“Hear, O Israel”: The Importance of Preparing for Worship

People of God: Remember to prepare for worship prayerfully and to be ready to worship the Living God and to hear His Word as it is read and preached to you.

Pray for your ears to be opened, your heart to be ready to receive, your mind to be fresh, our worship to be full of the Holy Spirit, and my preaching and proclamation of the Gospel to be clear! Our Larger Catechism instructs us helpfully:

WLC 160  What is required of those that hear the word preached? A. It is required of those that hear the word preached, that they attend upon it with diligence,(1) preparation,(2) and prayer;(3) examine what they hear by the scriptures;(4) receive the truth with faith,(5) love,(6) meekness,(7) and readiness of mind,(8) as the word of God;(9) meditate,(10) and confer of it;(11) hide it in their hearts,(12) and bring forth the fruit of it in their lives.(13) (1)Prov. 8:34 (2)1 Pet. 2:1,2; Luke 8:18 (3)Ps. 119:18; Eph. 6:18,19 (4)Acts 17:11 (5)Heb. 4:2 (6)2 Thess. 2:10 (7)James 1:21 (8)Acts 17:11 (9)1 Thess. 2:13 (10)Luke 9:44; Heb. 2:1 (11)Luke 24:14; Deut. 6:6,7 (12)Prov. 2:1; Ps. 119:11 (13)Luke 8:15; James 1:2

Pastor Phil Ryken says very insightfully: “Most churchgoers assume that the sermon starts when the pastor opens his mouth on Sunday. However, listening to a sermon actually starts the week before. It starts when we pray for the minister, asking God to bless the time he spends studying the Bible as he prepares to preach. In addition to helping the preaching, our prayers create in us a sense of expectancy for the ministry of God’s Word. This is one of the reasons that when it comes to preaching, congregations generally get what they pray for.”

Are you remembering to pray for the worship and preaching every week? This is so very important. Let me remind you to pray for the worship and preaching as if you were the one to lead worship and to preach! What needs more preparation the hard ground or the farmer who sows the seed?  Listen to the wisdom of the great Charles Spurgeon:

“We are told men ought not to preach without preparation. Granted. But we add, men ought not to hear without preparation. Which, do you think needs the most preparation, the sower or the ground? I would have the sower come with clean hands, but I would have the ground well-plowed and harrowed, well-turned over, and the clods broken before the seed comes in. It seems to me that there is more preparation needed by the ground than by the sower, more by the hearer than by the preacher.”

I think it is extremely important to remember to prepare our hearts to listen. Remember that hearing in the Bible is not merely to hear auditory sounds, but to “listen and to be obedient”; we are to hear “from our hearts”; see Deut. 4; Psalm 78; Proverbs 2:1-7; “Hear, O Israel” is the Shema, and it means “Hear!” (imperative with the meaning of “listen and obey); our Lord often says: “He who has ears to hear, let him hear” meaning that he who has received this in one’s heart and will obey (see also the Spirit’s work in Revelation 2-3: “He who has an ear let him hear what the Spirit says to the Churches”).

To hear takes due preparation of one’s hearts, not merely one’s ears. Our hearts are the soil. The soil of our hearts must be prepared and tilled like ground to prepare for seeding. The seed is the Word of God makes its way to the heart through the ear. All of us know how we can listen and hear someone and yet not truly HEAR THEM.

Remember our Lord’s teaching in Luke 8:4-15?

And when a great crowd was gathering and people from town after town came to him, he said in a parable: 5 “A sower went out to sow his seed. And as he sowed, some fell along the path and was trampled underfoot, and the birds of the air devoured it. 6 And some fell on the rock, and as it grew up, it withered away, because it had no moisture. 7 And some fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up with it and choked it. 8 And some fell into good soil and grew and yielded a hundredfold.” As he said these things, he called out, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”

And when his disciples asked him what this parable meant, 10 he said, “To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of God, but for others they are in parables, so that ‘seeing they may not see, and hearing they may not understand.’ 11 Now the parable is this: The seed is the word of God. 12 The ones along the path are those who have heard. Then the devil comes and takes away the word from their hearts, so that they may not believe and be saved. 13 And the ones on the rock are those who, when they hear the word, receive it with joy. But these have no root; they believe for a while, and in time of testing fall away. 14 And as for what fell among the thorns, they are those who hear, but as they go on their way they are choked by the cares and riches and pleasures of life, and their fruit does not mature. 15 As for that in the good soil, they are those who, hearing the word, hold it fast in an honest and good heart, and bear fruit with patience.

