in faith, not just with some vague groping for God of the universe. We come to faith not just because we know. God has spoken in his word. We come to faith because we hear God's word in a volitional sense, it enters into our eyes or ears, or however we're perceiving of it, and it has its impact on our wills.

So faith, this belief, this salvation that happens comes by hearing and hearing the word of God. And yet That is not sufficient in and of itself. I can hear the Word of God. I can know that there is God, I can know that there is a word.

And yet this very word tells me that my mere believing in the Word of God is insufficient for my growth in faith. The Bible tells me that I need to hear and you need to hear the word preached, proclaimed, exalted, lifted up. There is something special. There is something unique.

There's something, as it were, sacramental about the preaching of God's word. Now when we say sacramental, we're not meaning sacerdotal. We're not saying that somehow the priest or the pastor comes and says, Open up your mouth. Here is the word of God, and then we preach, and here's the word of God.

And only if a properly ordained priest or pastor gets up and delivers the sermon will it have its magical effect upon you. We're saying that God in His love has ordained that the church would be sanctified. That's part of our salvation, and grow and ultimately glorified, partially through the preaching of God's word. In that sense, the preaching of God's word is sacramental.

It's a means of grace that causes the church to grow and to be sanctified. What do we see here in First Corinthians, Paul says, so as much as is in me, I am ready to preach the gospel, to announce the gospel to you who are in Rome also. In this particular context, Paul's not just talking about evangelism, as important as that is. He's talking about going and preaching the gospel over saved people.

announcing the gospel as they are gathered together, and he says, I'm not ashamed of the gospel of Christ. It's the very power of God to salvation to everyone who believes for the Jew first, and also to the Greek. the Lord Jesus Christ has been pleased to give special gifts to his church. He's given gifts to this church, right?

He's given everyone in this room. has certain gifts. We have people in this room, they have the gifts, a gift of service or a gift of hospitality or gifts of exhortation. But one of the gifts that Christ is pleased to give to His church is really just human beings.

They have a particular role, and we call them pastors or teachers or evangelists. We see in Ephesians 4 that Jesus, after his ascension, gave to the church these special gifts, and he gave some to the apostles and some prophets. That's almost certainly just talking about the foundation that we have in the New Testament of the apostles and prophets that went out and spoke and wrote God's word. But then beyond that foundational work that we see in Ephesians 2:20, Jesus Christ also gave some to be evangelists, pastors, and teachers.

And I want to suggest to you that evangelist pastors and teachers are really talking about the same group of people in any given local church. It's just focusing on the different roles that they might have evangelists, pastors and teachers. How do I know that evangelists, pastors and teachers is really just referring to The pastors or the elders of a particular church. Well, Paul, Paul here is writing to the city of what, what, what city is he writing to?

Ephesus. So this is the church of Ephesus. Who's the pastor of Ephesus at this time? Well, he's the head shepherd who's the under shepherd under Jesus Christ of the city of Ephesus.

No, it's Timothy. Nice try though. It's Timothy. So Timothy is the pastor.

When you look over at Timothy, what do you see God doing in 2 Timothy? Paul is talking to Timothy and he's calling Timothy a shepherd. He's telling him to preach the word. He's commanding him to preach the word.

And in another portion he's saying, and do the work of an evangelist. So Paul's using all Of those terms to refer to Timothy himself. So really, evangelist, pastor, teacher, these are are functions of really the same person, I would argue. So Jesus Christ is giving to his church.

The Evangelist pastors, teachers, you can just say it that way, he's given to his church pastors, preachers, and they're a special gift to this local body. Now, I don't know, those of you guys have children, you can, you understand this concept of Christmas comes, and your children look underneath the Christmas tree, and they can tell, right? I knew, didn't you? You look under the Christmas tree, and I know that's clothes, that's a toy.

I'm going for the toy, right? but whatever it is that your parents give you, we would hope that our children would open up their gifts and just be very thankful for the gifts that they're given. I have to rehearse with my children before we go to family gatherings at Christmas. We rehearse in the van on the way there.

Whatever you open up. You will smile You will say thank you and give that particular relative a hug for whatever it happens to be. If it's a duplicate of what we've already given you, you don't say that. You say thank you, Grandma.

