Sermon: The Divine Liturgy Pt. 3 - Liturgy As Love Story

The Divine Liturgy Pt. 3 – Liturgy as Love Story
Sunday, April 13^th, 2025
Christ Covenant Church – Centralia, WA
Song of Solomon 1:15–2:4

BRIDEGROOM:
¹⁵Behold, thou art fair, my love; behold, thou art fair; Thou hast doves’ eyes.

BRIDE:
¹⁶Behold, thou art fair, my beloved, yea, pleasant: Also our bed is green.
¹⁷The beams of our house are cedar, And our rafters of fir.
¹I am the rose of Sharon, And the lily of the valleys.

BRIDEGROOM:
²As the lily among thorns, So is my love among the daughters.

BRIDE:
³As the apple tree among the trees of the wood, So is my beloved among the sons. I sat down under his shadow with great delight, And his fruit was sweet to my taste. ⁴He brought me to the banqueting house, And his banner over me was love.

Prayer

Father, we thank you for the gift that is worship. The gift of hearing your voice, of being given in Scripture the words to respond to your voice in faith and in love. And so teach us now to become true worshippers of the true God, for there is none other than You. We ask this in Jesus’ name, Amen.

Introduction

What was the very first thing that God said was not good?

• It was Adam alone in the garden. It says in Genesis 2:18, “And the Lord God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; [therefore] I will make him an help meet for him.” Other translations say, “I will make him a helper comparable to him” (NKJV), or “I will make him a helper corresponding to him.”
  • The idea is that Adam needs something, someone, that is like him in certain respects, but also unlike him in other respects. Adam needs a helper that is suitable, fitting, and complimentary to him, someone that can supply and make up for what he lacks. And so, God puts Adam into a deep sleep, a happy death, and he takes one of his ribs, and He builds/forms/creates from Adam’s side Woman.
• Now what kind of help is Eve to Adam?
  • First of all, she is his physical compliment. Without woman’s reproductive organs and powers, there are no children. There is no you and me, there is no “be fruitful and multiply,” there is no future for the human race.
  • But Woman is not merely Man’s physical compliment, she is also something more because humanity is something more than what is physical. Unlike plants and animals that also generate and procreate each according to their kind, man is made in the image and likeness of God (Gen. 1:27). That is to say, man and woman have an immortal, spiritual, intellectual soul that is capable of knowing God, speaking to God, and even being united to God.
    • It says in 2 Peter 1:4, God has “given unto us exceedingly great and precious promises: that by these ye might be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust.”
  • This participation in the divine nature (union with God) is the chief end of man. It is our telos, the ultimate why for God creating Adam and fashioning woman from his side.
  • God did not want Adam and Eve to just have physical offspring, he wanted them to have spiritual offspring (disciples!). God wants the world to be filled with living breathing knowing images of the Holy Trinity, who exercise dominion and authority and bring the beauty and glory of God to all creation.
    • As the very last line of the Psalter declares, “Let everything that has breath praise the Lord. Praise the Lord!” (Psalm 150:6).
  • And so the spiritual reason God created woman, was so that Adam could have a liturgical companion. Someone to talk to. Someone to talk about God with. Someone who could join Adam in singing praises unto God for giving them being. Adam needed a wife so that together they could worship God in a more glorious way than Adam could have alone.
• God says, “it is not good that man should be alone.” Heneeds someone to sing the high notes, a helper to sing in unison at times, and to sing the harmony at other times, someone to sing responsively back and forth, to give to God the glory due unto his name in the beauty of holiness (Ps. 29:2). That is the ultimate spiritual reason for the creation of woman, so that humanity could more fully glorify God and enjoy Him forever.

In our text this morning we have illustrated for us this back-and-forth love song between Bridegroom and Bride. In its original historical context these words are placed upon the lips of Solomon and His Shunamite bride, but of course what Solomon and the Shunamite woman are actually singing about is Christ’s love for the Church, and God’s love for the human soul.

