Mentoring the New Believer - Lesson 8

JC had asked the question yesterday about fasting relative to prayer. I have mixed feelings on fasting, and when I was preaching the series on the Sermon on the Mount, what was really hard was I had to preach a fasting passage, but I’d never fasted. It's not like I could preach on it with any authority. And so I preached on it. I covered the basic information, and then I had my teenage son come up who does fast, and I let him finish the sermon. And basic rule is don't let your teenage son behind the pulpit because they'll steal the show. They’ll just steal the show. I told a story about a rather uncomfortable position I'd been in where I came to a meeting, and I came a little late, so I didn't hear the beginning of it, but the teacher was sharing the things he had learned during his last 40 day fast. And after about 10 minutes, I leaned over to the guy next to me and I said, ‘are you uncomfortable with this?’ And he goes, ‘yeah, I'm very, very uncomfortable with this,’ because the whole point of fasting in the Lord's Prayer is that nobody knows you're doing it. I told the story in the first part of the service, and then I got down, and Tyler got up to talk about his experiences. And Tyler starts (I mean, he's probably 16 at the time), and he goes ‘well, in my last 40 day fast… And the church erupted, and I lost the service for the rest of the day. I couldn't get anyone to focus at all.

 But I wasn't comfortable enough even preaching on it because I've never done it. I don't think that the statement that when Jesus says, you know, ‘when the bridegroom is gone, then you’ll fast’ is an imperative. I think it's just saying, you know, fasting is not appropriate when Jesus was here, but it's your choice afterwards. There are other people. John Piper did a really good little book on fasting. I enjoyed reading it just to kind of understand it. His point is that, first of all, there's no question that Jesus fast, the early church fast. So I'm in a minority position, and I would never argue that it's wrong to fast. It's certainly wrong to fast under certain situations. But there's evidently something about fasting that helps you focus on the Lord and that in some ways it might be one, I would say several ways to focus on your prayer. The famous passage where the disciples couldn't cast out the demons and Jesus says in the King James, ‘this kind does not come out except by prayer and fasting.’ If you look at the modern translations, it just says prayer. And we have evidence in the Greek manuscripts that “and fasting” was added about 300 A.D. That would be a pretty strong verse if “and fasting” were actually in the Greek. So that's why I couldn't just answer the question quickly. Where fasting is wrong is when you think that matter is wrong. That's Platonism. That's not Christianity. It's not Judaism. God made the world good. He didn't make it good and bad. And so when people fast because they think that food is evil, that's bad theology. I remember I knew a person once who used to fast to do body cleanses. She was just a tad overweight.

And so she would do this periodically. That is not at all what fasting is biblically. There are people who understand, who have a practice of fasting for the right reasons, and it's a way of saying no to good things so that you can focus on better things. Wayne's got a good section in his book on it, I'm assuming for when he wrote that he does fast. So evidently it is something that does help you focus on your prayer life. I mean, the only fasting I think we can entertain and say it's biblical is when it's done for the right reasons, for spiritual reasons. Anyway. So that's why I don't have, you know…do you know any other reasons that people fast relative to prayer? (Class member:  to hear the will of God in a particular situation, to be more attentive to the Spirit.) Dr. Mounce: Okay. Yeah, that's kind of what I was thinking. All right. You know, the one thing that I did forget to say yesterday that I really wanted to say on prayer is I think the new believer will need to be exposed to the fact that if they stumble and refuse to confess, then it puts a relational barrier up between them and God, that’s what we talked about yesterday. But one of the ways in which that relational barrier is going to manifest itself is in their prayer life, right? When there's a problem in a relationship and the relational barriers go up, communication is one of the first things who suffers. I think probably what's helpful is that new believers understand that if they, when they stumble, if they don't confess, that the relational barriers are going to go up and they're going to start having communication problems with God. They may not, for example, feel his presence quite as much.