And when Grandma happened to give my 4 year old daughter at the time a miniskirt, you don't say, Dad's never going to let me wear this, Grandma. You say, thank you, Grandma. Thank you so much for this wonderful gift, right? And when we look at the gift that Christ has given to the church, Christ has given to this church pastors and preachers, the appropriate response for us is to look to Christ and say, Jesus, thank you for this gift.

And, whatever the size church it is, if it's a large church, it's a small church, if the gospel's being preached, there should be an attitude within the people of God, where we say, thank you, Jesus, for this gift, right? Maybe my preacher doesn't preach like John MacArthur. Maybe my preacher doesn't preach like John Piper. Maybe the guy in the pulpit today doesn't preach like Pastor Milton.

But you come and you say, thank you, Jesus, for the gift that you have given to this church. And it's clear in the pages of the New Testament, That the Bible values preachers. the Bible values everybody in the body of Christ, we're all equal in the sense of that value. But there's something, there's this gift that's been given to the church that we should look at and say, this is really something special that the Lord's doing for us to help us grow.

And, and so we want to give appropriate honor and thanks to the Lord for these preachers. just the word preacher, doesn't it, doesn't it imply a church? Doesn't it imply a group of people? When Timothy, when Paul says to Timothy, Before God who's going to judge the living and the dead, I command you preach the word in season and out of season, rebuke, exhort.

it implies that there's a group of people that are gathered there in Ephesus, that Timothy is a gift to them, and they're receiving him as a gift of Christ. we see this honor demonstrated in 1 Timothy chapter 5 where Paul says, Let elders who rule well be counted worthy of double honor, especially those who labor in the word and doctrine. So the idea here is there's, there's in Ephesus, there's probably a group of elders. There's those that are laboring and then there's those that are really excelling.

They've been gifted in different ways, and they get up and they exhort more frequently, perhaps in the gatherings, and Paul says, make sure you guys give them two pats on the back, double honor. No, no, no. Double honor is make sure they get remuneration for what they're doing. These guys are working hard.

They're an ox. They're like an ox. Don't muzzle that ox. I just love being referred to as an ox.

It just keeps me humble, that I'm an ox that should not be muzzled. so, so Christ is given to the church preachers. So it is necessary. We need to know God.

We need to hear the word of God, and we need to hear the word of God preached. Now let me say just a couple of things before we move on. So just so we are clear, preaching is not something that happens after the worship time. I hope you guys are getting that through things that we say on a weekly basis.

as a young Christian, I understood like there was worship, and then there was the sermon. And I, as a young believer, I really got into the worship of my church. I was into it, we were a hands raising church. I was into it.

Moving around, sometimes tears coming down, just experiencing the presence of God and worship. And then the pastor would get up and preach and be like, Or in this church, it's like this, it's like, Look at the clock. Is this going to be over, man. Can't we just have some more worship?

But if we understand the word of God properly, When the temple people get together, this is worship. Even if you don't have the goosebumps in the back of your neck, this is worship. In fact, did that on the page of the New Testament, in the writings that are specifically given to the church, how many times does the Bible talk about the music part of our worship? Anybody have any idea?

Two passages. There's a passage in Ephesians, and there's a parallel passage in Colossians, where Paul talks about how that when we're filled with the Spirit, we're going to sing, make melody in our hearts to the Lord and to one another. Outside of those two passages, there are no other passages in the New Testament that specifically talk about singing as part of our worship. The overwhelming majority of evidence and scripture about what we do when we gather has to do with prayer, communion, fellowship, and preaching.

And an argument can be made that preaching is the high point of a worship service on the pages of the New Testament. we see this. I'm going to refer a little bit later to a quote from Justin Martyr where he talks about the preaching within a service. So when you guys come to a particular service, Cornerstone, or wherever the Lord leads you guys in your local church experience, don't view the singing as the high point of the service.

I don't want to minimize, modern worship. I think it's great that we sing the gospel. I think it's great that we're able to sing the word and sing to the Lord and sing to one another. But just know that historically that really has not been the emphasis in worship services.

It really wasn't until the early part of the Reformation period that congregational worship became in vogue, and when it came in vogue at first they just stood up and sang the psalms. All they did was sing psalms word for word. And then after that, Isaac Watts started getting pretty radical, and he wrote some, oh, he wrote some lyrics that didn't go right with the Psalms. They were just trying to express the Christological viewpoint of the Psalms and doctrine and stuff like that, radical guy in his day.