• And so traditionally you were not allowed to even read the Song of Solomon until you were a grown and mature adult, who had already mastered all the other books of the Bible. And the main reason for this is because the Song of Solomon is describing the most intimate spiritual union with God, using ideas, actions, and images taken from the most intimate physical union that can be: marital love.
  • And so I have chosen only a sample of verses that are (I think) appropriate for public reading, to illustrate this one point: that our worship service, our liturgy, is a love story that is told in myriad ways. Our worship service is a divinely inspired love song. It is the drama of creation, fall, redemption, restoration, and consummation. It is the history of Israel, it is the story of the gospel reenacted and set to music. It is the sacrificial system with its order of offerings, with its procession from the outer court to the altar, to the holy place, to the holy of holies. It is the ascension of Moses to God on Mount Sinai. It is the descent of heavenly choirs come down to renew and remake the earth.
  • Like the Song of Solomon, our worship service is a back-and-forth dialog between Bride and Bridegroom, between God and Man, between Christ and the Church, between Minister and Congregation.
• This is the most basic pattern for Christian worship that the Bible gives to us from Genesis to Revelation. There is a call, there is a response, and there is invitation to eat together.
• And so the purpose of my sermon this morning, is to help you see and notice just a few of these biblical patterns in our worship.
  • The amazing thing about imitating God’s patterns is that they naturally form connections you never saw before, connections that interlock and interweave and mutually indwell interpret one another. And so it is not just one pattern that you can find in the liturgy, there are like Ezekiel’s vision of God’s glory, wheels within wheels, patterns within patterns, gospel all the way down.
  • And so I want use the rest of our time to give you a narrative tour of our liturgy. Why do we worship the way we do, with the words we do, in the order we do?

Covenant Renewal – An Overview

• So let’s start with an overview of the broadest organizing principle that we use to order our worship, and it is what we call Covenant Renewal. And if you look at page 11, I have listed for you there the 5 basic steps of the Covenant Renewal Pattern.
  • 1. Call to Worship: God calls us into His presence. We enter with joy and singing.
  • 2. Confession: God cleanses us of sin. We repent and profess our faith in Christ.
  • 3. Consecration: God teaches us His Word. We hear and obey.
  • 4. Communion: God feeds us. We commune with Christ and one another.
  • 5. Commission: God sends us back into the world renewed. We go forth to conquer by faith.
    • And you should notice that in all these instances, God is active doing something to us or for us, and We are also active responding to Him and for Him. As image bearers of God, our job is to mirror back to God in our own creaturely way what God has first given and spoken to us.
• Now where exactly do we find this pattern of covenant renewal in Scripture? There are many places, but I will highlight for you just four examples:
  • 1. Exodus 19-24 where God first enters into a covenant with Israel at Sinai.
  • 2. Leviticus 1-9 where God describes the sacrificial offerings and ordains the priests to ministry.
  • 3. 2 Chronicles 5-7 where Solomon dedicates The Temple.
  • 4. The whole book of Revelation, which is itself a vision of the heavenly liturgy that John sees in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day.
• Now to help us get this pattern in our mind, let me walk through just one example of it from the Levitical sacrificial system. Recall that Leviticus is all about, How do you get close to God without dying? This ritual begins with…
  • 1. God calling Aaron and his sons to worship Him (Lev. 8).
  • 2. God cleanses them by washing them in water and anointing them with oil. There is a baptism and a christening.
  • 3. God consecrates them through a series of animal sacrifices.
    • First a sin offering (Lev. 1:4),
    • Then a burnt offering, which is better translated as an ascension offering (lit. “a going up offering”). The idea is that the whole person is burned up and ascends as a living sacrifice and is transformed into smoke so that he can be united to God’s glory cloud. He joins the cloud of witnesses.
    • Third, having ascended to heaven in the burnt offering, you can now move to the 4^th stage of covenant making and renewal which is the eating.
  • 4. God communes with Aaron and his sons through the Peace Offering. This is the one offering the ordinary Israelite worshipper actually gets to eat together with God (and the priest).
  • 5. God commissions Aaron and his sons to the ministry.
    • We could also note that those three main sacrifices, the Sin offering, Ascension offering, and Peace offering, are a miniature form of the covenant renewal pattern.
      • The Sin offering signifies Confession.
      • The Ascension offering signifies Consecration.
      • The Peace offering signifies Communion.
      • This is that pattern within pattern, wheels within wheels idea.
• So with all that in mind, and now that we are alert to this pattern, let’s turn together to page 3 in our bulletin and walk through our own form of this covenant renewal service.