Remember how when you first became a Christian, how you could feel the presence of God in a palpable way? I mean, you just knew he was there. And unfortunately, as far as spiritual formation, that goes away, or at least it comes and goes. The most famous example is Mother Teresa. Did you know the story in her autobiography that she spent six months just about in the throne room of God? Her feeling of the presence of God was overwhelming. And then for the next 20 years, she felt absolutely nothing. I've not read it, but I guess her autobiography is so strong in” crying out to God, where are you, are you there?”, that some people even question whether she was saved? Again, that's just what I've been told. I do know that when you first become a Christian, that the presence of God is very real. But if you sin and you don't confess, then even when you're a new believer, that presence can go away. And that could be scary to a young Christian, can’t it? But it's certainly, if they allow sin in their life, it's not going to be, they're not gonna be taking the next step forward. And perhaps the most famous example of this is on the Lord's Prayer, right, the two verses after the Lord's Prayer. The Lord's Prayer, He says, you know, ‘Father, forgive us our debts as we have forgiven those who have sinned against us.’ It's kind of like Jesus finishes the sermon and then says, ‘in case you didn't catch it, and I know it's really hard, let me make sure that you heard what I just said, that if you forgive the sins of those who have sinned against you, then your father will forgive you.

But if you do not forgive the sins against you, then your father will not forgive your sins.’ And this is not a forgiveness that means your unsaved. It's the unforgiveness that results in relational conflict and relational distance. New believers need to understand that…one of the most fascinating things that ever happened when I was pastoring was, I was preaching on this passage. And one of the points I made in the sermon is that I think you forgive people whether they ask for forgiveness or not. Jesus didn't wait for them to ask him. The Sermon on the Mount doesn't allow it. It just says, you know, if you don't forgive, you're not going to be forgiven. And so, I think that when we're harmed, when we're sinned against, we have to forgive. That doesn't mean that trust is restored. It doesn't mean the relationship is stored. And perhaps most importantly, it doesn't mean that the sinner, the person who has sinned against you, has been freed from the consequences of sin. Freedom doesn't come when you're forgiven. Freedom comes when you confess, right? I think it's just a critical, critical part of spiritual growth is to understand that if you sinned against me, my job is to forgive you and turn you over to God, and he will work with you, and if he needs to punish you, he will punish you. But that's not my job. My job is to forgive. But you will never be free of the effects of your sin until you confess. Well, I preached that. And a first-time visitor came up to me after church and wanted to know if we believed in church discipline. That's an interesting question. Well, like I shared last night, I assumed he was from the other church in town that enjoyed church discipline a little too much,

and so he wanted to know what we were going to be doing. So I told him what the position paper on it and whatnot. And he launched into a diatribe against me that you only forgive people when they're sorry (because I made the joke in the sermon that you only forgive people when they come crawling to you, right?) And he believes that. And I said, ‘well, I just think you're wrong.’ And he said ‘I’m calling the elders of this church to do church discipline against you because what you said was wrong.’ I went, ‘oh, you think so, huh? First time visitor. And you think you're going to call in church discipline because you disagree with my theology? That interesting.’ And it turns out the guy was a member of some cult back in Illinois. And it was a fundamentalist, a rigid kind of cult. And this was part of how they did it. So, it was the first guy I ever kicked out of a church. I said, ‘the door's that way and I'll walk behind you to make sure you get out…  I mean it, get out of this building, you have no place here until you come in repentance.’ It was an interesting situation; but that kind of thinking only builds walls between the new believer and Christ, and they'll never grow in their faith. So, I think that's an important lesson that new believers don't. They're called to forgive whether the other people have said they’re sorry or not. It's one of the hardest things to do because it means you have to trust God, right? You have to trust God that he is all loving and that he's all powerful, that he's good all the time, and that he actually will execute vengeance if he has to.

