Dr Paul Allen

Scripture doesn’t use the phrase “Ten Commandments.” Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5 record Yahweh’s “Ten Words” (Exod 34:28; Deut 4:13). These texts contain imperatives, but, like the rest of the Torah, they include declarations, warnings, and promises. That multiplicity of speech acts is better captured by the phrase “Ten Words.” The First of the Ten Words speaks to the question of whom we worship: We are to have no other gods before the face of Yahweh. The Second Word had to do with how we worship: We are to approach God as He commands us to approach Him. The Second Word needs to be more frequently understood. The question isn't whether physical things, man-made things, can become vehicles for God's self-communication, places and moments of communion with God. The question is, which things and moments has God given as vehicles for His self-gift. Nowhere does God promise to be present through pictures or statues. The Second Word has also gotten tangled up in debates about whether...

As Paul told the church at Colossae, as those who “have been raised with Christ,” we are to “seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God” (Col. 3:1). In worship, we are to heed his admonition when he says, “Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth” (Col. 3:2). Our worship is “vertical” as we glorify and commune with our triune God. Yet, we must not miss the needed “horizontal” nature of worship. Setting our minds on things above and not on earthly things does not mean we are to ignore the others around us who are worshipping with us. In worship, we are not only to fulfil the great commandment to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. We are also to love our neighbour who is there with us in worship. As the congregation arrives on Sunday morning, it is gathering for corporate worship. Thus, we need to be sure that we are putting the corporate into our corporate worship! In looking up, we must also look ...

 Malachi 1:6–14 “When you offer blind animals in sacrifice, is that not evil? And when you offer those that are lame or sick, is that not evil?” (Mal. 1:8). Some of the most heated debates in church history have been associated with worship, and this should not surprise us. People tend to argue passionately about the things that are most important to them, and worship is perhaps the most important labour of the church. Men and women engage in debates about worship because, consciously or not, they recognize the importance of worship issues. We do not have to look into the debates concerning worship very long before we see people draw lines regarding the church’s liturgy. Some Christians argue for highly structured services, where everything is laid out in print precisely for the worshipers to follow.  Others think worship services should have more of an informal structure. Often this argument takes the form of whether it is better to have liturgical or nonliturgical worship, “...

Christian worship takes place in the context of a covenant relationship between us and God. It is vital that we remember the roles we each take in that relationship: He is the Lord, and we are the servants. Therefore, worship should be an extremely humbling act, reminding us of our own creatureliness. After all, the god we are most tempted to worship besides the living and true God is the god of self. But real worship reorients us and corrects that idolatrous impulse by making it primarily about God and what He desires. Does the corporate worship we engage in on a weekly basis impress on us our status as servants of the living God? Or do we implicitly think that we are in control, that we can call the shots in this meeting with God? I think there are at least three things that we should ask to evaluate if our worship meets the biblical criteria of asserting the supremacy of our covenant King. WHO TALKS FIRST? The first question is simply this: Who talks first? Is it us or God? It ought...

This Sunday, I experienced a contrast between the beautiful worship I had experienced earlier in the day — the holy presence of God, the purity of the Word, the glory of the Spirit — and the filthiness of this carnal world. I turned on the TV when I arrived home from church. The headlines were not only filled with bad news. They were also filled with venom and malice. They were meant to provoke and enflame and divide. They were earthy, carnal, “of this world.” They were defiling. We are Manipulated by Biased News Let us drink from healthy, pure, beautiful, and glorious streams. Not only will we ourselves thrive and bear much fruit, but we will be able to give nourishing drink to others as well. The truth be told, and more than we would like to admit, we are manipulated and defiled by the news — by which I do not simply mean the latest reporting of the facts. I mean the biased, partisan news that bombards us every day. It does not build our faith. It does not bring us closer to God. It ...

God means to be worshiped, but not in ignorance. God wants to be known and enjoyed and praised for who he is. This is why he doesn’t just demand the worship of his creatures but first reveals himself to us so that we might know him, and therefore delight in him. Theology, our study of God, serves doxology, our worship of God. Jonathan Edwards, known for both his Reformed orthodoxy and his creative expression of it, helps us with a fresh way to approach God’s attributes, in service of our worship. From a few basic truths — God is simple, God is incomprehensible, God is happy, and God creates — we see more of what God is and, by his grace, are freed to marvel at him even more. God Is Simple Begin with the statement, “God is simple.” Understanding divine simplicity is not simple; it’s complicated. Think of it this way: created things are made up of parts; we can break them down into things more fundamental than they are. A person is composed of body and soul. We can distinguish what you a...

  Exodus 15:19–21  “Miriam the prophetess, the sister of Aaron, took a tambourine in her hand, and all the women went out after her with tambourines and dancing. And Miriam sang to them: ‘Sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously; the horse and his rider he has thrown into the sea’ ” (vv. 20–21). The Song of Moses did not belong only to Moses, but all the people of Israel sang it, as indicated in Exodus 15:1. But how did Moses teach it to the whole company of Israelites, which numbered six hundred thousand men, plus their wives and children, plus many people who had joined the nation in leaving Egypt (see 12:37–38)? Today’s passage gives us at least part of the answer. After mentioning what happened to Pharaoh’s army at the Red Sea one more time, Moses says that the women, led by his sister Miriam, sang and danced (15:19–20). Specifically, Moses says that Miriam sang the song to the women of Israel (v. 21), and the sense here is that she was teaching them the song by s...