#1 – CALL TO WORSHIP

• Worship begins with God’s Minister calling out to the world, M: Let us rise and worship the Triune God.
  • As it says in Psalm 122:1, “Let us go into the house of the Lord”
    • This is the primordial call to all creation to prepare themselves to hear the voice of God.
  • In response the people stand up. For as God says to the prophet Ezekiel in Ezekiel 2:1, “Son of man, stand upon thy feet, and I will speak unto thee.” And as God says to Moses before causing His glory to pass by him, “Behold, there is a place by me, and thou shalt stand upon a rock.” (Ex. 33:21). And is it says in Psalm 122:2, “Our feet shall stand within thy gates, O Jerusalem.”
    • So now standing and ready within the gates of the New Jerusalem, we hear God’s voice. And what is the first word that God speaks to us when we are assembled?
• M: Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
  • Grace is the beginning of the Christian life, and Peace is the end of a life marked by divine mercy. And so in this opening blessing all the goodness of God’s works are comprehended, and all the persons of the One God are declared: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
  • Having received this blessing from the Triune God, we then enter into dialog with Him using His own divinely inspired songbook and prayerbook which is the Psalms.
• From the earliest days of the church and even going back before to Jewish worship prior to Christ, Psalms were selected and sung according to a Liturgical Festival Calendar.
  • Depending on which Christian tradition you are a part of (Anglican, Lutheran, Methodist, Episcopal, Presbyterian), the calendar might be more or less prominent in how the Psalms are selected.
  • Our practice at present is to follow the Lutheranlectionary which has selected Scripture readings for all the major Christian festivals (Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Easter, Pentecost, etc.).
• For example, today is Palm Sunday, the day in which we remember Jesus’ entrance into Jerusalem before his passion, and in the gospels we read, “And the multitudes that went before, and that followed, cried, saying, Hosanna to the Son of David: Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord; Hosanna in the highest” (Matt. 21:9).
  • And since that song of praise comes from Psalm 118:26, the church has customarily sung Psalm 118 on Palm Sunday.
  • Now the Psalms are songs remember, and God intended for these words to be sung, not necessarily just read back and forth to one another. And so in some congregations that are more musically mature than us, the Minister and the Congregation will actually chant these words back and forth to one another.
    • Or a cantor will sing one line, and the congregation will sing the other. We are not there yet, and I don’t know if we will ever get there, but given where we are as a congregation, we at least begin with reading God’s Word back and forth to one another, and then we sing a song that we do know after the prayer.
  • I should also note here that many of the Psalms are clearly written for this specific purpose of being sung back and forth to one another. Think of the constant refrain of Psalm 136, “For his mercy endures forever.” This is part of the divine dialog between Christ and the Church, the lover and the beloved. The first line gives the thought, and the second line responds to that thought and glorifies it. This is that mirroring that God embedded into Creation and into His Word.
• After we get God’s Holy Word onto our lips and into our mouths, I then offer an opening prayer of invocation based on whatever the Psalm is. And then that prayer concludes with a Trinitarian reflection that is also based on the Psalm.
  • Sometimes I compose these prayers myself, and other times I use or modify prayers from the ancient church.
• After the prayer we have our opening song. Joe Stout is our Chief Musician and together we set the music for each week. I probably need to a do a whole sermon on music and singing later in this series to explain the biblical principles that guide our song selection.
  • For those who have been around for awhile, you know that we prioritize heavily singing the Psalms, and if we are not singing a Psalm, we are singing other portions of Scripture or hymns that closely paraphrase the Scriptures. This morning we sang Isaiah 2:2-5.
• So that is the first part of Covenant Renewal Worship, and the mood we want to set is summarized by Psalm 100:4, “Enter into his gates with thanksgiving, And into his courts with praise: Be thankful unto him, and bless his name.” So usually our first song will try to emphasize these elements of praise, thanksgiving, and blessing.