Right? I mean, that's hard for me to understand, much less a new believer. When I said that about the presence of God, it reminded me of something else that I forgot to tell you guys. If I could have everyone listen to one class on Biblical Training, this is it: this is a class that has changed more people's lives than anything else on the site. If you go to Discipleship and go down to track three Growing Deeper, there is this on Spiritual Formation. Dr. John Coe. John is a Professor at Talbot in Southern California. He is the head of the Spiritual Formation Institute at Talbot. And this is a series of talks he gave at a church down there. And it is absolutely life changing. It is not a talk for new believers. It'll scare the b-gee bees out of a new believer. It's meant for people like you and me that have been Christians for a while and perhaps are stuck. Nothing's moving forward. What he lays out is kind of the process under which God grows us up. When we first become Christians, we can feel his presence; it’s very real, and everything is new and everything is wonderful. And he likens it to a baby that’s and is breastfeeding and is close to its mom. But at some point, in time, babies have to learn to drink out of glasses, don't they? And they're withdrawn somewhat from the physical presence of their mother, unless there's some really significant dysfunction going on. Same thing happens to us, that the part of the process of growing up in Christ, John argues, is that God actually withdraws his presence from us, and it happens to all of us. It's part of the normal way in which he works; it’s to help us grow up just like a baby has to grow up to be a young boy or a young girl.

 So also, we have to grow up. The other process is God removing the sense of his imminence (imminence with an “i”),   imminence, his closeness that you could actually reach out and kind of touch him. It is an amazing, an amazing 10 hours. I'd really encourage it. If I could have you and your elders, your deacons, go through anything, that’s what you go through. 

The other major point that he makes is he says moralism is the great sin of the church. The greatest sin of the church is doing something good. I talked to Robin yesterday. She had an interesting discussion with Hayden, my 18-year-old. I said, okay…and she said ‘Hayden’s an absolute delight. He's great. Even as an 18-year-old, he's conversing, he’s talking, he's entering in,’ and she said, ‘I had to ask him if he's done something wrong’ (because Hayden, like all of us, when he does something wrong, tends to want to fix it by doing something right). That's moralism, right? You know, you offend your spouse, and you go out and you buy him something. What John is going to encourage you to do is sit among the weeds, is his expression, sit among the weeds. It's an expression from Teresa of Avila or Avile, something like that. The point is that when you and I sin, it's just the tip of the iceberg. The real issue is much lower in the surface. I'm mixing my metaphors, but to sit among the weeds, the weeds are all the sins in your life. And when you commit a sin or when you find yourself sinning, you need not to do something good, but to sit down amongst the weeds and to realize that your sin is much worse than you can understand it to be.

 It's much worse than what you just did. It is only then and there that you will fully understand God's love. Because God doesn't love you because you look pretty good. God loves you despite the fact that you're rotten to the core. You and I are. While we are new creatures, our depravity still extends to all parts of our being, right? When we sin, we need to stop, and we need to look and realize what we just did was just the tip of the iceberg. There's actually a lot more and God knows it. And he died for us, and he loves us…different concept, isn't it? It's very, very powerfully delivered. I would encourage you to do it. So that's a situation in which God withdraws his presence. It's a good thing. But for a new believer who doesn't confess sin and there's relational barriers, that's not a good thing. And they need to get back to confession. (Class member: How long are we supposed to do that, and you do that before or after confession?) Dr. Mounce: Oh yeah, you confess it right away. But see, if I did something to offend Robin, it's not to say I did something to hurt Robin. It's that I'm the kind of person that would hurt his wife. If I've hurt her to one area, there's probably a deep problem that gave rise to that. If I snapped at her, for example (I'm going to put it in subjunctive), if I would snap at her, if I might snap at her, you just don’t say, ‘oh I’m sorry I snapped, because that's not what Robin cares about. What Robin cares about is, ‘why did you do that? What's going on in your heart that you would respond to me in that way?’ So, you confess your sin, but you realize that there's more going on than just that one action.

