Well, I’m so thankful to be here in view of the fact that I got on that plane and the first thing they said was — I didn’t believe a word they were saying — “Well, the hydraulic pump is out,” and I said, “Right.” I know that’s a code word for the mechanics are sitting on their duff and it’s a slowdown for Northwest because right across the hall, the hydraulic was also being replaced and down the hall. So, I thought, “Oh my. We don’t have any leeway here,” and they put us on another plane an hour later and God was so good. So, I’m just glad to be here. Really, really thankful. I’ve been looking forward to this for so long.

Greetings and Gratefulness

I feel really moved. That was a very moving song. I sit there and I think about how blessed I am in so many ways. We go through seasons of life. I’ve been sick as a dog. I did not preach yesterday. I was so sick. You don’t ordinarily preach on Monday anyway. I didn’t preach on Sunday and that’s the second time in 20 years I’ve missed preaching on Sunday. I don’t get sick a lot, but I was really sick. So pray for me. I’m glad this water is here and I’ll sip it if I have to, but that’s another reason for gratitude.

So, there are these low times, but it’s so good that pastors get sick. It is really important that pastors get sick because I’ll tell you the things I have to do when I’m sick is to try to empathize with the people who live with this. Almost constantly, some do, and here I’m with a little flu, a little achiness, a little soreness in the chest, a little bit thumping in my head, a little coughing. Some people just live with this all the time and it was very hard for me to remember my memorized verses and hard for me to pray, so that’s very important that we pastors walk through seasons like that so we know how to minister to people in those situations, but mingled with those are good times.

My dad wanted to be here. He’s 81. He lives in Greenville, South Carolina, and he can’t be here because he can’t drive that far, but I think about him being down here in his neck of the woods and what a veteran preacher he is. My dad was an evangelist and preached for 50 years on the road and still preaches to a Sunday school class at 81 and his wife has been in and out of the hospital, my stepmother, and then my son Benjamin got engaged on Valentine’s Day, which makes me really happy. He got engaged to a really fine Christian Brazilian woman, which is a thrilling thing to me. So, my heart is just brimming with so many different things.

I had a great time with our elders last night. I don’t know if you enjoy meeting with your elders. I’ve been blessed at my church to have a fellowship of elders for 20 years who’ve never been a depletion to me. They’ve always been an enrichment to me and that’s a gift because I know the warfare that many churches have in their councils of elders and so I am a rich man as I come to you and I feel it deeply.

Why Preaching in Corporate Worship?

I want to take you to 2 Timothy, if you have a Bible and would like to open it. My topic is “Preaching with Confidence That It Belongs in Worship.” Basically, the question I want to ask is why is so much of the time in corporate worship devoted to preaching? Is that a biblical defensible way to do corporate worship, to spend half the time or so in preaching? Or is that just a tradition that is there that doesn’t have any biblical foundation or any theological basis? I want to defend it and use this text as part of my foundation. So, we’ll read from 2 Timothy 3:16–4:4. It says:

All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work. I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing and his kingdom: preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching. For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths.

So, why should we spend half of our corporate worship time, give or take, in preaching? What’s the reason for that? There are two reasons right off the bat that I’ll mention, one of which comes from outside this text and then one comes from inside. Then we’ll unfold more from inside the text. One is that God has revealed himself and worship has the self-revelation of God right at the center of it. If you don’t see him, you can’t savor him. So, you have to see God if you’re going to worship and he stands forth as the word. In the beginning was the Word. He is word first. Now, that’s what’s not in the text, but I’ll mention it just so you can ponder it and have it underneath.

What is in the text is that he stands forth by the word. All Scripture is inspired by God. That means that God has ordained that men moved by the Holy Spirit would write Scripture. It says in 2 Peter 1:21, “No prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.” God moved man so that they spoke and then they wrote all Scripture. All writings are inspired by God and when they’re inspired by God, it’s him putting himself, his will and his character, in through those writings so that if you learn how to read or listen, you can connect with him. So the word becomes the instrument or the mediation through which you see, sense, and spiritually apprehend God.

