Conserving Well, Changing Wisely: Part 3
 |
| Image from Wikimedia Commons |
Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom; teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord. And whatsoever ye do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God and the Father by him. Col. 3:16-17
In a previous message, I said that I wanted to point out three areas of conservation for our church: an area of theology (the sovereign grace of God in the salvation of sinners through Christ), an area of doxology (the worship of the church according to the word of God), and an area of ecclesiology (the sacraments and structure of the church). Today, we want to look at the area of doxology.
Doxology is worship, and I think we can all agree that worship is an essential element to the life of the church. When Luke sums up the practice of the very earliest church services at the end of Acts 2, he writes that they were “Praising God, and having favour with all the people. And the Lord added to the church daily such as should be saved” (47). Peter writes that it is the purpose of the Christian and therefore of the church to praise God: “But ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people; that ye should shew forth the praises of him who hath called you out of darkness into his marvellous light” (1 Pet. 2:9). Or, as the author of Hebrews puts it, “ By him therefore let us offer the sacrifice of praise to God continually, that is, the fruit of our lips giving thanks to his name” (Heb. 13:15).
Worship is not just something we do individually, but together. Paul writes to the Ephesians, describes a life filled with the Spirit in this way: “Speaking to yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord; giving thanks always for all things unto God and the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ; submitting yourselves one to another in the fear of God” (Eph. 5:19-21). “Speaking to yourselves,” or rather, “speaking to each other.” We will have occasion to come back to that point, but for now I simply register the fact that worship is a corporate experience and not primarily something that you do alone on a solitary walk in the woods with earbuds in the privacy of your own thoughts.
So the question is, then, how do we worship God together as a church? I want to argue that the way that this church conducts its worship is something which by and large I see primarily as something to preserve, but I want to help us see why. It is not “because it’s the way we’ve always done it.” In fact, we shouldn’t think that our worship should never change. This is another area where change and conservatism work together. But we have to be careful how we do that; there is a right way and a wrong way to do it.
The right way is the way of the regulative principle of worship. What is meant by that is what the Puritan Jeremiah Burroughs meant when he said, “All things in God’s worship must have a warrant out of God’s word, must be commanded; it is not enough that it is not forbidden.” Or, as the early Baptist historian Thomas Crosby put it, “That the holy scriptures are to be the only rule of our faith and worship, and that we are to practice nothing, as an institution of Christ, which is not therein contained.” I think it’s safe to say that most churches in the West today do not go by the regulative principle of worship, but rather by what is sometimes called the normative principle of worship, which states that as long as Scripture doesn’t explicitly forbid it, then it’s okay to do it. (Sometimes, they don’t even use that principle, but operate on the basis of purely pragmatic principles.) The primary problem with this attitude is that it is in fact contrary to the norms of Scripture itself. Paul doesn’t just say to the churches, “Hey do whatever you want as long as you don’t violate some explicit command of the Lord.” Instead, he says stuff like this: “Now I praise you, brethren, that ye remember me in all things, and keep the ordinances, as I delivered them to you” (1 Cor. 11:1). The church is to do what the apostles command us “in all things.”
The other problem with that is that it has led to all sorts of silliness and shallowness in worship. Untethering ourselves from God’s word is to untether ourselves from the only thing that keeps us tied to the weightiness and gravity and glory of God. Without it, we are in a sort of spiritual version of the Second Law of Thermodynamics that tends to the disordering of worship into triteness and triviality. The problem with all the pragmatic approaches to worship is that the norms of the culture end up driving the way we worship of God instead of the norms of God’s word. As Sam Emadi puts it, saying that the word of God is prescriptive for the worship of God ends up being almost identical to saying, “We don’t do weird stuff.” He talks about a pastor who got bored baptizing people in water and so he switched to dunking new converts in . . . beer. He writes, “In God’s providence, while writing this very paragraph, a friend sent me a YouTube clip of a preacher instructing his congregation to take their socks off and wave them over their heads while he improvised a song about how Jesus is spinning them ‘around . . . right round.’”