But then the church began to sing more and sing the gospel more frequently. And it's been great, I think for the most part. Unfortunately, in some of our churches, the music has become like the touchstone for whether that's a good church or not. Why'd you leave that church?

they have really good preaching, man, but the worship's just not spirit filled, dude. What do you mean by that? That, and that was my attitude. I'm, I'm criticizing myself.

My attitude, I remember when I first moved out here to the Inland Empire, I started going to a church over here that was a lot more conservative and a lot more traditional than I was used to. Went to the church and really loved the preaching. And I remember the pastor coming up to me and he's just like, so hey, so what do you, what are you thinking of your experience here at the church? I'm just like, I, I am 19 or 20.

You, you do a really good job, pastor, with your preaching, and you're, you're a good preacher. I really love the word. But, and what's coming. But boy, you guys need to learn how to worship.

1920 year old, you guys need to learn how to, what is from my, from my tradition, from my background, you need to learn how to sing songs that I'm used to that I grew up with since the time I was 14, and get your hands in the air and sing the stuff that I'm familiar with that I identify as spirit-filled worship. Not these old hymns that I can't even get the words out of my mouth, and I haven't heard half of these songs because I didn't grow up with hymns. And when they did sing hymns in my church, I was falling asleep.

No, no, no, the word of God is being preached is where we want to put the emphasis.

I would just challenge you guys as families here that as you guys move through your church experience, the likelihood is most of us are going to throughout our lifetimes move and have different stages in our lives we're involved in different local churches, but make the preaching of God's word a touchstone for why you attend a particular church and why you attend certain worship services. Don't make something as silly as whether they have acoustic guitar or not. A touchstone for your choice of a church.

They play the organ here and now I just can't stand the organ.

That's just, that's just so, just not anywhere in the Bible is one of the main touchstones. and then, fifthly, As we exposit this one point, you guys are getting the one point, right? We need to hear God's word preached together. Together we could hear the word of God preached.

And yet I want to suggest to you that that could still be insufficient. Last night, I was hearing Pastor Milton preach personally to me. It's about 10 o'clock at night. And Pastor Milton, I was his personal audience.

He came and preached to me. While I was at Coco's, right? Had my earbuds in, listening to the MP3 off of our website, Pastor Milton was giving me a personal sermon. It was great.

I was very edified. I get very edified when I listen to Piper or any of my favorite preachers online. But that is not the same as gathering together with God's people during worship, where God is pleased to manifest his special presence. Even though I was by myself at Coco's last night, listening to a great preacher, that does not match when I'm here with my family, listening to the exact same message.

There's something special that happens when God's people are gathered together. We see from Genesis to Revelation that God is a God that wants to dwell among his people. And in the Old Testament, if you wanted to find the special presence of Almighty God, you had to go where? The tabernacle or the temple.

And then you move into the New Testament, and you want to find the manifestation of the special presence of Almighty God on earth. In this dispensation, you have to go where the temple, which is you when we are gathered together to serve Almighty God. He manifests his presence in a very special way. When Jesus says, where two or three are gathered in my name, there I am in the midst.

That doesn't mean that when I'm by myself, In the Sierras with my Bible doesn't mean he's not there. What it does mean is that God is pleased to manifest his special presence, when the church is gathered together, and the church is gathered together to hear the powerful gospel, this concentration of power preached. And just because you don't feel goosebumps necessarily or the hair isn't rising up on the back of your neck every time somebody preaches does not mean that God is not there.

God is pleased to meet with us by faith, as we gather together every week.

We see in Acts chapter 2. That on that Pentecost day, Peter stands up and he begins to address the 11, and then 3000 souls are added to them that day. And then they continued steadfastly in the apostles' doctrine. The idea is that they continued together.

They were all together, continuing in the apostles' doctrine. This would involve the preaching as Peter had just done. We need to hear God's word preached together. We hear the word of God as we hear the God, the word of God preached together, the special gifts the Lord's given to His church.

He's given us pastors, teachers, evangelists, and as we gather together under their preaching, this body in Ephesians 4 now begins to become more and more intertwined. The puzzle pieces by God's designs start to come together underneath the preaching ministry of the pastors. Puzzle pieces are coming together. See it.

