Sinners (and that’s what we are) are incapable of approaching a Holy God directly. We need a mediator, a stand-between, a reconciler, an advocate who will represent us before God, and take our place, and bear our sin, and render us acceptable to God, and bring us into God’s presence with joy. In the Old Testament human priests and sacrifices symbolically fulfilled this function, but Jesus Christ is the only real mediator for the people of God. It is he who has paid the penalty for our sins and opened the way to God. Though human priests…What gathered worship should look like: mediated
Sinners (and that’s what we are) are incapable of approaching a Holy God directly. We need a mediator, a stand-between, a reconciler, an advocate who will represent us before God, and take our place, and bear our sin, and render us acceptable to God, and bring us into God’s presence with joy. In the Old Testament human priests and sacrifices symbolically fulfilled this function, but Jesus Christ is the only real mediator for the people of God. It is he who has paid the penalty for our sins and opened the way to God. Though human priests…
Sometimes reverence and joy are viewed as mutually exclusive in the worship of the church. I have friends who suspect “reverence” is a code word for austere, cold, somber and dour. So, when they hear someone talking about the need for reverence in worship, they want to have none of it. On the other hand, I have friends who are suspicious of calls for “joyfulness” in worship, as if this necessarily entailed emotional manipulation and superficial sanguinity. In some churches, there is such an emotional display in worship…
Many years ago, my friend Dr. Mark Dever, Senior Pastor of the Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, DC, shared this moving quotation with me from the hand of the great English Baptist minister William Kiffin, writing in 1682, of the death of his beloved wife Hanna. “It pleased the Lord to take to Himself, my dear and faithful wife, with whom I had lived nearely forty-two years; whose tenderness to me, and faithfulness to God, were such as cannot, by me, be expressed, as she constantly sympathised with me in all my afflictions. I can…
Isaac Watts (17 July 1674 – 25 November 1748) was an English hymnwriter, theologian and logician. A prolific and popular hymnwriter, he was recognised as the “Father of English Hymnody”, credited with some 650 hymns. Many of his hymns…
Christian worship is all about God. And a biblical congregational worship service should reflect that. It is all about God. It is not all about us. Or all about the preacher. Or all about the choir or praise team. Or all about the building. Or all…
“As the first Protestant missionary to China, Robert Morrison laid a foundation for what would become the imposing edifice of today’s Chinese church. Morrison was quite conscious of his role, and worked deliberately to prepare for others,…
Robert Morrison, Anglo-Scottish evangelist and first Protestant missionary to China “on July 16, 1814, at a spot on the steep hills and gullies along the shore of Macao, a place seldom reached by crowds of people, . . . baptized Cai Gao, who…
Dr. David L. Wykes, BSc (Dunelm), PhD (Leicester), FRHistS, is Director of Dr Williams’s Library, and Co-Director of the Dr Williams’s Centre for Dissenting Studies. He gave the second plenary of the Matthew Henry tercentenary (being…
Christian public worship ought to be simple. It should not seek to add to the elements warranted by Scripture or to elaborate forms not endorsed by the word. This is just the faithful application of the general biblical principle that we have nothing…