Serve the LORD with gladness! Come into his presence with singing! —Psalm 100:2 As spring draws near, it is as though all creation bursts into life. Flowers bloom, trees blossom, grass grows, and weeds shoot up like they have been fertilized. Thus, it is time to break out the weed-eater, which soon leads to firing up the blower. These gas-powered instruments for beautifying the yard, however, cannot crank with just one tug on the pull cord. The engine requires priming, which involves pushing a small pump to deliver fuel, making the engine ready for combustion. Our hearts are like those cold engines. To be ready for worship, fired in our souls to give God the praise due to His name, we need shots of truth, heart-focusing facts about the greatness of the Lord and His grace, so that our cold hearts would be roused to action. Psalm 100 can be such a primer for us. Psalm 100 is the climax of a collection of psalms focused on the Lord as King. From the declaration of Psalm 93:1, “The Lord re...

Robert Murray M’Cheyne lay on his sickbed in January 1839. Illness had punctuated much of his life and would eventually claim him at the tender age of twenty-nine. Eternity was ever before him in such seasons. Thus, on January 12, 1839, he wrote to a ministerial friend: “May your mind be solemnized, my dear friend, by the thought that we are ministers but for a time, that the Master may summon us to retire into silence. . . . Make all your services tell for eternity.” Worship is the main theme in the symphony that is the Christian life. Lord’s Day meetings are the center of our experience, for it’s in gathered worship that we encounter the triune God through His Word, sacraments, and prayer. When the saints gather on Sunday, eternity kisses the earth. WORSHIP THAT UNDERSTANDS THE REALITY OF ETERNITY What might happen to our services if they told for eternity? At least four things would be true. I. We would enjoy God’s presence . One great mystery of the Christian’s experience is that w...

In their recent book Good Faith: Being a Christian When Society Thinks You’re Irrelevant and Extreme, David Kinnaman and Gabe Lyons document that 84 percent of Americans believe that “enjoying yourself is the highest goal of life.” Further, 86 percent believe that to enjoy yourself you must “pursue the things you desire most.” And 91 percent affirm this statement: “To find yourself, look within yourself.” In our day, the Westminster Catechism answer has been inverted: “the chief end of man is to glorify and enjoy himself forever.” One could even make a case that self-worship is the world’s fastest-growing religion. It is certainly the world’s oldest (just read Gen. 3). Moreover, this religion lies beneath many of the most hot-button social and political issues of our day. Six Commandments These are the sacred commandments of this ancient and still-trending world religion: Your mind is the source and standard of truth, so no matter what, trust yourself. #theanswersarewithin Your emotion...

Means of grace refers to the divinely established ways we encounter and commune with God as we learn and experience His grace through Christ’s redemption.  These include the ability to hear the Word as it is read (1 Tim. 4:13) and proclaimed (Rom.10:14–17),  The avenue to God in prayer (Col. 4:13) and supplication through Christ (John 14:13),  The sacraments or “visible words” of the Lord’s Supper (1 Cor. 11:26) and baptism (Acts 22:16; Eph. 5:26).  But do we think about these means as benefits themselves, reflecting the level of intimacy and access we have to God won for us by Christ and His covenant?  One way to appreciate these means is to reflect on the parallel means of grace before the era of the New Testament church. When we see the parallels, it can make us even more grateful for the benefits of the new covenant won by Christ’s work. Old covenant worship looked different from new covenant worship.   When reading Exodus and Leviticus, perhaps some of...

A likely outcome of his ministry ended with him upon a plate. A generation before, on November 20, 1839, the first pair of formal missionaries to the New Hebrides were killed and eaten within minutes of their arrival upon the shore. Even still, John G. Paton, whom Spurgeon later dubbed “King of the Cannibals,” traveled as a missionary to the islands with his wife and son, facing odds and suffering only Christ with him could conquer. And Christ, has promised to be with him (Matthew 28:20), achieved a great feat. Less than fifty years after the murder of the first missionaries, Paton would reflect on the widespread work of God on the islands (including the entire island of Aniwa coming to Christ), writing, “Thus was the New Hebrides baptized with the blood of martyrs; and Christ thereby told the whole Christian world that he claimed these islands as his own” (The Autobiography of the Pioneer Missionary to the New Hebrides, 75). From a people dead in their sins, who ate the flesh of their...

You shall not make for yourself a carved image or any likeness. (Exodus 20:4) We may not fashion our own golden calves today, but the second commandment’s prohibition of “carved images” remains surprisingly relevant to how we approach God in our daily lives and in our weekly corporate worship. Very little time passed between Israel receiving the “Ten Words” at Mount Sinai and then flamboyantly breaking the second commandment.  In Exodus, we find God’s people not only stumbling right out of the gate — grumbling shockingly soon (Exodus 15:24) after their dramatic deliverance, through the Red Sea (Exodus 14–15) — but then, immediately on the heels of receiving God’s law, they replay the fall of humanity by breaking the covenant almost as soon as it was inaugurated. The first and second “words,” or commandments, of Exodus 20 form a pair: (1) no other gods and (2) no carved images. The first deals with whom we worship (the true God alone), while the second concerns how: not in our own p...