And the body's starting to grow up into unity, right? We're starting to grow up as we're all coming together underneath the preaching of the word of God. Now if the whole body does not gather, it does not unify underneath the preaching of the word of God, that means that you get different body parts that start to develop at different levels and stages. Imagine just walking around with a foot that's about 2 inches wide and thick.

It's going to be debilitating. And yet that happens in the church. Remember years ago, being part of a church, where a dear old saintly couple, for whatever reason, they just decided that they didn't like sitting through the preaching. And so basically every Sunday they were in the nursery or they were ushering or they were here or they were doing in a parking lot and they were just never underneath the preaching of God's word and God was doing some amazing things as God's word was being preached and yet you would go fellowship and interface with this particular couple it was like they were a decade behind.

They were not moving with the congregation because they were not underneath the preaching of God's word, and I want to propose to you that if we're correct this morning, even if they would have gone home and listened to the same message, not that there's anything wrong with this, they went and heard the same message on their MP3 player by themselves, they've missed out on the special presence of Almighty God during that worship event. When the Word of God is being preached, it's not just an impartation of information.

I'm giving you information, you're receiving information, you walk out with information. We can do that through our iPods, we can do that online.

This is a worship service, where Almighty God is pleased to meet with his people right now. And when the Word of God is preached, he is pleased to meet with us. And it's something that we do by faith. And it's not something that, we look at and, and all of a sudden, like after one message, we see we've grown an inch.

No, it's the repeated, the repeating week after week after week of being together underneath the preached word. And we look back after a year, and we're like, we've grown. if you've been here for any time you can look back here at Cornerstone and you can think 5 years ago, you can think 10 years ago, and you can rehearse some of the books that we've preached through 1 Corinthians. If I say 1 Corinthians, a lot of you people go, Yeah, we grew.

If I say 1 Timothy, you remember, you don't, you might not remember a single sermon, but you're like, we grew. If I say Ephesians, you're like, we grew. God is growing His people, and it is, it is, it is needful. It is a must that we gather together for the preaching of God's word so that we can grow together.

we, if we do not do this, we, we, we suffer from what I think some have called modern, modern Protestant monasticism. This idea that somehow I can just be off on the pillar. I've got my MP3 plugged in, and I'm just downloading information. Now, I don't want you to get the idea that I, I want you to not go listen to your sermons.

I think it's great that people listen to sermons. I listened to lots of sermons, and I think it's wonderful for us to continue to get that input throughout the week. But if that's, if that becomes a replacement for, if we begin to minimize the preach word at our own local churches and despise the gifts that Christ has given to us and say, well God't quite preach like John Piper. That guy is not quite like RC Sproll.

We, we are in poverty. We famish ourselves in such a case. so, can I just listen to my favorite preachers on my iPod? I would say yes, do that, but not as a replacement.

And then as you're listening to the word of God preach, then we move into our small groups and we begin to process what has been preached, and we begin to see how can we put this into work as a body. in the early church, if you were to, try to do some study and figure out, OK, how did these guys do church, what were the things that they emphasized? One place you could go is just to Justin Martyr in his first apology. He says on the day called Sunday, there's a meeting in one place of those who live in the cities or in the country.

In the memoirs of the apostles of the writings, the prophets are read as long as time permits. So they're reading from the Old New Testament. When the reader is finished, the president, that's the pastor, is, in a discourse, urges and invites us to the imitation of those noble things. The pastor would get up by modern standards, he would probably talk too long, and, they probably want to get a hook out and say, you're done.

And, but he would get up and preach. Then we would all stand up together and offer prayers. By modern standards, this went way too long. This would sometimes go for a couple of hours.

And as said, when we have finished the prayer, bread is brought with wine and water, and the president similarly sends up prayers and thanksgiving to the best of his ability. And so, and then, and then there's a time of giving. One thing that you see that's absent in this early church description of the worship service is singing. Now I think singing is biblical.

It's Ephesians, Colossians. It's an important aspect of our service, but both biblically and historically, it has just not been. The number one emphasis in the church, it's not until recently, and especially in American culture since like the 1960s that the music part of worship has really taken off and in many places become the pinnacle and touchstone for what we describe as worship. Now, let me just As we close things here, I want to hit some cultural factors that stand against this doctrine and answer some questions.

So again, our one point is we need to hear God's word preached together. We need God, yes. General revelation is not sufficient. We need God's word.