 (Class member: It almost sounds like what some people say, well, if you tell a lie, you’re a liar.) Dr. Mounce: If you tell a lie repeatedly, you're a liar. (Class member:  So if you snap at your wife, and then you asked her for forgiveness, does that make you a snapper?) Dr. Mounce …I think there is certainly a difference between isolated events and character, right? I could see you not quite stopping at a signal, and a policeman pulls you over and you protest your innocence, and in the process your kids in the backseat know that you're not completely telling the truth. And so, you're going to have to have a discussion with them.   And you say, ‘look, I'm not a liar. I don't know why I did that.’ Well, at one level, you are a liar. I mean, that's why I was kind of trying to backtrack a little. At one level, you are a liar…I think stories about what kids hear in our cars are especially powerful, aren't they? I was driving to Gordon Conwell one day. The roads in New England where we lived are incredibly curvy. They’re old carriage trails, horse trails they paved over. And so there's a whole set of rules in New England that don't apply anywhere else. Left turners have the right way. If you ever driving north of Boston, just beware left turners have the right of way. Because if you don't give left turns the right of way, traffic gets way backed up.

Anyway, we pulled up to one of these intersections, and it was really hard for people to get through. And I was probably late. Hayden was like five years old, and he rolls down the window, hangs halfway out the door, and screams at the top of his five-year-old…something like, ‘will you move it up there.’ Then he sat down, looked at me with a big grin on his face, like, ‘aren't you proud of me, Daddy?’ Well, what does that tell you about me? Yeah, I yell at people too much. So I wanted to clarify that new believers need to understand they have to learn to forgive, as hard as it is, and God will be patient with them. But if they don't do it, that relational wall’s going to come up. That's something different, that it's going to happen later on in their life. (Class member: Do we want them to sit amongst the weeds?) Dr. Mounce: Yeah, because it is only when…see, when I became a Christian, I was a really good kid. I hadn't raped or pillaged yet.  I was an eight-year-old kid. And this is the problem of multi-generational Christians, isn't it? You can almost always tell a first generation Christian because they've seen this dramatic change in their life. You have to go back four generations of my family to find a non-Christian; my great grandpa, somebody killed him in the woods, and nobody cared, and they left him there, he was such a rotten person. I mean, so you had to go quite a ways back. I don't have that kind of release like a first-generation Christian has. And yet,

so it's really important for people like me to sit among the weeds. What I do is that when I do something wrong, I have to stop and I have to say, ‘why did I do that? What is in me that led me to yell at that idiot driver, oh, that driver? What is it in me that…why was I envious’ or, you know, whatever be the case. So for multi-generational Christians, especially those of us that don't feel this dramatic change and become followers of Christ, we have to really sit among the weeds. Because otherwise, if you don't focus on it, you don't ever see it. And down deep…you know Martin Lloyd-Jones, you know the name? His two-volume book of sermons on the Sermon on the Mount is one of the very best things ever written. And I don't like reading other people's sermons as a general rule. There's something about working through his sermon and having the Holy Spirit work with it, and all that kind of stuff that makes for powerful preaching. You generally can't pick up someone else's sermon and preach it effectively. So, I don't tend to read other people's sermons. But Martin Lloyd-Jones, his sermons are the best thing I've ever, the best thing I ever read in the Sermon on the Mount. I found that I preach at the same pace that he preached. So, it took him to enough years to get to the sermon as well. The one thing that I could not preach because I didn't know if I really, I knew it was true, but I was fighting God on it, is where he says (he’s talking about people that get in your face and accuse you as the pastor of, you know, doing bad things and being a bad person,