So we want to be tethered to what God’s word says about worship. Today, as we navigate the Biblical issue of worship in the church, I want us to look at Paul’s words to the Colossians. Here, we have a good road map for worship that, if we follow it, will lead us to a good place where God is truly worshipped and honored by the church. Here we see the following elements of true worship.
It’s shaped by the Word
“Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom.” In the Greek text of Colossians 3:16, the very first words in the verse are “the word.” Literally: “The word of Christ, let it dwell in you richly.” There is emphasis here, and we ought to take note. As the apostle exhorts the believers in Colossae in the matter of public worship, he begins with the word of Christ. So should we.
What is the word of Christ? The closest parallel in the NT to Paul’s words here is something he tells Timothy in 1 Tim. 6: “If any man teach otherwise, and consent not to wholesome words, even the words of our Lord Jesus Christ, and to the doctrine which is according to godliness” (6:3). The “words of our Lord Jesus Christ” are “wholesome words” and “the doctrine which is according to godliness.” It is contrasted to “doting about questions and strifes of words, whereof cometh envy, strife, railings, evil surmisings, perverse disputings of men of corrupt minds, and destitute of the truth, supposing that gain is godliness: from such withdraw thyself” (5-6). The words of Christ, the word of Christ, is the truth which leads to godliness.
In his last letter to Timothy, Paul writes, “I charge thee therefore before God, and the Lord Jesus Christ, who shall judge the quick and the dead at his appearing and his kingdom; preach the word; be instant in season, out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort with all long suffering and doctrine. For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears; and they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables” (2 Tim. 4:1-4). What Paul tells the Colossians to let dwell in them is what Paul tells Timothy to preach – the word – and to do so eagerly, constantly, perseveringly, and faithfully.
The word of Christ is the word from Christ and the word about Christ. It is the word which centers on the person and work of Jesus Christ. And that means that it is a gospel-centered word. It is a word that points people to Jesus Christ as the one who is the eternal Son of the Father, the creator of all things, the sovereign ruler over the world, the Lord of all, and the Savior of sinners.
We need this word precisely because of the fact that we are all sinners. What does that mean? It means that we have broken God’s law by which we are all bound as his creatures, and that we are justly under the ban of his empire, and under his holy wrath. It means that if we perished forever in hell, God would be entirely just to have it so.
And this is what makes the gospel what it is: good news. The word of Christ points people to Jesus as the one who did what we cannot. The word of Christ points us to the one who is the eternal Word and yet also is the one who became flesh and dwelt among us (Jn. 1:14). It points us to the one who fulfilled God’s law perfectly and then took upon himself the guilt of sinners and purged it through his suffering on the cross so that all who believe on him might be saved (Jn. 1:12-13; 3:16). The word of Christ is the word that Paul enunciates in 2 Cor. 5: “Now then we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God did beseech you by us: we pray you in Christ's stead, be ye reconciled to God. For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him” (2 Cor. 5:20-21). Certainly an ambassador of Christ can only speak the word of Christ, and we see how Paul defines that word here. The word of Christ is the gospel of Jesus for sinners to hear and believe. Are you a sinner? This is the word of Christ: you can be reconciled to God by Jesus when you put your trust in him, not because of what you have done, but because of what he has done. Be reconciled to God!
Because it is a gospel-centered word, it is a Scripture-based word. The whole Bible is ultimately about Jesus. Especially the Old Testament. We must not let the NT keep us from the OT! We must not forget that when Jesus taught the disciples about his person and mission in the world, he pointed them first to the Old Covenant word of God: “And he said unto them, These are the words which I spake unto you, while I was yet with you, that all things must be fulfilled, which were written in the law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in the psalms, concerning me. Then opened he their understanding, that they might understand the scriptures, and said unto them, Thus it is written, and thus it behooved Christ to suffer, and to rise from the dead the third day: and that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in his name among all nations, beginning at Jerusalem” (Lk. 24:44-47). The law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms are the three-fold description of the entire canon of the OT, the Tanach. And our Lord says it all points to him and to our corresponding responsibility to him as Lord and Savior, in terms of repentance and faith.