Yes, we do. But God's word, outside of a hearing context is insufficient. We need to hear God's word. We need for ourselves, we need to hear God's word with our volition activated.

But we need more than that. We need to hear God's word preached. There is something sacramental about the gathering together. Yes, it's important for me to have my quiet time.

Yes, it's important for me to have family devotions. Yes, it's important for me to memorize scripture and to meditate on scripture. But a means of grace for the church is to hear the word of God preached. And we need to hear the word of God preached together.

Sadly, I remember years ago, there's a family that I was interfacing with, and they had a particular daughter that was very talented athletically, and, and they just were convinced the only way that she's going to get to college is if she's able to do these weekend tournaments in order to really advance in her skills, and these tournaments would take her away from the church every Sunday. She was in church maybe about once every 8 weeks underneath the preaching of God's word.

And I would just suggest to you fathers, mothers, that to pull your kids away from the weekly preaching of God's word, and obviously we get sick, there's that is to pull yourself away from a great gift and, and to unintentionally bring your children into a famished state of their souls. That this is a means of grace.

This is something that God has given to the church that is not just optional but necessary and essential for our own growth. Now this is not easy because there's many cultural factors that stand against the doctrine that we've been preaching this morning. One of those factors that stands against us is this rugged individualism and self-reliance. Culturally, we are a culture of Teddy Roosevelt, that philosophy of just self-reliance.

We're a culture of Ralph Waldo Emerson, transcendentalism, it's all about the individual. We're a culture of Emily Dickinson, it's all about the individual, and the concept that we need to gather together for this foolish thing called preaching. Paul even admits that, through the weakness of the word preach that God is getting his work done. This is how things are happening.

So we have to fight against we're swimming upstream. When we say yes, it is important and vital for my family to be underneath the priest's word of God at a local church. We're swimming upstream of the culture. We're also fighting against what I'm calling Protestant over-Reformation.

The idea that we've reformed and I think properly so we said, what, we're rejecting the Pope, the papal office. We're rejecting this New Testament priesthood. We're rejecting this concept of transubstantiation in communion, but then Many denominations and Christians have carried that forward with, we're rejecting the need for pastors, we're rejecting the need for authorities, we're rejecting the need for preaching in our lives. It's, it's a, it's a Protestant over reformation that you see in many circles.

And then another thing that we're just swimming upstream against is what I think is more unique to America than elsewhere, and that is the smorgasbord, Siskel and Ebert sermon tasting. It's the idea that I just come in and I get a little bit of this, I get a little bit of that. I'm a consumer and then after church it's not like, oh we've just met with God. It's like, oh what did you think of the sermon?

Yeah, it wasn't too good. I like it better when Pastor Milton's up there or whatever. And so, and then we just like taste this, we taste that, but we don't have this concept that we've we're meeting with God, as the Word of God is being preached. And so we have to, if we're going to stand against these forces, we have to be proactive and thinking about this doctrine, meditating upon this doctrine, dispensing this doctrine to our, to our, to our children.

Couple of final questions. What if we don't gather to hear God's word preached? What are the consequences of this? I would just suggest to you that if we don't gather together to hear the word of God preached, then we're despising a gift that Jesus Christ has given us.

He's given us this wonderful Christmas present, and we're saying, clothes. I, I, I, I didn't want that. No, we're despising a gift. If we don't gather for the word preached, if only some of us gather, not all of us are gathered, then people are growing at different, off-kilter rates, not the way that the Holy Spirit's designed.

I don't want you to misunderstand me. We know that people are all at different levels. People grow at different levels, but when people just exclude themselves from the preached word, it does bring problems into churches. and so you guys can wrestle with some more answers to that in your care groups, in your, in your meetings.

so how can we take advantage of the preacher when you guys come on any given Sunday, you should say, say to your children, say to yourself, we're going to take advantage of Pastor Milton today. We're going to totally take advantage of him. How can you do that? Imagine it's an athletic event stretch out before the athletic event.

OK, so you're going to stretch out your spiritual muscles. Saturday night, Sunday morning, you're getting up and you're stretching out, you're getting ready, you're praying, you're exercising your mind, you're rehearsing what this event's all about. That's why personally, it doesn't always work out this way, but we try, I try as much as possible. To not just go out to, like big old parties or whatever, just social events on Saturday night that might keep me out super, super late.

