Preaching in Worship:
Voice of God, Voice of Christ

Professor David Engelsma

The subject of this editorial contains two distinct truths.

Both are of fundamental importance for the right worship of God. One is the nature of preaching. This truth lies on the foreground and is immediately obvious to all. The question at issue is whether preaching is God's Word or man's word.

The other truth is the place of preaching in worship. This truth lies more in the background of the subject and might easily be overlooked. Does preaching have a place in worship? Does it have a place at all? If it does have a place, is this place central or peripheral? Is the place of preaching in worship this, that preaching is merely one of a number of equally important activities? Or is preaching, with the sacraments that are attached to it, the heart of the worship of the church of God?

If preaching has the central place in worship, is this because of what preaching itself is, because of what preaching is by God's appointment? Or is this because of tradition and cultural Reformed tradition and Western, intellectual culture?

In the teeth of the "liturgical renewal" in Reformed and Presbyterian churches today, I contend that the preaching of the Word of God is vox Dei (voice of God) and, more particularly, vox Christi (voice of Christ). For this reason, preaching is not merely part of every service of the public worship of the Triune God in Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Ghost, but is the central, preeminent act in the worship of the church.

Between these two truths concerning the nature and the place of preaching, there is mutual relationship. As the voice of God, preaching is the central act in worship. Who would presume to exclude from worship the voice of God? Who would dare to consign the voice of God to a peripheral, subordinate place in worship?

But the relationship may also be stated this way: God has ordained preaching as His voice exactly in order that His voice may have the central place in the worship of the church.

The truth of the nature of preaching and the related truth of the place of preaching in worship are the two most important issues at stake in the battle by the true, faithful Reformed church for right worship. The battle for the faith now at the end of the ages rages also on the front of worship. "Rages" is the appropriate verb here. For one thing, the battle over worship is furious. For another thing, the conflict in the congregation between those introducing innovations and those holding on to the old ways produces hot anger and heated exchanges.

The movement for liturgical renewal, or "progressiveness" in worship, hinges on a denial of both the nature of preaching as the voice of God and the place of preaching as central. Regardless of the conscious motives of everyone who promotes this renewal of public worship, the movement as such has two results. It dislodges the sermon from its central, dominant place in the worship service, and it inculcates a view of preaching as the word of man (and now, woman).

The seriousness of the raging conflict over worship is that with the loss of a regard for preaching as the Word of God is lost the right worship of God. Where worship is thus corrupted, there can be no giving of grace to needy sinners. Preaching as the Word of God is the means of grace.

The question whether preaching is the Word of God or the word of man is forced on us at the present hour by the assault on preaching in the Reformed churches. It is this assault that drives the movement to overhaul Reformed worship.

One does not have to read many issues of the journal Reformed Worship to realize that in the restructured worship that this Reformed periodical envisions and promotes preaching is, at best, one element among many. Fact is, although the editors pay lip service to preaching, preaching does not have their heart. What truly interests them are banners, dialogue, dance, and especially music.

Whereas Reformed Worship damns preaching in worship with faint praise and scant attention, Presbyterian theologian John M. Frame expresses that the current renewal of worship in supposedly conservative Presbyterian and Reformed churches takes dead aim at preaching. He does this in his recent book, Worship in Spirit and Truth: A Refreshing Study of the Principles and Practice of Biblical Worship (P&R, 1996). Under the heading "Preaching and Teaching" Frame denies that "teaching in the church is ... restricted to elders" (p. 91). He affirms that drama is a legitimate form of preaching and teaching. He asserts that "teaching can take place through dialogue" (pp. 92-94).

This reputedly conservative and certainly influential Presbyterian theologian says, "I see no reason why some worship services should not be entirely musical" (p. 114).

Basic to his gutting of the regulative principle of worship (by so expanding it that it becomes meaningless) is his denial of any validity to the distinction between official, public worship by the church and informal worship at home by a family (pp. 44, 45). This effectively negates the necessity of preaching at church, for obviously we do not have preaching in our family devotions.