It is therefore an Old Testament word. But it is also of course a New Testament word: “God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son, whom he hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made the worlds; who being the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person, and upholding all things by the word of his power, when he had by himself purged our sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high” (Heb. 1:1-3). God has spoken to us by his Son, and that word is given to us in his own words recorded in the gospels and in the words of his personally commissioned apostles in the epistles. Paul writing of his commission as an apostle, tells the Galatians, “Paul, an apostle, (not of men, neither by man, but by Jesus Christ, and God the Father, who raised him from the dead;) . . . For do I now persuade men, or God? or do I seek to please men? for if I yet pleased men, I should not be the servant of Christ. But I certify you, brethren, that the gospel which was preached of me is not after man” (Gal. 1:1, 10-11). The gospel, the New Testament word, is the word of Christ, not the word of man.
We are to let this word of Christ dwell in us richly in all wisdom. Dwell in us – to live in us as it were, to inhabit our minds and captivate our hearts. We aim, not for a superficial acquaintance with God’s word, but for an encounter with it that will leave us changed in a way that conforms us more and more to the image of Christ. In all wisdom – so that we deeply understand its teachings and are able to apply it to our lives.
If a church takes this seriously, it will affect the way they do things. It will make the church a word-based church. It’s why we do things here the way we do things here. It’s why the call to worship is a reading from Scripture. The first thing we do together is to hear God speak. It’s why the hymns we sing are calculated to remind us, not of our feelings, but of the truths of God’s word. It’s why I pray the Scripture with you. It’s why we preach the word of God to you.
It even affects the architecture of our church. It’s why this pulpit is front and center in the sanctuary. It is meant to point us, not to the preacher, but to the word of God which is preached from here, and to show even by the way our church is designed that God’s word is primary in our worship. It’s why this pulpit is not a glorified music stand, but something firm and immoveable – like the word of God!
Brothers and sisters, this is a tradition to be maintained: to hold the word of God primary and central in our worship.
It’s experienced in community
Note then what Paul says next: “teaching and admonishing one another.” While the primary teaching role is given to the pastors of a church, that doesn’t mean that the rest of us get to sit on our backsides and ride along for the fun. We are to teach and admonish each other. The word “admonish” is the Greek word noutheteo which is the word Paul uses in writing to the Romans: “And I myself also am persuaded of you, my brethren, that ye also are full of goodness, filled with all knowledge, able also to admonish one another” (Rom. 15:14). It carries the connotation of the application of teaching. It’s the members of the church helping each other apply the truths they here taught from the pulpit, that they read in their Bibles, that they learn in Bible studies with each other. It’s what’s behind the exhortation of Hebrews: “Take heed, brethren, lest there be in any of you an evil heart of unbelief, in departing from the living God. But exhort one another daily, while it is called To day; lest any of you be hardened through the deceitfulness of sin” (Heb. 3:12-13).
The point is that there is a community aspect to it. The importance of this is being lost in our day. There are apparently a lot of young people in our day who think that they can be a healthy Christian and do it without being connected to a church. Let me tell you something: you can’t. You can’t because Christ didn’t make you that way. He made you to thrive and grow in the church. Here is the way Paul puts it to the Ephesians: “Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love” (Eph. 4:15-16, ESV). You can’t be connected to a body that you are not in contact with. It would be like saying you were a member of a baseball team when you never went to a practice and never showed up for a game.
It is the same thing with worship. The modern age has allowed us, and even encouraged us, to privatize everything. It encourages us through apps on our phones and YouTube and playlists and headphones to make worship a thing we do by ourselves and in a way that is entirely according to our own preferences. It is disconnected from anything remotely communal. We tap in digitally to the work of others we know nothing of and say that is worship. I’m not saying we shouldn’t use technology or that it is wrong to do so, far from it. But what I am saying is that if we replace the corporate nature of worship with that, then we are abusing technology. We are in fact in sin at that point.