Instead, I stay up real late working on Sunday school and stuff like that. but, so, but to be able to just stretch out the night before. And think, hey, tomorrow's the Lord's Day. Tomorrow's a special day where God is going to meet with his people in a very special way.

Let's get ready for this event. Then exercise yourself during the sermon. Richard Baxter gives suggestions to Christians on how to hear a sermon. And, and one of the things that he suggested is just this concept of active listening.

It's like listening bent forward. It's like up in your seat, at least metaphorically. That you are understanding that this is a spiritual event here. So in any spiritual activity, there's the devil, right?

He doesn't want you to hear the word of God. There's your own flesh who fights against it. And so you've got to work against the flesh. You've got to work against the devil as this event is going on.

The preacher has his job to do. You have your job to do, and we're interfacing, we're talking to each other, and you are trying to, you're working to pay attention. There are times where I've been up like, I don't know how many hours working on a Sunday school lesson. I come in to hear the preaching the word of God.

Pastor Milton's just bringing it, and I got to lift my legs and like hold my breath and like pinch myself because I'm like, my, my eyelids are just about ready to drop, not because of anything that Pastor Milton has done, just because I, I, I'm going on a little sleep. But, I'm, I'm, I'm OK, what can I do to not totally embarrass myself and my whole family by falling asleep in the middle of church? No, but the, but the motive, the motive should be, I want to exercise myself, and then warm down after the sermon as soon as the sermon's over.

What do you do after exercise?

You warm down, so you're like, OK, let's process. Talk to people after the service, talking to your family through the message, talking to your care group, and that really would bring us to that fourth point is continue the burn, baby, continue the burn. So you've heard the word preach and so you're going to continue to take what you've learned, and you're going to keep working out with it with your care group or your family or what have you. Another question, what if, what if the preacher isn't Milton Vincent?

Oh no. What do we do? I have no memory of who this person is, so forgive me if it was you, but I remember like several years ago I was coming in the foyer and somebody ran up to me and said, Oh, I brought my friend. I'm so excited for them to hear Pastor Milton preaching.

I've been telling him all about his ministry and I'm just really excited and she's all, and I said, Oh, Pastor Milton's not preaching this morning. He's on vacation. She says, Oh no, I can't stand it when the other guys preach or, oh, I just, and I wanted Pastor Milton to be preaching. Oh, what's who's preaching this morning?

Me Oh, I didn't mean you, Pastor Mike. You do a great job. You're just You are so awesome. You are so awesome.

One of the little kids years and years ago when he was like, it was actually it was Brendan Vincent when he was like 5 years old, he gave me a little card for Pastor Appreciation Month and it said, and it showed me preaching. It says, thanks for being the backup pastor. I was like, oh, that's so cool. But if we understand this concept that Christ has given to His church pastors, evangelists, teachers, then it really shouldn't, as long as the gospel's being preached, it shouldn't matter who's in the pulpit, and there should be an attitude in our hearts that says, what, maybe my pastor's not John Piper, maybe my pastor's not this like incredible expositor that, is writing books, but he's preaching the word.

And God is present with us. One of the quotes that I read this week, that just really, really got me excited was Steve Burchet says this, If your pastor is honestly dull, but he preaches the truth faithfully, a little statement I once heard might be helpful for you to remember the mature worshiper is easily edified. And, I, I've seen that with mature saints in our church is, there's times where I've gotten up to preach, and I get done, I'm just like, that was a nightmare. That was an absolute disaster.

And then some old saint will come up to me and just be like, oh, Pastor Mike, it was such a blessing. You just blessed me this morning with this particular and I'm just like, How? But, I'm a church saint is hearing the gospel preached, even this young whippersnapper is always tripping over his tongue, whatnot. And it's like, wow, the Word of God is being preached.

We're excited. And then lastly, what if, what if we think the preacher is wrong? Just be quiet, go home. I'm joking.

I'm joking, yeah. No, no. when in the New Testament, when a preacher gets up to preach, this is not like Old Testament prophecy, like Isaiah standing up, thus says the Lord, bam, word for word, everything's right. This God is pleased to use this thing called preaching.