If that doesn’t happen, worship can’t happen. You have to connect with God in order to worship. You have to see him, apprehend him, and taste him. There has to be some sense of his reality, his presence, his contours, his character, and his ways and this text says he has inspired writings, and I presume he’s inspired them with his own self, his own ideas, his own ways, things about himself that he wants to be known. Why else would he do it? So, those words become the instrument of our spiritual communion with him.

The Works the Word Performs

I think we can say more than this, more than that he reveals himself by his word. We can say that worship is a response not only to what he shows us of himself in his inspired word, but worship is also a response to his work in the world, in the present, in history, and in our lives. And the word relates to that work in some pretty significant and clear ways in Scripture. The word was the beginning of that work or was the instrument of the work. In the beginning, God created the world by the word, according to Hebrews 11:3. The worlds were created by the word of God. When Jesus did his work, over and over again it says he spoke and seas were calmed. He spoke and fevers were cooled. He spoke and demons were cast out. He spoke and sins were forgiven. He spoke and the blind received their sight. He spoke and the dead were raised up.

The word of Jesus, the word of God performs works and when you see those works, you see evidences of God and character of God and they become an occasion for worship. So the word is linked up not only directly with the self-revelation of God in what he says about himself, but the word performs works which become the occasion of worship as well and that’s true today. Right here in our text, look at what it says:

All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete . . . (2 Timothy 3:16).

Just stop right there. I was reviewing this on the plane coming down. One of the things pastors have to do is awaken people to the obvious. You have to rivet people on the obvious. If you’re always only trying to think of quirky new things to say, you might entertain, but if you don’t find fresh, mind-awakening ways to say the obvious things, then you’ll miss part of your high calling. I was reading that verse and it just struck me. Why is it that he says all Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction so that the man of God may be adequate and equipped? What’s the man of God? What’s an assumption here?

Man of God is mentioned and the inspired word of God. This man becomes adequate because Scripture got inspired. Well, there’s an assumption there. What is it? That he reads it and meditates on it day and night and becomes like a tree planted by streams of water, and it’s just that simple thought. There’s an assumption here between a man of God and a word of God. He reads it. He spends time with it. That’s not to be taken for granted in the ministry. I read Ray’s letter that he sent out to all of you about how busyness is threatening to just call us away from prayer in the word over and over again to other things that our people want us to do and if we yield to their immediate desires, we will fail on their big desires in the long run. One of those is to become a man of God by lingering over the word of God, but now that’s just an aside.

Every Good Work

The main point I wanted to draw out here is the word “good work.” Every good work. God inspired the Bible so that when men of God linger over the word of God, they would be equipped and empowered to do the work of God. The work. Every good work flows from the word and those two are occasions for worship. Where would I get that? Where would you go? What text did you go to undergird that statement, that our good works are occasions for worship? I’d go to Matthew 5:16 where you perform good works and men see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven. That’s worship.

So, your works become an occasion — preaching is one of them — for people to worship, and where does it come from? The word. I’m giving reasons for why the word must be central in corporate worship and one of those reasons now is that it not only was the power by which the world was created, it not only was the instrument by which Jesus did his mighty works, but it also is the means by which we do our works. One of those is preaching, or praying, or loving our people, or blessing them in all kinds of ways and those people ministering to each other. Those good works become the occasion of giving God honor and glory, which is what worship is.

So the point here is that worship is about knowing and admiring and savoring God through his works, and those works are depicted in the word and done by the word. They are portrayed in the word and performed by the word, and they are expressed in the word and affected by the word.

Spiritual Vitality in the Church

I think there’s one other argument I would give for why the word should be central and then I’ll pose the question: Why this particular form of the word, called preaching? If there’s no life in the church, if there’s no life, spiritual vitality, spiritual life. If there isn’t life in the church, there won’t be worship in the church. Where does life come from? 1 Peter 1:23 says:

You have been born again, not of perishable seed but of imperishable, through the living and abiding word of God . . .

The word of God is the instrument of the new birth. You’ve been born again. You are born unto life. You are brought from death to life by the word of God. Yesterday morning in my devotions, I was almost to the end of the Book of Acts, reading through acts and I decided I would memorize again Acts 26:18 because there’s certain texts where Jesus commissions his apostles, or Paul in particular in this case, that are so relevant to me. I want so much to be this that I memorize them, take them in, try to live them out. It says in Acts 26:18:

[I am sending you] to open their eyes, so that they may turn from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me.