We are like coals in a fire. Coals glow the brightest when they are next to each other and they turn cold and ugly when they roll away from the others. Now it is true that to burn like a coal, it has to first be a coal and to be able to burn on its own. It has to catch on fire. The same is true with us. We cannot just have a public side to our worship without the already of a previously existing private walk with God. We must know the secrets of the prayer closet. But you will not burn long if you burn on your own in isolation. The Christian will glow brightest in company with other believers, and grow cold the more detached they are from the church. I know whereof I speak because I’ve seen it happen over and over again. The first step to apostasy is distancing yourself from the church. It is incredible pride and arrogance for any of us to think that we can thrive in worship on our own. We need the church!
When you turn to the scenes in heaven, what do you see? People off in corners doing their own thing? No! Here is what you see and hear: “After this I beheld, and, lo, a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues, stood before the throne, and before the Lamb, clothed with white robes, and palms in their hands; and cried with a loud voice, saying, Salvation to our God which sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb. And all the angels stood round about the throne, and about the elders and the four beasts, and fell before the throne on their faces, and worshipped God, saying, Amen: Blessing, and glory, and wisdom, and thanksgiving, and honour, and power, and might, be unto our God for ever and ever. Amen” (Rev. 7:9-12). Heaven will be the ultimate expression of communal worship.
It’s expressed in song
Paul then goes on to write, “teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord.” What then does this teach us about corporate worship? First of all, it teaches us something about the content of the music the church sings. Everyone of these words that Paul uses – psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs – were used to describe the Psalms in the Septuagint, often in the titles of the psalms. Also, in the parallel passage in Eph. 5:19, the word translated “making melody” in the KJV literally means “psalming,” and is an unmistakable reference to the OT practice of singing the psalms.
Now, I don’t think, as some do, that this means the church should only sing the OT psalms. But it does point to the Psalms as a model for the kind of songs the NT church is to sing. And when we look to the Psalms, we see that they were filled with doctrinal content as to the character of God and his redemptive purposes. They were not light and airy compositions with little or no doctrinal substance. Some of the very best descriptions of the nature and attributes of God come from the Psalms (take, for example, Psalm 145). The hymns that we sing today therefore need to have words that teach us something about God, that point our hearts and minds to truths about him. We will never worship God in spirit unless we also worship him in truth. The important thing is not whether a particular melody moves the soul, but whether the words which are carried upon the melody move the soul and heart. That is why I appreciate hymns like, “Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise,” or, “Holy, Holy, Holy.” These kinds of hymns point us to the greatness of our God, just like the Psalms of old. Again, just because a song moves you, does not mean it is worthy of the corporate worship of the church. You need to look at the lyrics. Do they point you to the God of the Bible? Do they teach you something about him? Do they reorient your heart toward God: Father, Son, and Spirit? Bob Kauflin, one of the great modern hymn-writers, makes this wise observation: “When our songs and prayers are dominated by what we think and feel about God and focus less upon who he is and what he thinks and feels about us, we run the risk of fueling our emotions with more emotion. We can end up worshipping our worship.”
Another thing instructive about the Psalms is the different ways they do this. Many of the Psalms are prayers which are sung directly to the Lord. We ought therefore to sing songs just like that. At the same time, there are also many Psalms (like Psalm 78) which are instructional and are directed to the people of the Lord. As the apostle put it, we sing to the Lord, and we sing to each other. There ought to be a sense in which truth is being preached to us when we lift up our voices in song: “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom; teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord” (Col. 3:16). By the songs we sing, we need to be teaching each other Biblical truth.
This, by the way, is partly what informs my desire to continue the practice to allow for people in our congregation to select some of the hymns that we sing. If the preacher or the worship leader picks all the songs, it really takes away the ability of the believers to participate in teaching others through song. In other words, when you pick a song for all of us to sing together, you have become in some sense one who is teaching and admonishing the rest of us through that particular song. This also fits in with the way the apostle described the worship of the earliest church: “How is it then brethren? When ye come together, every one of you hath a psalm, hath a doctrine, hath a tongue, hath a revelation, hath an interpretation. Let all things be done unto edifying” (1 Cor. 14:26). I think it is also important for someone who has had a song that has really ministered to them that week to have the opportunity to sing that with the rest of the church on the Lord’s Day.