ESV Jeremiah 4:3 For thus says the LORD to the men of Judah and Jerusalem: “Break up your fallow ground, and sow not among thorns.

Pastor Ken Ramey in Expository Listening (Kress Press, 2010) writes that Christians can better prepare themselves to hear God’s Word read and preached each Lord’s Day if they will seek to do this each day (here are his helpful suggestions):

  • Read and meditate upon God’s Word every day.
  • Pray often throughout the week.
  • Confess your sins daily before God.
  • Reduce your media intake.
  • Plan ahead, and schedule your week around the ministry of the Word: try to be home on Saturday nights; be careful not to watch or listen to anything that might cause lingering distractions in your mind during worship; get things ready on Saturday to avoid the inevitable Sunday morning rush; get a good night’s sleep because you’ll be doing the hard work of listening; get a good breakfast that will hold you over until lunch; as you’re getting ready and traveling as a family to worship seek to sing and pray together; arrive for worship at least 10 minutes early to get everything done (even the unexpected things), and sit down ready to receive.
  • Be consistent in worship attendance.
  • Go to worship with a humble, teachable, expectant heart (it is not the preacher who is on trial before you; you are on trial before God’s word as to whether you will hear and receive what is spoken if Biblical truth.
  • Worship with all you heart: sing enthusiastically because you believe what you’re singing; follow along in Bible when read; listen attentively to prayers when prayed and respond with hearty “amen”; during the sermon follow along in the Bible; take notes).
  • Fight off distractions
  • Listen with diligent discernment so that you can determine humbly if what you heard was biblical and presented Christ and His Gospel to you and your family.

Let’s remember to pray unceasingly for one another that we will prepare ourselves better for hearing specifically, and worship in general, and that our worship services would be more excellent to God, and more helpful and transformative to us! Let us prepare our hearts for worship, and particularly for hearing the Word of God preached, and expect great things from our Great and Faithful God! (1 Thess. 5:18; Ephesians 6:18-20; 3:20-21).

Let us pray together to seek the best worship services we have ever had in the new year! Let us pray that God would send forth His Spirit upon us in such a way that we will all declare together: “Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit says the LORD!”

Here is a devotion to consider prayerfully before worship this week by Charles Spurgeon:

“These have no root.”- Luke 8:13

“My soul, examine thyself this morning by the light of this text. Thou hast received the word with joy; thy feelings have been stirred and a lively impression has been made; but, remember, that to receive the word in the ear is one thing, and to receive Jesus into thy very soul is quite another; superficial feeling is often joined to inward hardness of heart, and a lively impression of the word is not always a lasting one. In the parable, the seed in one case fell upon ground having a rocky bottom, covered over with a thin layer of earth; when the seed began to take root, its downward growth was hindered by the hard stone and therefore it spent its strength in pushing its green shoot aloft as high as it could, but having no inward moisture derived from root nourishment, it withered away. Is this my case? Have I been making a fair show in the flesh without having a corresponding inner life? Good growth takes place upwards and downwards at the same time. Am I rooted in sincere fidelity and love to Jesus? If my heart remains unsoftened and unfertilized by grace, the good seed may germinate for a season, but it must ultimately wither, for it cannot flourish on a rocky, unbroken, unsanctified heart. Let me dread a godliness as rapid in growth and as wanting in endurance as Jonah’s gourd; let me count the cost of being a follower of Jesus, above all let me feel the energy of his Holy Spirit, and then I shall possess an abiding and enduring seed in my soul. If my mind remains as obdurate as it was by nature, the sun of trial will scorch, and my hard heart will help to cast the heat the more terribly upon the ill-covered seed, and my religion will soon die, and my despair will be terrible; therefore, O heavenly Sower, plough me first, and then cast the truth into me, and let me yield thee a bounteous harvest.”

If you would like a book on how to listen better to sermons, I will provide you one upon request at no charge. The book is entitled “Expository Listening: A Handbook for Hearing and Doing God’s Word” by Ken Ramey (Highly recommended by John MacArthur Joel Beeke, and Jay Adams).

I have come to learn and to believe that if the preacher prepares himself in heart and soul before he prepares his sermon, the sermon will prepare itself; the sermon will flow forth from the heart that is devoted to Jesus by His Spirit. In the same way, if the listener to the sermon prepares himself in heart and soul before he comes to worship, the worship will prepare itself; the worship and hearing of the person will flow forth from the heart that is devoted to Jesus by His Spirit.