It comes as no surprise, then, that in the last chapter, "Putting It Together," where Frame describes the ideal worship for which he has laid the foundation throughout the book (which also happens to be the public worship that Frame has created and leads in his southern California "New Life Presbyterian Church"), the preaching of the Word is lost in the shuffle. (I use the word "shuffle" deliberately since Frame also approves dance in the worship, pp. 130-132.) Not the preaching, but the lively praise songs; the choruses; the clapping; the whistling; the tapping of tambourines; John Frame's prayer; hymn after hymn after hymn; John Frame's talking to the congregation between the hymns; the Lord's Supper; and John Frame's directing the choir are on the foreground (pp. 145-154).

All these other activities take up most of the time. Unless they hold services for two hours or more in southern California, the sermon cannot be longer than 15 minutes.

The book comes highly recommended by professors at leading, conservative Reformed and Presbyterian seminaries. Steve Brown of Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando, Florida states, "This is the kind of book that you will read and say, 'But, of course. Why didn't someone explain it that way before?' John Frame has done the church a great service … with biblical balance, insight, and an irenic spirit." Richard B. Gaffin, Jr., of Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia gives this commendation: "Some of Frame's conclusions and applications are controversial, but anyone concerned about worship honoring to God and true to Scripture will surely benefit from reflecting on this stimulating, clearly argued, and always biblically focused study" (back cover). Frame himself is professor at Westminster in California. The Reformed and Presbyterian saints who have their young men trained for the ministry in these seminaries must not be surprised when their pastors have them dancing in the aisles. They have been forewarned.

The attack on preaching in the churches of the Reformation is open, direct, and brutal. Dutch Reformed theologian Klaas Runia has taken note of this frontal assault in the publication of a series of lectures, The Sermon under Attack (Paternoster, 1983). Essentially, the criticism of the sermon is the fruit of the Enlightenment's liberation of Western man "from the authoritarian shackles of Scripture and the church." Modern man "does not want to be told what is true and worthwhile; he wants to discover it for himself and, accordingly, he also wants to determine for himself what he should do. . . . He wants to join in the discussion. But the sermon provides no opportunity for discussion (my emphasis—DJE)."

Runia quotes L. E. Keck, expressing well the attitude of the people toward sermons:

If something is worth communicating, don't spoil it by preaching it! Let it emerge in the give-and-take of the group; celebrate it by music, dance or drama. In preaching, people are as passive as chickens on a roost—and perhaps just as awake. For whatever reason, the authority of the preacher has become problematic (p. 6).

With the assault on preaching goes a deep doubt concerning the effectiveness of preaching. Runia quotes Henry Ward Beecher:

The churches of the land are sprinkled all over with bald-headed old sinners whose hair has been worn off by the friction of countless sermons that have been aimed at them and have glanced off and hit the man in the pew behind (p. 10).

The Reformed layman cannot but notice the wounding, if not the murder, of the sermon in Reformed churches. John J. Timmerman, esteemed professor of English at Calvin College for many years, ruefully reflected on the demise of the sermon in his 1987 semi-autobiography, Through a Glass Lightly (Eerdmans):

The sermon was formerly the centerpiece of worship; now additions and adornments, creative participation and additions, sometimes reduce it to a sermonette…. The long prayer is now written down and read to God. The sermon is in danger of becoming a diminishing dot in a flurry of addenda.... I sometimes think the sermon is in many churches a diminishing island in a surging sea of activities (p. 125).

Implied, if not bluntly stated, in all this criticism and neglect of the sermon is the modern conviction that preaching is a human activity: a man (or, now, a woman) talks about God and spiritual things. This can be beneficial, if the speaker is gifted. But preaching is just another human act that must fight for its few minutes in the limelight of the liturgy with all the other acts that clamor for a place.

Such a conception of the preaching of the Word is a radical break with the conception held by the Reformation. There is today the loss of faith that preaching is the voice of God.