Another thing that I think is instructive about the comparison with the Psalms, is that the Psalms encompass the full range of human emotion, and I think we ought to allow space in our singing together for just that. In other words, if every song that the congregation sings together supposes that they are all on the mountain top with no worries, then something is wrong. There ought to be place for hymns like Psalm 42: “O why art thou cast down my soul/ and why so troubled shouldst thou be/ hope thou in God and him extol/ who gives his saving help to thee/ who gives his saving help to thee.” You may not be lamenting but someone else in the church may be, and it will not hurt you to sing a song that expresses the lament of their heart – after all, we are to weep with those who weep, and we can do this in song just as well as we can do it with tears. Psalm 88 sits right beside Psalm 89 in the canon, and I thank God for that.
One may ask in this connection whether these words describe also the mode of our singing. Does the Bible prescribe one particular way to do this? The Psalms were clearly sung with musical accompaniment, and had the Divine sanction for the practice (see 2 Chron. 29:25). If fact, the very word “psalm” originally had reference to the sound of a stringed instrument. However, by the time of the apostle, it could also just refer to a hymn of praise, whether accompanied by musical instruments or not (cf. Jam. 5:13).
That being said, it is interesting is that the early church – the church of the first four centuries – did not look with favor upon the idea of using musical instruments in the church. The church fathers unanimously voted in favor of acapella singing in the church. This is certainly the conclusion that James McKinnon arrived at after he had studied extensively the attitude of the early church towards the use of musical instruments in worship. Here are a few quotes from his work:
• “The antagonism which the Fathers of the early Church displayed toward instruments has two outstanding characteristics: vehemence and uniformity.”
• “The attitude of opposition to instruments was virtually monolithic even though it was shared by men of diverse temperaments and different regional backgrounds, and even though it extended over a span of at least two centuries of changing fortunes for the Church.”
• “Not only was it [early Christian music] predominantly vocal, but it was so exclusively vocal that the occasion to criticize the use of instruments in church never arose.”
Now this is not a Biblical argument, and the early church clearly got some things wrong. We don’t follow them blindly. But it ought to give us pause in our day when musical instruments are thought to be absolutely essential to worship when the early church for the first three or four centuries wouldn’t use them at all and it did just fine. In fact, there is no doubt in my mind that if Ignatius or Irenaeus were to walk into the worship services of almost any church in America today, they would leave almost immediately, shocked and horrified at what modern Christians call worship!
Personally, I think there are a lot of dangers with introducing musical instruments that we need to be aware of. One of the dangers is drowning out the voice of the people and turning the worship time into a concert. The dynamic of Christian worship ought to be congregational, and the use of musical instruments (if they are used at all) ought to support this, not replace it. But the introduction of musical instruments often ends up eclipsing the singing of the congregation, and this is extremely unfortunate (even if the singing is bad!). Again, the apostle is describing corporate, not private, worship, and our worship time ought to reflect that.
One of the reasons I emphasize this is that one of the beautiful things about vocal harmony is that it is an audible expression of the solidarity that the church has in Christ. Especially in acapella worship, you can hear the many voices in different parts, all singing the same song. Different voices but same truth. We not only sing to one another, but we are singing with one another. I’m not saying this can’t happen with musical instruments, but, as nice as they may sound, they often overpower the human voice. And if we can’t hear one another sing, we can’t even begin to obey the text, can we?
It’s empowered by the Holy Spirit
When the apostle writes that we sing “with grace in our hearts to the Lord,” we recognize that what makes singing pleasing to the Lord is the grace of God in the heart that creates a worshipful spirit. As our Lord told the woman at the well, “But the hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth: for the Father seeketh such to worship him. God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth” (Jn. 4:23-24). God is not pleased with mere external worship; he demands the heart, and it is the grace of the Spirit that gives us this heart.