Love you!

In Christ,

Pastor Charles

Richard Baxter’s Thoughts on Meditating on Heaven

Richard Baxter’s Thoughts on Meditating on Heaven

Christians do not merely grow from reading through the Bible. Christians grow by meditating on what the Bible says. We should prayerfully seek not to merely comprehend what we’re reading, but to digest it by the help of God’s Spirit.

Thomas Watson wrote: “The promises of God are flowers growing in the paradise of scripture; meditation, like the bee, sucks out the sweetness of them. The promises are of no use or comfort to us, until they be meditated upon.”

He wrote further: “The devil is an enemy to meditation; he cares not how much people read and hear; he knows that meditation is a means to compose the heart, and to bring it into a gracious frame. Satan is content that you should be hearing and praying Christians, just so long as you are not meditating Christians. He can stand your small shot, provided you do not put in this bullet.” – A Treatise Concerning Meditation.

Here’s help to aid us so that we can become Meditating Christians, from the great Richard Baxter from his book ‘Saints’ Everlasting Rest’

1)            Think on God’s love for you in Jesus Christ; think often of how God’s law and love are stunningly united in Jesus Christ. Think of the benefits of union with Jesus (forgiveness of sins, approach to God).

2)            Stir up your desires after Christ’s beauty, love and grace toward you. Jesus died for you, and will never leave you nor forsake you.

3)            Know the hope of becoming like Jesus Christ in heaven, and inheriting all things.

4)            Pray and live courageously and confidently knowing that God in Christ will always be faithful to you, because He is faithful.

5)            Rejoice! Continue to grow in joy knowing that you are an heir with Christ and of His beautiful perfect Kingdom where there will be only bliss, and no sin, death and misery.

-             From Saints’ Everlasting Rest

Augustine’s Conversion- from his ‘Confessions’

Aurelius Augustine’s Testimony of His Conversion to Christianity (from his ‘Confessions’)

Augustine died in AD 430. He is one of the most influential (if not ‘the’ most influential) Christian teacher in the church of the post-apostolic age. It was the teaching of Augustine that instructed John Calvin and the Reformers to return to true and biblical Christianity in the 16th century. Dr. R. C. Sproul once said that if you are a Christian, and yet have never read Augustine’s ‘Confessions’ you ought to be ashamed of yourself. Well, I can’t argue with Dr. Sproul, but I would add that if you have never read Augustine’s ‘Confessions’ at least once (even twice), you may indeed be ashamed, but you are missing the great blessing of reading and being influenced by a great man of God who pours out his heart in praise to his Great God and Savior.

Augustine:  “I was saying these things [asking God to cleanse him from sin that he realized was in his heart] and weeping in the most bitter contrition in my heart, when suddenly I heard the voice of a boy or a girl- – I know not which — coming from the neighboring house, chanting over and over again, ‘Pick it up, read it; pick it up, read it.’ [In Latin this is ‘Tolle, lege; tolle, lege”, a phrase made famous by the ‘Confessions’].

Immediately I ceased weeping and began most earnestly to think whether it was usual for children in some kind of game to sing such a song, but I could not remember ever having heard the like. So, damming the torrent of my tears, I got to my feet, for I could not but think that this was a divine command to open the Bible and read the first passage I should light upon….

So I quickly returned to the bench where Alypius [his friend] was sitting, for there I had put down the apostle’s book when I had left there. I snatched it up, opened it, and in silence I read the paragraph on which my eyes first fell: ‘Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh to fulfill the lusts thereof’ (Rom. 13:13). I wanted to read no further, nor did I need to. For instantly, as the sentence ended, there was infused in my heart something like the light of full certainty and all the gloom of doubt vanished away.” -Augustine, ‘Confessions’, VIII.12.29.

“Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God.” -Apostle Paul, Epistle to the Romans, 10.17.

“Cheap Grace” – Bonhoeffer

Dietrich Bonhoeffer on Costly Grace (rather than ‘CHEAP’ Grace)

“Costly grace is the gospel which must be ‘sought’ again and again in Jesus Christ, the gift which must be ‘asked’ for, the door at which a man must ‘knock’.

Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life. It is costly because it condemns sin, and grace because it justifies the sinner. Above all, it is costly because it cost God the life of his Son: ‘ye were bought at a price,’ and what has cost God much cannot be cheap for us. Above all, it is grace because God did not reckon his Son too dear a price to pay for our life, but delivered him up for us. Costly grace is the Incarnation of God.”