you know, the stuff that happens, right...the stuff that happens, right? Okay…make sure I'm not the only one). And Lloyd Jones writes that the proper response is, ‘oh, if you only knew me, If you only knew my heart, you would realize that I'm a lot worse than you think I am. (Class member: It’s what Spurgeon said once.) Dr. Mounce: I don't remember him citing anyone, but I could see someone annoying like Spurgeon saying that, because we are a lot worse than anyone knows. We're a lot worse than our spouse knows, right? Robin and I have a fantastic, fantastic marriage going through the death of two children, and the ripping apart of the church and all that happens. Those are the things that either you get divorced, or your marriage is next to the Trinity, right? I mean, it’s how it feels. And we went the latter way, and we just got closer and closer and closer. So we have a great relationship. But, you know, there are things that go through my mind that I go, my goodness, where did that come from, and why? That would not be helpful if Robin knew that passed through my mind. She knows this stuff is going on, and stuff’s probably going   through her as well. So, we have to sit among the weeds. It's absolutely crucial, especially as pastors. You have to realize that there's junk going on down underneath. (Class member:  The tension which is there relating to the new converts is the maturity, and when we can emphasize this in their life, in their walk with God…). Dr. Mounce: And that's why I was wanting, I mean, I'm completely off track here. When it comes to new believers, I would not talk about any of the junko stuff, but I think you can say God has forgiven you more than you're ever going to have to forgive; be kind, tender-hearted, forgiving one another as God in Christ has forgiven you; that no matter what is done against you,

 it will never equal what you did against God. And if he can forgive, then you need to start learning to forgive. I think that's all you need to go with a new believer, other than to say if you don't, it's going to hurt your friendship with God. It's going to hurt it from your side, and the barriers are going to go up. That a fair way to say it? This is a breathtaking 10 hours. It really is. And it will annoy the b-gee bees out of you, whatever the b-gee bees are. We've given it to many, many, many people. 

Okay. We're going to move on. Lesson Six is on learning more about God. And the purpose of Lesson Six is to completely and totally overwhelm the new believer. It’s to create a picture of God that is so big that they can't even begin to fathom it. That's the purpose. Do you know the book by J.B. Phillips called Your God is Too Small? (Class member: Yes.) Dr. Mounce:  Okay, good. First half of that book is worth its weight in gold and far beyond. This is the J.B. Phillips who wrote that paraphrase of the Bible that’s so good. (Class member: J.B. Phillips?) Dr. Mounce: J.B. Phillips. But the book, Your God Is Too Small is, when I think of the top 10 books in my life, this is one of them; because I've been in a situation, in a Wesleyan situation, where over the years all the pressure had been on me to perform as a Christian. And this is part of the challenge, and certainly not all Wesleyans will do this, but it's part of the challenge of Wesleyan culture. There's so much pressure on you to perform. I left it, and I think I told you; we moved to Spokane.

I had been writing commercial software. We were just going to take a break from teaching, write software, and just take a breath and see what was going to happen. Found out that the company that had promised to sell the software had no intention of paying me. So, we're sitting up there with nothing. I mean, if you want to feel helpless, have a PhD in New Testament and no teaching job, you're not good for anything. Can't preach, can't do anything. The struggle that I went through was, over the years, without being aware of it…I had started shouldering more and more of the responsibility of taking care of myself. You know, I had to be my own rock. I had to be my own foundation, using Psalms language. It was really, really hard. I remember this book because it was one of my mom's favorite books, and I read it, and it was just a wonderful breath of fresh air. The whole point of the book is God is so immeasurably larger and more powerful and more loving and more holy and more pure than anything we can imagine. And you've got to keep your vision on God. You've got to keep God big, because life's difficult. But if you have a vision of a God who is all powerful, who is all knowing, and is all wise, that’s what gets us through, right? My wife got to…she did her baptism this morning and baptized this girl that she'd been walking with, and she said it was just an amazing experience. But in the girl's testimony, she made reference to a sermon that I preached to this church two years ago. In fact, it's happened quite a few times. It's pretty interesting. If you go to Discipleship Growing in Christ, there's a sermon series called The 52 Stories of the Bible.