As demonstrated in the previous editorial, there is in Protestantism today a brutal attack on preaching in the worship of the church. Although vehement, the definition that someone has given of preaching as "a monstrous monologue by a moron to mutes" captures the mood of the movement for liturgical renewal.

Within Reformed and Presbyterian churches also, there is a loss of faith that the preaching of the gospel is the voice of Christ Himself. Thus, in their worship these churches break with the worship advocated and practiced by the Reformation. For the Reformation honored preaching as the voice of God in Jesus Christ.

This was Luther’s estimation of preaching. In a sermon on John 20:19-31, he remarked: "Every honest pastor’s and preacher’s mouth is Christ’s mouth." On another occasion, he declared, "I am certain that when I enter the pulpit to preach or stand at the lectern to read, it is not my word, but my tongue is the pen of a ready writer."

Calvin agreed. In a sermon, significantly on Ephesians 4:11, 12 (Christ "gave...some, pastors and teachers"), Calvin taught his congregation:

If our Lord gives us this blessing of His gospel being preached to us, we have a sure and infallible mark that He is near us and procures our salvation, and that He calls us to Him, as if He had His mouth open and we saw Him there in person.

Therefore, for Calvin the pulpit was "the throne of God".

This conception of preaching, common to all the Reformers, is found throughout the Reformed creeds. It received explicit formulation in Bullinger’s Second Helvetic Confession of 1566:

The Preaching of the Word of God Is the Word of God. Wherefore when this Word of God is now preached in the church by preachers lawfully called, we believe that the very Word of God is proclaimed, and received by the faithful; and that neither any other Word of God is to be invented nor is to be expected from heaven: and that now the Word itself which is preached is to be regarded, not the minister that preaches; for even if he be evil and a sinner, nevertheless the Word of God remains still true and good (Chapter I).

This high view of preaching continued in the history of the Reformed churches until recently. In his work on liturgics, William Heyns called the minister de mond Gods ("the mouth of God"). In a rich and profound treatment of preaching as the primary means of grace in the church, explaining Q. and A. 65 of the Heidelberg Catechism, Herman Hoeksema described a preacher as one who does not merely speak concerning Christ, "but one through whom it pleases Christ Himself to speak, to cause His own voice to be heard by His people" (Triple Knowledge, vol. 2, pp. 409, 410).

James Hastings Nichols put it well when he described the Reformation’s view of preaching, and, therefore, of the preacher, this way: "the preacher … is … God’s instrument in a terrifyingly direct way" (Corporate Worship in the Reformed Tradition, Westminster Press, 1968, p. 31).

In the life-and-death battle for biblical, Reformed worship today, all that we are called to do, if only we can, is to defend and preserve our Reformation and Reformed heritage. But then we must ourselves see, and be convinced, that this is the biblical view of preaching. The Reformation’s conception of preaching was not cultural, was not an accident of history, although this is how those who are reviving and renewing worship in our day like to present the matter. Fact is, the Reformers knew all about drama and music in worship. They had firsthand knowledge of the most impressive ceremony and ritual in the history of Christendom: the sacerdotalism and ritual of the Roman Catholic Church. All of this they rejected. Instead, they demanded preaching. The reason for their rejection of ceremony and their insistence on preaching was the testimony of Holy Scripture that preaching is the voice of God.

Scripture’s Regard for Preaching

For the Reformers, this testimony was, first of all, the teaching of the Bible everywhere that everything depends upon the Word of God, that is, upon the living voice of God speaking peace to His people. We live by every Word that proceeds from God’s mouth (Deut. 8:3). The sheep of Jesus Christ hear (present tense!) His voice, and only thus do they follow Him (John 10:27). From the beginning of the history of redemption, God has spoken, and now in the end of the ages He does not shut His mouth, to try some other methods, but has spoken—and continues to speak—by His Son, Jesus the Christ, our chief prophet and teacher (Heb. 1:1, 2; Heid. Cat., Questions 19 and 31).