Which means that we should beware of attending worship in the strength of our own resources. But it also means that we do not have to rely on our own weaknesses and limitations in order to bring God acceptable worship. We should not seek to worship the Lord in our own strength, but neither should we despair that God will abandon us if we seek him fervently. Where two or three are gathered in his name, there he is in the midst.
Brothers and sisters, let’s not forget that worship can only occur by the grace of God. It is a supernatural thing. Which means that the church that seeks the Lord with all its heart before gathering and while gathering and after gathering is the church that will worship him the best. May the Lord put it in our hearts to seek him, not to settle into the dangerous presumption that God will just bless us. May the Lord deliver us from a Laodicean outlook, and may we constantly seek the Lord for eyes to see and for true riches which are found in him. We need his grace, but our high priest, the Lord Jesus Christ, promises to give it to all who need it!
The apostle then writes, “And whatsoever ye do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus.” Do all in the name of the Lord Jesus. If we conduct our worship with the honor of the Lord Jesus always before us, and if our desire is that in all we do, whether we pray or sing or preach, that he would be glorified, then that cannot but be conducive to a reverent attitude and disposition on our part.
Who again is the Lord Jesus? He isn’t a heavenly version of Mr. Rogers. He’s not the old man upstairs. He is the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Sovereign ruler of the universe, the Lord God who omnipotent reigneth, the one who will come and destroy all his enemies and save all his people. He is the one who was dead and now is alive and who lives forevermore. He is the Lion of the tribe of Judah and the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world. He is the one whom all the angels praise. He is the one before whom the apostle John, when he saw him in his glory, fell down at his feet as dead, and who wrote this about what he saw:
“The hairs of his head were white, like white wool, like snow. His eyes were like a flame of fire, his feet were like burnished bronze, refined in a furnace, and his voice was like the roar of many waters. In his right hand he held seven stars, from his mouth came a sharp two-edged sword, and his face was like the sun shining in full strength” (Rev. 1:14–16, ESV).
Do we come here with this mindset? Do we come here expecting to meet this Christ? Do we come here needing this Christ? Do we come here to hear from this Christ? Do we come here to obey and trust him? Oh may the Lord revive among us a spirit of humble and joyful reverence in his presence!
It’s enriched by thanksgiving
Paul wraps up his thought here by saying, “giving thanks to God and the Father by him.” In the parallel passage in Ephesians, the apostles puts it this way: “Giving thanks always for all things unto God and the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Eph. 5:20). We don’t come merely to be thankful some of the time, but to be thankful all the time. All our worship is to be permeated with thanksgiving.
How can we do that when as a church we are experiencing hard things, when it just seems that nothing is going right? How can we be thankful when we can’t see the good that God is doing for us? We still thank him! Like Betsy telling Corrie Ten Boom, as they were forced into quarters in a Nazi concentration camp into a building filled with fleas – “Thank God for the fleas!” Corrie didn’t want to do that. Can you blame her? But Betsy was right. When our lives are filled with flea-like trials which don’t seem to have any redeemable aspect to them, we still thank God. Do you know why? I hope you do! It is because Romans 8:28 is still true. God is working the fleas for your good. He did it for Betsy and Corrie: the fleas kept the German guards outside the building and allowed them to conduct Bible studies freely for all the ladies there. We may not see it right now, but we can be sure that God will work the bad things for good.
We thank God now in our suffering and hard times because we know that one day we will thank him for the glory in his presence: “Now unto him that is able to keep you from falling, and to present you faultless before the presence of his glory with exceeding joy, to the only wise God our Saviour, be glory and majesty, dominion and power, both now and ever. Amen” (Jude 24-25).
Are these not the things we would want to foster and conserve in our worship? A worship that is based on the word of God and the gospel, that is rich in community, that is expressed in harmonious song, that is empowered by the Holy Spirit, characterized by reverence, and enriched by thanksgiving? May the Lord help us to worship him so. May he give all of us unity of heart and mind in these areas. May he meet us as we meet together!
.jpg)
Comments
Post a Comment