Now that’s an absolutely staggering statement. He says, “I send you to open their eyes. You, Paul. You go open their eyes.” That’s just stunning. So, here he says to me, “I send you into the pulpit on Sunday morning, or into a hospital room, or into a counseling situation and you go there and you open their eyes” How? With what? And the answer is with the word of God. With the word of God you have been born again, you have been raised from the dead, you have been brought from death to life, and you have been brought out of darkness into light. You know that because Paul says in 2 Timothy 2:24–26, that the way people get brought from deadness and lack of repentance to repentance and from bondage to Satan to do his will is by this patient, loving, gentle teaching. It’s the word that becomes the instrument of awakening the dead.

So, it’s wonderful on Sunday morning if you meet life when you come, and I don’t assume I’m going to meet it. I assume there’s going to be a lot of death brought into the room — maybe a kind of partial death, dullness in the saints, too much television, too much money, and too much worry, and the word is just being choked out as the thorns and the cares of this world and the delight in other things tend to choke it out. I’m there to hack away at these thorns and to give life to these dying souls and to waken sleeping and raised dead hearts and that would be an absolutely hopeless task if the word of God were not powerful and living, able to pierce to the division of soul and spirit, bone and marrow and search out the secret things of the heart and bring life where there is no life. So, if worship is going to happen, there has to be life and life comes by the word and so there’s another reason for why the word must be woven into our services, not just part of it, but all of it must be word saturated.

So, let me sum up what we’ve seen so far and then shift gears over to the actual phenomenon of preaching in worship. Three reasons to sum them up. One, the word is the revelation of God as He inspired the word. Second, the word portrays and performs God’s work in the world, and third, the word brings life. You got to see God. You’ve got to see his works. You’ve got to have life or you can’t have worship and the word does all those things and therefore the word is essential and central in worship.

The Place of Preaching

No, here’s the harder question: Why the particular form of word called preaching? You can do a lot of things with this book. You could read it for 30 minutes. You could do historical analysis of it and explain the words in context. You could sing it for an hour. Why preach it? Where do we get this idea that should occupy for me 35 or 40 minutes on a Sunday morning? Where does that come from? So, now we keep reading. Just ignore the chapter division because it wasn’t there when Paul wrote it. He finishes saying all Scripture is inspired by God and is profitable for teaching and correction and reproof for training and righteousness that the man of God may be adequate and equipped for every good work. Then he says:

I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing and his kingdom: preach the word (2 Timothy 4:1–2).

Now, don’t miss this absolutely unparalleled solemn introduction. There’s nothing like it in the Bible that I know of anywhere else. I don’t know of any place where a brief command is introduced like this. He says, “I solemnly charge you (diamartyromai) in the presence of almighty God and of Christ Jesus.” So here are two attendants to this charge of mine. He is saying, “I am charging you, Timothy. I am saying something out of my mouth through this letter to you about something very important and two people are watching me — God the Father and God the Son are watching as I tell you this.” Isn’t that a strange thing to say? Unless what he is about to say is to be lifted to unbelievable proportions of importance.

And that’s not all he says. He says, “God the Father is watching. Christ Jesus is watching. I’m in the presence of them as I write these words. This Jesus who is watching is to judge.” That brings in a sense of trembling and to Timothy and Paul here — I’m going to be judged? The thought is, “You’re going to be judged, Paul, for what you say to me now? I’m going to be judged for how I respond to what you say to me and how I handle what you say to me? And my people that I deal with are going to be judged by this Christ and not only judged, but the living will be judged and the dead will be judged? Everybody will be judged?”

Timothy thinks, “This is a universal person who’s attending to this commandment that you’re about to give me and he’s going to judge them. If they’re dead, they’ve got to give an account. If they’re alive, they’ve got to give an account.” And then he says, “And by his appearing.” It’s very strange grammatically. It’s an accusative of reference that just dangles out there and you wonder, “Well, how does this function?” Because it really depends on the verb “charge.” It’s not “judge them by his appearing.” That’s not the grammar in the Greek. He says, “He will judge the living and the dead,” and then says, “His appearing.” He is solemnly charged with reference to his appearing. In other words, “Keep in mind this judge is going to stand forth from invisibility and become visible someday. The clouds will split. Lightning will flash from one horizon to the next. The whole world will see. They’ll call rocks to fall upon them. He is going to be visible. Every tongue will confess that he is Lord, either willingly or unwillingly.”