The Reformers had their specific texts: I Thessalonians 2:13 ("when ye received the word of God which ye heard of us, ye received it not as the word of men, but as it is in truth, the word of God"); Rom. 10:14 ("how shall they believe in him whom they have not heard?" Greek text); John 20:21-23 ("whose soever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them"); Luke 10:16 ("he that heareth you heareth me").

Clear and powerful as these passages are, none is more clear and compelling than Ephesians 4:20, 21: "But ye have not so learned Christ; If so be that ye have heard him, and have been taught by him, as the truth is in Jesus." Writing to the Ephesians who had not heard about Christ and been converted to Him until some 20 years after He ascended into heaven, the apostle says, matter-of-factly, as something both they and he knew to be the case, that those Ephesian Christians heard Christ and were taught by Christ. The only, and obvious, explanation is that the preaching of the gospel by the apostle and his co-workers was the voice of Jesus Christ. The preaching of the Word was for the Ephesians vox Christi.

That this "terrifyingly direct" instrumentality of the minister as the mouthpiece of Christ applies, and is intended by the Holy Spirit to apply, to preachers, and not only to apostles, is evident in two ways. First, the preceding context mentions the office of pastor and teacher with those of apostle, prophet, and evangelist (v. 11). The office of pastor and teacher is the only permanent office in the church, to carry on the edifying of the body of Christ that was begun by the apostolic office. The hearing of Christ and the being taught by Christ that once took place through the office of the apostle now takes place through the office of pastor and teacher.

Second, it is the teaching of Ephesians 4:20, 21 that hearing Christ and being taught by Christ are necessary if we are to learn Christ in the saving manner described in verses 17-19 and in verses 22-24, namely, not walking as other Gentiles, but putting off the old man and putting on the new man. Salvation requires hearing Christ Himself! Salvation requires being taught by Christ Himself! The voice of God in Christ, and only the voice of God in Christ, calls the things that are not as though they were and brings the light of spiritual life out of the darkness of our natural, total depravity! This voice sounds in every age, to the world’s end, through the preaching of the gospel by the pastors and teachers whom the ascended Christ gives to His church.

Two things qualify the preaching that is this living voice of the risen Christ, the personal Word of God. First, it is preaching that has as its content, and, therefore, preaching that is faithful to, the message of the apostles, that is, Holy Scripture. The Second Helvetic Confession gives this qualification when it says, "when this Word of God is now preached," etc. The reference is to Scripture, which the Second Helvetic has just confessed to be "the true Word of God."

Second, only that preaching is the voice of God which is done by a man who has been given to the church as a pastor and teacher by the ascended Christ, that is, one who is called to this labor by Christ, one who is in office. The Second Helvetic Confession indicates this qualification when it says, "when this Word of God is now preached in the church by preachers lawfully called," etc.

Preaching as the voice of Christ is necessarily connected with, and dependent upon, preaching’s being the exercise of office, and not merely the exercise of gifts. The assault on preaching today begins with the rejection of office. Modern Reformed church members and contemporary synods first disparage and then deny positions of authority in the congregations. Usually they do this in a pious manner, as though they would exalt "service." The implication is that authority and service in the church are mutually exclusive. A man with authority to bring the Word of God would be a tyrant, lording it over the cowed members. Whatever the approach, the churches repudiate office. This is the end of preaching.

It is also the muzzling of the voice of Christ in those churches. Fundamental to the entire ministry of the Son of God in human flesh is office. He may glorify God in the world, redeem the church, fulfill the covenant, and establish the kingdom of God, not simply because He is gifted but because He is ordained and qualified by God as God’s authoritative Servant. He is the Messiah. He has been called of God.

Still today, when He functions by means of men, particularly as prophet and teacher of the church, he calls and sends these men, so that His labor through them is official. Other than officially, Christ will not work. Other than officially, He will not speak.

The preceding editorials in this short series demonstrated that the faithful preaching of Holy Scripture by an ordained man is the living voice of God in Jesus Christ. The preaching of the gospel is the Word of God. This concluding installment draws the conclusion that preaching has the central place in worship.