You're more than welcome to steal this, by the way. I put up all my lecture notes, PowerPoints and everything, but I was concerned about biblical literacy. I wanted people to understand the grand scope of the Bible, the grand structure of the Bible, its major theological themes. And so I picked the 52 most important stories and retold them. The first one is the story of Creation and God. And that's the sermon that I preached, and a year and a half later she was still talking about it. And all that I did was I told the story of Genesis 1. It wasn't me. I painted the biblical picture of a God who was all wise and all-knowing and all powerful and all present. And it overwhelmed the people of the church. Where this actually came about was one of my best friends. I was a photography major in college at first, and my photography instructor became a very good friend of mine, and isn't a believer, but called me up one day and he said, ‘my son, (Mounce: I think his name's Eric) is 12. He needs to know what's in the Bible,’ because David was raised in a believing family. So he was raised knowing the Bible and he said, ‘Eric needs a Bible, but do you have one without all that Leviticus junk in it?’ And that's where I developed the expression “lost in Leviticus”. David didn't want his son to get lost in Leviticus. This is actually a project that I'm talking to International Bible Society about doing is getting the text of the 52 Stories and making them into a Reader's Digest Bible for non-Christians, or for new believers. This is what this Lesson Six is all about, is what that sermon is about, and that is simply painting a picture of the immensity of God. In the second half of the sermon, then, it’s how do we respond?

 And this is where in the sermon, in the New Believers curriculum, we talk about worship. And again, I was making fun of this, I think it was yesterday. But you know how much a nonbeliever who has not been raised in the church, or even a new believer has very little church experience. How much they feel when they walk in our churches and go, ‘what are you doing that for? Why?’ We open up a book? If you're a bit old fashioned (and this is an old-fashioned thing that I like), and you open up to number 628. At first you can tell it's music. In this day and age, you can read music, which most people can't (because it's all of the PowerPoints, but that’s another talk). But also in the back, we get something where there's no notes any longer, right? And one verse should be bold, and the other verse would be font, right? And also, if anyone opens it and were reading it, and you realize that you're supposed to read it, then all of a sudden you keep reading and everyone else is stopped, and the preacher keeps reading. Well, that's embarrassing. You know, for those of us raised in church, responsive to reading is natural. It's also one of the most important things we can do and things that we've lost, I think. But how must a new believer feel when they have no idea what worship is? The definition of worship that I use is that worship is the process of revelation and response. It's a very common definition. Usually, books on worship go to Isaiah 6, that God reveals something about himself. He's holy. Isaiah responds in a way that's appropriate: ‘woe is me from unclean man with unclean lips. I live among an unclean generation.’ God reveals himself as a forgiving God, and Isaiah accepts the touch of the coals on his lips that cleanses them of a sin. God reveals himself as a God who wants to work through his creation. And Isaiah responds, ‘send me, send me’ (one of the 52 sermons is on Isaiah 6. We know, at least we're supposed to know, that worship is the process of revealing God and us responding. That's why the responsive of reading is so good, because the bold print is the revelation of God. The regular font print is the people's response to the revelation of God. That's what worship is. I don't know how you do it in your churches. Much to the older people, some of the older people's consternation, I pushed the sermon much earlier in the hour than normal. We would sing about three songs and do some stuff to get ready, and then I would preach. And the reason we pushed it early is that if worship truly is revelation, response, the sermon is revelation. But how do you respond? And in my churches, we don't whoop. I mean, there's nothing built in my tradition for people to say “amen”. Here’s Swedish Baptists, scared to death to move, to respond. And if you raise a hand, you're weird. I mean, I've had this discussion with people in my tradition, and they're offended when someone's doing this. And what I normally say is things like, ‘don't you understand?’ But that person is physically responding to the revelation of God. It is an act of worship. And what they cannot understand is how you can possibly listen to something like that and just not move.

 Some of this is a cultural thing, but that's what revelation is. And so that's what I'm doing in this lesson, is trying to help the new believer understand that's what worship is. That's why we invest. We have a really expensive sound system in our church because my words were the clearest revelation of God in the service because it was expository preaching. And I wanted to make sure everyone heard every word I said. But then we had comfortable chairs so that people wouldn't get sore listening and detach from the service. That's why the worship leader worked so hard to get his singers to enunciate, the lost art of enunciation. Because if you're up there singing and no one can understand your words, is anybody worshiping?  No words, no worship. In this day and age of poor diction, I think you just got to put the words up on the screen. Anyway, I'm going a bit off the topic, but that's what goes on here. (Unintelligible comments by class member.) Dr. Mounce: When we moved to Washougal, we wanted to pick a church that was considerably different. And Four Square is really outside of our comfort zone because of all the dancing and all the shouting and all of the praying at the same time. The pastor loves it when everyone… 500 people praying loudly…well, 499 (the one Swedish Baptist guy hasn’t learned to open up his mouth yet). It's terrifying to someone coming out of my tradition, but it's healthy as all get out. (Class member: We said we praise go up.) (Another class member:  Blessings come down.) Dr. Mounce: When praises go up, blessings come down.