This is big what I’m about to tell you here, and he has one more thing to say: “And by his kingdom, I charge you.” He is saying, “I charge you by his appearing and I charge you by his kingdom. When he judges, he will establish a kingdom and then every account will be settled, every reward will be given, every wrong will be righted, and nothing will have been spent for his sake in vain.”

Preaching the Word in the Context of Worship

Here’s what all that is about, Timothy, preach the word. That’s an amazing introduction. That’s absolutely amazing. So, I get the impression this is important. Paul means for Timothy to wake up and hear these simple words. He wants him to preach the word with great solemnity. So, my first reason for saying that preaching should be central in corporate worship is that it just looks like here it is important to the apostle Paul for a minister of the word, whom he’s not addressing as an evangelist, but as one who handles the inspired word for men’s instruction and reproof and correction, training and righteousness. This is not an evangelistic context.

I think you could defend from the Book of Acts very easily that preaching belongs in evangelism. Preaching is the main means of evangelism all through the Book of Acts. Preach, preach, preach, preach, preach. But should it be in worship services? That’s what I’m asking. That’s the more the setting I think we have here of someone who’s ministering to a body of believers, the word of God. Second Timothy 4:2 speaks of reproof, rebuke, exhortation, patience, and instruction. So, why is it so fitting? Well, first, because it just seems that he says it is. He says it is. Put it right there in the center of the life of the church and preach in the center of the life of the church.

Biblical Precedents for Preaching

Now there’s Old Testament precedent for this if you wonder where it came from and how we got this. Let me just highlight one or two instances. In Nehemiah 8:6–8, it says:

And Ezra blessed the Lord, the great God, and all the people answered, “Amen, Amen,” lifting up their hands. And they bowed their heads and worshiped the Lord with their faces to the ground . . . The Levites helped the people to understand the Law, while the people remained in their places. They read from the book, from the Law of God, clearly, and they gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading.

There you have an illustration in Nehemiah 8:6–8 of the law being read, people standing in worship, bowing down saying, “Amen. Amen.” Some appointed people give the sense of the word. Now that’s brought over. That pattern is brought over into the synagogue. In the New Testament, you see Jesus in Nazareth right off the bat in Luke 4 coming in. Some of the law is read. He closes the book. He makes some exposition and application. He says, “Today this word is fulfilled in your hearing.”

You see the same thing in the Book of Acts in the synagogues. Paul goes into the synagogue. In Acts 13:14–15, it says:

On the Sabbath day they went into the synagogue and sat down. After the reading from the Law and the Prophets, the rulers of the synagogue sent a message to them, saying, “Brothers, if you have any word of encouragement for the people, say it.”

There’s the pattern again. They stand up, read a portion of Scripture, and then here’s a guest, a rabbi perhaps, and they give us a word of exhortation. He says, “Brothers,” and he stands up and he preaches for the next little while in Acts 13, 14, following 16 to 31. He preaches.

So, I think we could develop those two lines of reasoning and they’re not the main ones, but here they are. First, it says explicitly preach the word in 2 Timothy 4:2 in the context of the life of the church, and secondly, you have these Old Testament roots and these synagogue parallels that seem to be picked up by the early church.

The Twofold Nature of Worship

But I would rest my case for preaching and worship mainly on something deeper than both of these. I find it heartening that Paul did say, “Preach the word” in this context, but when I contemplate why I do what I do year in and year out, I need to know that it belongs to the essence or the substance of the way God set things up. I want to know that I’m doing coheres with reality in a way that’s really significant. So, here’s what I mean by that. Edwards is a great help to me here. Jonathan Edwards is my favorite dead teacher outside the Bible. Edward said that it has to do with the twofold nature of the way God has sought to be worshiped or glorified in the world. How has God sought to be honored, sought to be glorified, sought to be worshiped? That’s what creation is about. I’m going to talk about that tonight. So, here’s the key quote from Edwards. This was and remains to me one of the most important paragraphs that I’ve ever read in my life. Edwards wrote:

So God glorifies himself towards the creatures also two ways: (1) by appearing to them, being manifested to their understandings; (2) in communicating himself to their hearts, and in their rejoicing and delighting in, and enjoying the manifestations which he makes of himself. God is glorified not only by his glory’s being seen, but by its being rejoiced in, when those that see it delight in it: God is more glorified than if they only see it; his glory is then received by the whole soul, both by the understanding and by the heart.