Surprisingly little has been done in Reformed theology, specifically in Reformed liturgics, to develop the place of preaching in worship and the relation of preaching to the other aspects of worship. Reformed theologians have developed preaching as means of grace, but a study of liturgics, homiletics, and even dogmatics reveals that there has been little development of preaching as worship.

In his contribution to the volume on Presbyterian and Reformed worship, Worship in the Presence of God (Greenville Seminary, 1992), Thomas G. Reid, Jr., remarks on this startling lack: "The relation of preaching to the concept of worship and to the other elements of worship remains a relatively unfallowed field" (p. 367; "fallow field" must be intended, that is, a field that has not been worked). Reid's contribution to the book is a review of "Recent Writings on Worship of Particular Interest to Reformed Christians." The paragraph that lists writings on "Preaching in Worship" is the briefest paragraph in the chapter. In contrast, the chapter on "Singing of Psalms" goes on for ten and a half pages.

This lack of development of preaching as an element of worship is surprising for two reasons. First, the Reformed churches have been of one mind, that preaching is the main element of public worship. One would think that their treatment of public worship would reflect this importance of preaching.

Second, if preaching is, in fact, the voice of God (as the Reformed faith insists), it is not immediately plain that preaching is part of public worship at all. Is not worship our activity of praise and thanksgiving? But preaching is God's activity. Through the office of the ministry, God is active in speaking His Word to the church. How is God's speaking part of our worship? How is God's speaking the center of our worship?

Exactly this is the objection that modern religious people have against the traditional Reformed worship service with its emphasis on preaching. Most of the service consists of one man's reading and expounding the Scriptures. The congregation is inactive-as passive, one has said, as chickens sitting on their roost. Such worship services are detrimental to lively, active congregational worship.

If we are successfully to resist the pressure against the centrality of preaching in public worship, as injurious to lively, active worship by the people of God, we must give account of preaching as the very heart of worship. It is not enough to argue that preaching is the voice of God. We must also show that and how preaching is the central element of the public worship of the people of God.

Preaching is, and must be, the heart of right worship exactly because it is the activity of God in Jesus Christ: the voice of God.

Worship is the meeting, the fellowship, of God with His people. The service of public worship of the true church is the official, formal, visible realization of God's covenant of grace with believers and their children in the world. It is awesome. Every Sunday morning and every Sunday evening, the cloud of glory fills the temple, but now as the Spirit of the crucified and risen Christ, so that we can bear the Presence and can stand to minister (I Kings 8; I Pet. 2:1-10). In His Spirit and Word, the glorified Jesus Christ walks in the midst of the churches (Rev. 1:10-2: 1). Angels attend their sovereign, the triune God in the exalted Jesus Christ, at the service (I Cor. 11:10). If an unbeliever enters the service, the secrets of his heart will be made manifest, and he will fall down on his face and report that God is in us of a truth (I Cor. 14:23-25).

As the covenantal meeting of God with His people, worship is delightful. Psalm 84 is the experience of every friend of God, sometimes stronger, sometimes weaker:

How dear to me, O Lord of Hosts,
The place where Thou dost dwell;
The tabernacles of Thy grace
In pleasantness excel.
My spirit longs, yea, even faints,
Thy sacred courts to see;
My thirsting heart and flesh cry out,
O living God, for Thee.

This meeting of God with His people takes place by means of God's Word. God is present to us, and we draw near to God, by the Word. In the activity of worship, God takes the initiative by revealing Himself as our Father and Savior in Jesus Christ in the preaching of the gospel.

God is first in worship. God is central. God is God in our worship, as He is God in our salvation.

The public worship of the church is theological, is theocentric. We do not make it so. God makes it so. Nor does God make our worship theocentric merely in the sense that all our activity revolves around Him. But He makes it theocentric in the sense that He Himself as the active, working, dynamic God is the center of the service. His activity, work, dynamism, at the center of the service, is the preaching of the Word.