 I’ll tell my pastor that; he'll like that. Let me show you...oh. here it is. Hey, you guys, under Discipleship Growing in Christ, there is a wonderful three-hour class on worship. I would make sure every single person who's ever up front leading worship in your church goes through this. The speaker is Gary Parrot, is one of my best friends. He was a professor at Gordon Conwell when I was there. Very interesting fellow. He married a Korean gal named Holly, and he served for 20 years as a pastor in a Korean church. He's written a lot of songs that are appropriate for a Korean context. He understands things about worship that I have never seen before. The depth of his understanding, because he has the academic side and he has the practical side, and not many people have both. You’ll all really, really enjoy this. Perhaps more importantly, your worship team members might, for a new, deeper level, really understand what they're doing up there. Worship is revelation and response. Things will come up, like, do your worship team members watch to see if the people are singing; just a real simple question like that. I actually take notes. I would sit in the front row on the side where I could watch the people, and if we sang a song and people didn't sing it, I'd sit down with the worship pastor afterwards and say, ‘okay, now, is it a bad song? Was it a hard song? Was it a new song?’ And he knew that if he couldn't get the people singing it within a couple of weeks, we had to dump the song, because if they're not singing, they're not worshiping, right? They're not singing.

It's a performance. And all that stuff is wrapped up in this class. I really encourage you to do that. We are under Discipleship Growing in Christ, and it's down there under the category What Jesus Means to Me; it's called Worship. It's really important to, I think, to bring the new believer in and to help them understand. (Class member: He has several sermons under Worship.) Dr. Mounce: Well, he has…yeah, this is a three-hour class. If you go under Leadership, here's a 24-hour class on Worship. So that is his seminary class at Gordon Conwell on Worship. And if you're desperate, you won't hurt my feelings if you don't, but if you go to my personal site and click on Sermons, some of my other sermons are downloaded here. They're all my sermons on worship. I wanted to take Gary’s stuff and preach it, and it took me seven sermons, and I got about only about halfway through what Gary said. But anyway, just some resources. I get to preach at our church, July (the last Sunday in July), and I’m preaching Psalm 107, which is, outside of Isaiah 6, is one of the best things for showing people what worship is, because it's a repetition of four things that God has done, and how the psalmist responds in praise. Anyway, just different resources. 

And let me say this one thing, and we're going to stop. One of the major things that happens in the New Testament, I don't make this point here, but everything is localized in terms of worship in the Old Testament, isn't it? It has to happen in Jerusalem. So, when the Northern Kingdom sets up two new centers of worship, it was about as bad as bad could be.

 Now the Temple is where God's presence was in a very special way, and everything is localized in the Old Testament. What happens in the New Testament is that everything is universalized. For example, you can see Peter and Paul using language that only was used at the Temple and using it for everyday life. You have the famous passage in John 4 that is, you know, it's not here, over there. It's in spirit and in truth. That's why you had to be really careful about calling your church a worship center. It is a corporate worship center, okay? Worship is something that happens every day, all day for a follower of Jesus Christ. That is not an altar up front. The altar’s the Cross. There is no theological altar in New Testament times, and I think a lot of our language is Old Testament language when it comes to worship, and it misses the point of the New Testament, that our worship is done 24/7. Wherever you are, as you hear about God, as you experience God, as you respond to God, that’s what worship is. And it's not localized at all. I just think that's a thing that we need to inform our language. Alright. Take a break. And if you have any questions on this stuff we can talk about, we come back.