Now what that says to me, and I think it’s absolutely right, is that worship has two components. In order for there to be authentic worship as God has designed it through his self-revelation, there must be a cognitive, or Edwards would say, a notional or intellectual apprehension of truth about God and there must be a heartfelt spiritual savoring of the glory and the beauty of that truth from the heart. If you only have the former, you have what we call intellectualism. If you only have the latter, which you can’t have (only can have substitutes of it) you have emotionalism. If you bring the two together, a true and right mental apprehension of God, as he’s revealed himself in Scripture and history, mingled with a heart’s apprehension of the spiritual beauty and delightfulness and “amiableness” (to use his word) and satisfactory nature, responding outward in delight. Then when those two things come together, you have worship.

The Uniqueness of Preaching

Now, here’s my contention. One form of speech is designed by God to do those two things, preaching. The word is keryssō here in 2 Timothy 4:2. The phrase is kēryxon ton logon. It’s not the word “teach.” It’s not the word “say.” It’s the word for “herald.” It’s what a town crier did. He comes with news. There’s no newspaper. There’s no radio. There’s no television, no internet. If you get news, you get it through a town crier. You gather the people and he says, “Hear ye. Hear ye. Hear ye the king declares an amnesty for all those who are in debt to him, and if you would swear allegiance to his son and follow him, all your debts may be forgiven and the land you’re living on will be yours, free and clear, and you in fact may have access to his throne room forever.”

Now that’s preaching. You announce. You herald a truth about God, about his ways, about his works, and in the heralding of it comes through something for the mind a truth (it must be there), and there it’s carried by a man who has felt the wonder of it and aims to display it in such a way that the people feel the wonder of it because if they don’t, they’re not worshiping. If they only understand it and don’t delight in it, they’re not worshiping.

Presbyterians need to get a handle on this. Charismatics need a handle on the other end. Baptists are groping everywhere in between trying to get ahold of this. My case is that preaching is designed by God, intended by God to have these two elements in it, namely the element for the mind and the heart. It must articulate truth and our people love to hear truth articulated with cogency. They like to be able to trust their pastor, that he has thought about this. The words aren’t just tumbling out and they’re saying, “Does he know what words are following words here? They’re just tumbling out there and I can’t detect any coherency there between how that connected to that, connected to that.” If you lose the trust of your people because you become so voluble that words just start tripping off your tongue and don’t have logical coherence, you may wow them with some stories or flourishes of rhetoric, but you will not lead them into worship. So, there must be coherency.

Cogency and Zeal in Preaching

I’m listening right now to tapes by Martyn Lloyd-Jones on Romans 7, and I listen while I brush my teeth and take a shower and get dressed. I put tapes in everywhere and punch buttons from room to room as I go, and I just marvel at how this man riveted the attention of his people on words and phrases and logical connections, and yet it never seemed to become intellectually pedantic, like you yawn and say, “Oh, good grief, give me something to live by.” You never felt like he had lost himself in the trees of academia, and yet it hung together. You trusted him. He’s thought deeply about this. He knows where he’s going. He’s leading somewhere. He sees how that phrase relates to that phrase and that one, and how this is not a contradiction over here in James or back here in Proverbs. He’s thought about those.

Just when I’m thinking of the problem, he says the problem and gives me a solution for the problem and he starts to win my confidence, and then he moves me with his passion over it or his illustration of it. And he’s won me and my confidence intellectually that he’s thought deeply, and now I’ll let his heart affect me so that he’s not doing an end run to manipulate me around my mind, into my heart. That’s what we want. I call this expository exultation. I think preaching is expository in the sense that I’ve been developing it here, that there’s this deep cogent truth, Scripture-based component to it, and then what does a preacher do that’s different from others who handle that word?