That largely involves the truth of the gospel, but it's also mixed in with a human person who has frailties and can be wrong. And so the Bereans are even looking at the apostle Paul's preaching, not when he's writing scripture, but when he's preaching and saying, we're going to compare this, we're going to compare and see what he's saying, if it's matching with the scriptures that we already have. And so it's appropriate for us to It's a worship service, but we always, we realize that Mike or Milton or Silos or Kalos, they're frail human beings.

OK, so we're going to match what they're saying against the word of God, and if we think it's wrong, there's all kinds of different ways you can approach it.

One would be just go gossip around the church and say, I really think that was wrong. Tell about 12 people and then post it on Facebook and say, I think, I think that was really, really, really, really messed up. No, that's not what you do. No, you, you go and And maybe, maybe it's just something small and you just let it go, you just let the little thing slide.

Love covers the multi sins. Maybe it's something you see on an ongoing basis and you're like, wow, I'm really not sure that that's the right way to go. And so maybe you come and you talk to one of the pastors afterwards. There's there's times where I've preached something and I say a word that like is a hot button for a whole matrix that somebody has in their head.

And I didn't even mean to go down this rabbit trail that they went down in their minds, and they'll come up to me and they'll say, Did you mean this? And I'll be like, Nope. here's what I meant. So sometimes just, just getting a little feedback with your pastor or talking to your care group leader, but honestly, what, we are all growing and so I've listened to some of my messages.

I've gone back at times where I'm going to preach something. I'll go back and listen to all message I did and I'll be like, oh. And if you're a teacher, you have these oh moments where you're like you're listening to something you preached 10 years ago and you're like, That's incorrect. Let's edit that and get it off the website.

and so, we make mistakes and so to have a, a brother or sister, doesn't matter if you're young in the Lord or more early in the Lord, that comes and challenges us and help us realize maybe what we said. this is totally crazy, this is before I was an official pastor, but I was over here at RBC years ago and when I was in a Christian rock band, my hair is a little longer and, and after that, I got up and I was preaching and I invited everybody to receive the devil into their hearts.

And I had no idea that I had said that. It was like everybody was smiling and all of a sudden it was like, And I had no clue.

I had no clue at all. But the mature, actually, there were some mature saints and the, and they just were, they kept smiling. And they, they, it's like, we know what he means, we know what he means. But then afterwards somebody came up to me and said, Mike, You may not realize you asked us to receive the devil into our hearts.

It's like, no! Oh man. Not good. Not good.

And then the very first time I preached here at Cornerstone, I kept using a colloquialism which I haven't used since, and it's not really a cuss word, but it's like an alternative word for the word hell and I used it over and over again and Pastor Milton in our feedback, he was giving me all this feedback, how he butters you up and say, oh you did such a great job, and then he's like, you might not want to use this word from the pulpit anymore. And I was just like. You're so right.

So I don't use that word anymore.

It's not a terrible word, but I think what. It's probably just not a good pulpit word. And, but just about every Tuesday after I preach, I guarantee you at our staff meeting on Tuesday when we sit down to evaluate this message, one of the things Milton will say is that he'll say, except for 6 uses of that word, it was a really good message. So we always throw that it's like mortuary humor.

We have pastor humor, so. anyway, so, OK, so you guys hopefully have the big point we've gone over, so I probably owe all of you doughnuts, so come to my Sunday school class next week. And we'll have donuts for you all. But, we're going to have our, let's have the ushers come forward.

And as we prepare to give, this is part of our worship too, is we're giving to the Lord voluntarily out of the excess that he's given us. And so this is not just, oh, well, we got to keep the electric electricity on. This is part of our worship. And so let's do that now.

And let's pray. Our Lord, we thank you so much that you're so pleased to meet with us when your word is preached. And we pray, Lord, that You would help us to, by your Spirit to be impacted by these things. 2 weeks, 3 weeks, 4 weeks from now, we may not remember a single point of this message, but we pray.

That over the months and the years that you would cause your people to grow and that we would each highly value the gift of preaching that you've given to this local church. We pray, Father, that You would help us to grow in our maturity in the way that we hear sermons. We pray, Father, that You would help us as singles, as dads, as married people to, to prepare our families and ourselves for this worship event and the gathering together of this temple people. We thank you so much that you've been with us this morning.

We believe it by faith, and we ask that you receive these gifts that we give to you that you would cause the gospel to go out and your word to be exalted in this place and all the world, in Christ's name we pray. Amen.