To the preaching of the gospel as the heart of biblical worship are attached, not banners and special music, but the sacraments. They too are primarily God's actions, not ours. In baptism and the supper, God more fully declares and seals to us the promise of the gospel (Heid. Cat., Q. 66).

This does not imply that the congregation is passive, whether in indolence or in stupefied wonder. By the very preaching in which God is first and central in worship, God calls us to activity in worship. But this activity is not that we come up with all kinds of innovations to make ourselves busy in the services. Rather, our activity is that we hear God speaking-truly hear with the reverence, submission, trust, obedience, and love of faith.

"Hear ye him!" God says to us concerning His Son, Jesus Christ (Matt. 17:5).

This, this is the activity in worship that is required of the congregation. This, this is the public worship that is acceptable to God.

Therefore the supreme worship of God that a man can offer, the Sabbath of Sabbaths, is to practice true godliness, to hear and read the Word. On the other hand, nothing is more dangerous than to become tired of the Word. Therefore anyone who is so cold that he thinks he knows enough and gradually begins to loathe the Word has lost Christ and the Gospel…. This is what is finally happening to the frivolous fanatics (Martin Luther, commentary on Gal. 1:11, 12).

When the busy "worship-leaders," no doubt sincerely, make themselves and us frantic with religious exercises, every Sunday a new set of them, we must say to them, "Sit down! Shut up! Stop working! Let God speak, will you! And hear!"

"Hear!"-the most difficult, strenuous activity of all, and the sweetest, as it is the most glorifying to God.

Commenting on Habakkuk 2:20, "But the LORD is in his holy temple: let all the earth keep silence before him," Calvin said:

Silence in this respect is nothing else but submission: and we submit to God, when we bring not our own inventions and imaginations, but suffer ourselves to be taught by His Word.

The right worship of God by His New Testament church is described and exhorted in Hebrews 12:22-29. The "church of the firstborn" (v. 23) is called to "serve God acceptably" (v. 28), where "serve" is one of the chief New Testament terms for the church's worship. This "service" is characterized by "reverence and godly fear" (v. 28), not by wild exuberance and frenzied activity. It is Reformed, not charismatic.

The central act in the church's worship is the act of speaking: "See that ye refuse not him that speaketh" (v. 25). The one who speaks is the triune God: "much more shall we not escape, if we turn away from him that speaketh from heaven" (v. 25). He speaks through Jesus Christ the mediator of the new covenant (v. 24). He speaks still. He speaks today. He speaks by means of the preaching of the gospel, whose message is "the blood of sprinkling" (v. 24) and the promise of a new world (vv. 26, 27). Just as really as the voice of words that Israel heard at Sinai was the living voice of God (v. 19), so truly is the voice that the church hears in the preaching the voice of God (vv. 25, 26).

The resulting and corresponding activity of the worshiping church is pointed out in the warning of verse 25: "See that ye refuse not him that speaketh. For if they escaped not who refused him that spake on earth, much more shall not we escape, if we turn away from him that speaketh from heaven."

Negatively, the one great admonition of the New Testament church regarding her public worship is: Do not reject the speaking God! Do not turn away from the one who speaks from heaven! Do not disdain the voice of God! Do not first belittle and despise and then replace altogether the preaching of the Word of God!

Positively, the one great exhortation of the New Testament church regarding her public worship is: Hear Him!

The true church will heed the admonition and exhortation. The speaking God Himself will see to it. He makes His voice lovely to her. Once, from Mt. Sinai, He spoke the awful justice of the law, and Israel "entreated that the word should not be spoken to them any more" (v. 19). Now, in Mt. Sion, He speaks the gospel of the forgiveness of sins in the blood of Jesus, and the church receives the Word gladly. She refuses to have it silenced.

Thus does the church rightly worship God.

(This editorial appeared in the Standard Bearer Jan-Mar 1998)
=========================================
Return to the Reformed Preaching page
Return to the Reformed Literature Topics page
Return to the Reformed Sovereign Grace Literature Home Page