-Dietrich Bonhoeffer, ‘The Cost of Discipleship’, SCM Press, 1959.

Calvin on the Necessity of Prayer, Pt. 1

Calvin on the Necessity of Prayer, Pt. 1

“…We clearly see how destitute and devoid of all good things man is, and how he lacks all aids to salvation. Therefore, if he seeks resources to succor him in his need, he must go outside himself and get them elsewhere….But after we have been instructed by faith to recognize that whatever we need and whatever we lack is in God, and in our Lord Jesus Christ, in whom the Father willed all the fullness of his bounty to abide [cf. Col. 1:19; John 1:16] so that we may all draw from it as from an overflowing spring, it remains for us to seek in him, and in prayers to ask of him, what we have learned to be in him.” Calvin, ‘Institutes of the Christian Religion’, III.xx.1

De Tocqueville’s Observations on American Culture

Volume I, Issue 2 –  In the early 1840s, Alexis De Tocqueville wrote on his observations of American culture, from politics to religion. In the book ‘Democracy in America’ he claims in the preface that he writes as a “friend” to Americans, from one who has objectively observed the culture as an outsider from France. He claimed that his main purpose in writing the book was to warn Americans of one issue that he believed would be destructive to a democratic country. The issue was INDIVIDUALISM:

“Individualism is a novel expression, to which a novel idea has given birth. Our fathers were only acquainted with egotism. Egotism is a passionate and exaggerated love of self, which leads a man to connect everything with his own person, and to prefer himself to everything in the world.”

“Individualism is a mature and calm feeling, which disposes each member of the community to sever himself from the mass of his fellow-creatures; and to draw apart with his family and his friends; so that, after he has thus formed a little circle of his own, he willingly leaves society at large to itself. Egotism originates in blind instinct: individualism proceeds from erroneous judgment more from depraved feelings; it originates as much in the deficiencies of the mind as in the perversity of the heart.”

“Egotism blights the germ of all virtue; individualism, at first, only saps the virtues of public life; but, in the long run, it attacks and destroys all others, and is at length absorbed in downright egotism. Egotism is a vice as old as the world, which does not belong to one form of society more than to another: individualism is of democratic origin, and it threatens to spread in the same ratio as the equality of conditions…”

“…As social conditions become more equal, the number of persons increases who, although they are neither rich enough nor powerful enough to exercise any great influence over their fellow-creatures, have nevertheless acquired or retained sufficient education and fortune to satisfy their own wants. They owe nothing to any man, they expect nothing from any man; they acquire the habit of always considering themselves as standing alone, and they are apt to imagine that their whole destiny is in their own hands…[Democracy] can throw him back forever upon himself alone, and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.”

Alexis De Tocqueville, ‘Democracy in America’, Vol. II, New York: The Colonial Press, 1900, 104-106.

1 Cor. 12:12: “For even as the body is one and yet has many members, and all the members of the body, though they are many, are one body, so also is Christ.”

For further reading:

Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations; Robert Bellah, et al, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life.

What Is Man?

Volume I, Issue 1

“What is man that thou are mindful of him?” asked the Psalmist.

In Calvin’s Catechism of 1538, John Calvin writes concerning the Biblical teaching of man:

“Man was first formed to God’s image and likeness, that in his adornments, with which he had been resplendently clothed by God, he might look up to their Author and might worship him with fitting gratitude. But since, relying on the very great excellence of his own nature, and forgetting its origin and ground, he tried to elevate himself beyond the Lord, he had to be deprived of all God’s benefits on which he was stupidly priding himself, so that stripped and bare of all glory, he might recognize God whom he, rich in bounty, had dared despise.”

“Therefore, all we who take our origin from Adam’s seed, when God’s likeness is wiped out, are born flesh from flesh. For although we consist of soul and body, we savor of nothing but flesh. Consequently, whatever way we turn our eyes, we can see nothing but what is impure, profane and abominable to God. For man’s prudence, blind and entangled in limitless errors, ever wars against God’s wisdom. Our depraved will, stuffed with corrupt feelings, hates nothing more than his righteousness. Our strength, weakened for every good work, madly dashes off to wickedness.”

From ‘Calvin’s First Catechism, A Commentary’, by I. John Hesselink, Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1997, pg. 9.

Thank God for God’s grace who did not leave us in an estate of sin and misery but sent Christ as man to redeem us from this estate!