He exults over it, he takes it in his mind. He meditates on it for days. He wrestles it into some kind of cogency to it and then he simmers over it and makes it yield glory for him and then he goes into that pulpit with some Spirit-given words and he exults over that truth, and those two things together make preaching. It’s the exulting over the truth or the truth exalting that makes preaching, which is why if I were to write a book on worship and preaching, which I hope maybe to do someday, it would be called Preaching as Worship, not Preaching in Worship. I try to teach my people and model for my people that when I’m preaching, I am worshiping. I love the truth that I’m preaching. I love the God that I’m heralding and I want to display that and exult over him to catch you up into it. That’s what my goal is when I am preaching.

Exposition and Exultation

Let me draw this to a close and then we’ll see if there’s time for some questions. Worship is not just understanding and not just feeling. It is both understanding and feeling. It is seeing God and savoring God. It is the response of the mind and the response of the heart, and therefore preaching belongs in that and is that because it is the kind of heralding that God has designed to perform both of those things, expositing the word and exulting in the God of the word, teaching the mind and reaching the heart, showing the truth and savoring the glory of the God of the truth. That’s what I think preaching is and that’s why I think it belongs in worship.

Questions and Answers

You can go any direction you want, anything at all personal, practical, theological, biblical or whatever.

Dr. Piper, I’d like to ask about a week in the life of a pastor. What should it look like with this in mind?

Well, it’s going to look different for every pastor and rather than tell you all the pieces that are going to be there for you because every church is different, every family is different, every chapter in the life of the church is different, every community is different, and every pastor is gifted differently. So, for me to lay out all the pieces of what it should look like, let’s just say there should be a steady stream of daily meditation and prayer right across the top of that week, and perhaps right in the middle of the day and right at the end of the day. Daniel prayed three times a day. There should also be a healthy component of Bible memory in there as well as meditation, and then I think a steady stream of reading and study that’s going to go up and down according to the pressures of your life and week, and then somewhere in the week, there should be a real concerted lengthy time of preparation for the specific engagements with the word.

I teach on Wednesday night. So, I take all day Wednesday in preparation, and I set aside Fridays and Saturdays to get ready for Sunday preaching. I only preach once on Sunday. I preach twice, but it’s the same message. We don’t have a Sunday evening service now. We used to for 10 years or so, but now small groups meet on Sunday night. So, I set aside two days for that. Generally, don’t use the full two days anymore, but they’re there to be used if I need them. So, for Wednesday and Sunday, that’s three full days that are pretty much set aside for study and preparation for those ministries of the word.

Of course, there have to be times set aside when you meet with people. I set aside Monday afternoons and some on Tuesday afternoons. If you have multiple staff, you have to set aside time to do that. You have to save evenings for the family and I could talk more there about some ways to do that. Our staff has been working to figure that out more recently because you have to step back every now and then and rethink how you’re doing it because you can realize you’re killing your staff if you’re not careful, or killing yourself if you don’t have a staff.

And then there need to be times when you’re just out among the people. For me, that tends to be after the services. I pray with people after our services and I stop preaching around 12:15 p.m. and I’m generally there until 1:00 p.m. praying with people right in front of the church. They talk to me about anything they want, pray about anything they want, share anything they want besides those Monday and Tuesday afternoon times. That’s probably enough. There are lots of other components to your life that you need, but if you’re thinking about how to keep your heart alive in God so that you can exult and how to keep your head growing in this infinite glorious, repository of truth called Scripture, then there needs to be meditation. In my own life I really distinguish between a more affective meditative Bible reading called devotions and a more rigorous study where you’re tackling hard problems in the Bible that you can’t figure out like how imputation works or something like that.

You’re reading theology and you’re struggling with comparing texts and Romans 7 and Galatians 3, and that’s a little different to me though it can yield wonderful devotional experiences. I try to treat the Bible both as a love letter and as a book to be studied because otherwise my own heart is wired to drift away from affection into intellectualistic fascination with propositions. Other people may go the other direction and need more discipline that way, but that’s the way I’m wired. I can become aesthetically fascinated with logical connections, which look like serious Bible study and yield very little spiritual food for my people or my own soul.

So, this meditative stream needs to be there. You could call it the pietistic bent in me. I think it has far deeper roots than anything like that. I think it’s rooted right in the very nature of God. He means to be worshiped by being enjoyed and we do not enjoy his spiritual attributes unless we meditate on them and roll them around on the tongue of our soul until they yield their sweets.

Right now, most of our people, they’ve been in church for a long time. They know the structures. They know the word. How can we best affect the heart? How can we address that further in our preaching and in our teaching to help them see the parameters of the effect of the heart. Of course, the Psalms say things like, “As a deer pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul for you, O God” (Psalm 42:1).

Oh, that’s so, so crucial to ask that question. One thing would be to start where they are and if they’re the kind of people who are chronically unemotional, then you might start by teaching them texts that talk about the affective and ask them what their experience is like. Scripture says, “Taste and see that the Lord is good.” And ask them, “What’s your experience of tasting and seeing? How do the words ‘see’ and ‘taste’ work together in your mind?” And If they’re intellectual people, get them to think about that, and if they find themselves wanting, they might become hungry and start to look.

I had a man say to me one time when I came to Bethlehem and began to sound the note of Christian hedonism of delighting in God and saying that faith has an affective element that is essential to it, he came up to me quite distraught after a service one time and said, “Frankly, I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about. I don’t function that way at all. I think, I know, I make decisions, and I make commitments. This other dimension, this affective, feeling dimension that you’re talking about, is just not part of my life.” I said to him, “I don’t believe you.” That was my response. I said, “Surely, there is some place in your life, in your relationships, in your walk among nature where you have had experiences that go beyond thinking right thoughts about reality,” and he stopped.

I said, “Give me an example. I’m sure you can come up with an example,” and he thought for a minute and he said, “Well, maybe when I’m in the Boundary Waters on a starlit night with my son lying out on the ground and it’s a sheet of stars. Maybe there I feel something more than just thinking about those stars.” I said, “Okay. What I want you to do now is to transpose that music into a spiritual key. If you can think of this analogy that in nature there’s this experience where on a starry night out in the woods, away from all sounds of technology, you’re there with your son and you’re lying on the ground, looking straight up into heaven, it’s a sheet of white and you are drawn out and your soul is expansive and feels a sense of wonder and awe and trembling and glory at nature, transpose that into a spiritual key. Just say that the God who made that must be therefore more glorious than that. That’s the work of his fingers, Psalm 8 says. It’s just his fingers, not his biceps, and therefore if he were to apply his biceps, what you get is galaxies upon galaxies and beyond. This God must be stunningly glorious, breathtakingly glorious. Take the emotion that you know is there and transpose it up a key into the spiritual and apply that to God.”

That’s one way that I would try to help them make the transition, and then a second thought is that most of us are crippled emotionally. Some are very crippled and some only partially crippled, but everybody’s crippled a little bit. Some people are crippled because they have way too much emotion. They just cry at the drop of a hat, and other people are crippled because they can’t cry no matter what happens to them. They can’t show any emotion because of the way their dad treated them or the way their mom treated them. They never got a hug and they never were affirmed and they never got anything encouraging or emotional said to them. They have no categories for dealing in relationships at the emotive level. Those people need profound healing and patience because God can over time do that. I have watched guys.

Now, I’ll use the illustration of lifting hands in worship. I put no stock in outward gestures whatsoever in and of themselves, but as releases of the whole person to God. To be able to lift one’s hand in worship without imitating anybody or fearing anybody. To move from where some of our guys were 20 years ago to where they are today required profound healing. It was healing in overcoming fears and in overcoming a kind of macho sense that to express affection is feminine. I mean, a lot of the worship songs today that many people of my Reformed stripe cluck their tongue at are clucked at not because they have bad words or because they’re bad tunes — in fact they’re often just Bible often — but because they’re so blame affectionate. They’re just so intimate that these guys feel like they’re naked when they’re talking like that and they don’t like feeling naked.

So, I think teaching our people about those lyrics and why they’re there and then modeling in front of the people. I sit on the front pew down there. I used to be up front when I led worship, but the way we do it now, I sit in the pew and so I’m a worshiper in the congregation during the singing time of our worship, and I just try to enjoy God. That’s my goal. I just want to enjoy God. Modeling for your people, the enjoyment of God. So, those are two or three ideas.