#2 – CONFESSION

• This section begins with a word of exhortation that is as God washing us, cleansing us, and sometimes anointing us with a rebuke.
  • David says in Psalm 141:5, “Let the righteous strike me; It shall be a kindness. And let him rebuke me; It shall be as excellent oil; Let my head not refuse it. For still my prayer is against the deeds of the wicked.”
• So this is the time for you to cleanse your mind of impurity, to unburden your conscience before the Lord, to let God rebuke you, correct you, and pour oil upon your head.
  • Many charismatic and Baptist churches have an altar call at the end, but we place our altar call here, and all of us do it! This is the call to repent and believe the gospel, kneel down and say the sinner’s prayer.
  • Every week we recite a portion of David’s great prayer of repentance after he committed adultery with Bathsheba and murdered Uriah. And so Psalm 51 is our great reminder that no matter how great our sins might be, God’s mercy is greater, and if we confess our sins and accept the consequences, God delights to put away our sins, and restore to us the joy of his salvation.
• After our altar call, I announce to you that “the enemies of God are brought down and fallen,” and that includes the sins you just confessed.
  • And so now with “a pure heart, a good conscience, and sincere faith” (1 Tim. 1:5), you can get up and say the words of Psalm 20:8 in boldness, “we are risen and stand upright.”
  • To this I then assure you of God’s love and forgiveness. To which you then respond with “Thanks be to God” and then we all sing the Doxology.
  • If we compared our liturgy with the liturgy of heaven in Revelation, we would find that immediately after God calls the seven churches to repentance, John looks up and sees an open door in heaven, and 24 elders singing praises to God. That is the heavenly choir that we are joining when we sing the Doxology.
  • We lift our hands because Psalm 134:2 says, “Lift up your hands in the sanctuary, And bless the Lord.”
    • And again, in Psalm 63:3-4, “Because thy lovingkindness is better than life, My lips shall praise thee. Thus will I bless thee while I live: I will lift up my hands in thy name.”
• Now after we praise God for his grace and forgiveness, we remember the words of Romans 10:10 which says, “For with the heart one believes unto righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.”
  • And so it is not enough to just confess our sins and believe in our hearts, we need to “confess the Lord Jesus” (Rom. 10:9). And so together we profess our faith publicly, openly, and with one voice.
    • Jesus says in Luke 12:8, “Whosoever shall confess me before men, him shall the Son of man also confess before the angels of God.”
    • And likewise in Matthew 10:32, “Whosoever therefore shall confess me before men, him will I confess also before my Father which is in heaven.
• And so because we want Jesus to confess us before His Father, we confess Him before all.
• Moreover, by using the words of the Nicene Creed, we distinguish ourselves from the many heretical sects that use the name Jesus and profess to be Christians, but which are in substance nothing of the sort.
  • The Nicene Creed (written 381 AD) is also the most universally recited creed, and it connects us in spirit and in truth with our brothers and sisters around the globe who are also on this very day professing the same faith.
  • This is one of the ways we obey Ephesians 4:3-6, which says, “endeavor to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called in one hope of your calling; one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all.”
  • We want our children to grow up with the truths of the Creed inscribed upon their heart because this is as Jude says, “the common salvation…that [we] should earnestly contend for, the faith which was once delivered unto the saints” (Jude 1:3).

#3 – CONSECRATION

• Having offered to God our Sin Offering by Confession, we then proceed to the Burnt Offering/Ascension Offering, which is where God consecrates us by His Word.
  • Remember that the Ascension Offering involves killing the animal with a knife, cutting it up, washing its inward parts, and then placing it into God’s consuming fire to be transformed into smoke.
  • We learn in Hebrews 4:12 that this is what Christ through His Word does to us: “For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any twoedged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.”
• The readings from the Old and New Testament, the Preaching of the Sermon, and the recitation of the Ten Commandments are God’s knife cutting us open and discerning our inward thoughts.
• The prayers of thanksgiving and petition are how God washes our minds from impure desires and teaches us to desire and want what He wants.
• The prayers of intercession for our civil leaders, religious leaders, and those suffering affliction around the world are a plea for God to rearrange, convict, comfort, and consecrate all creation.
• And so it is in prayer and through prayer, by hearing the Word read and sung and preached, that God changes us and consecrates us, but only if we are good and fertile soil.
• Remember Jesus parable about the seed and the soil (Mark 4, Matthew 13, Luke 8). The seed is the word, your heart/mind is the soil.
  • Of the four different soils in which the seed is sown, only one bears fruit 30, 60 and 100-fold. The rest have the seed stolen by the devil, they forget. Some have the seed choked out by the weeds of worldly desires and distractions. And some spring up with enthusiasm for a moment but then fall away when life gets hard.
  • So this time of Consecration can be a fruitful time but only if you are good soil. And if you are not, sometimes this time becomes how God changes you from bad soil to good soil.
• So if you want to experience this consecration that leads to abundant fruitfulness, to being assimilated into God’s glory cloud, then heed Jesus’ parable of the soils. It’s one of those few parables that is included in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, so it is of triple importance!

The Sanctus/Benedictus

Now the final two steps of Covenant Renewal are Communion and the Commission, and since those are more self-explanatory, I will leave to you to meditate on how they correspond to the various sacrifices and patterns in Scripture. But in closing I want to introduce and explain a new addition to our liturgy which forms the bridge between the Consecration and Communion, and that is the Offertory and Sanctus.

• Our usual custom has been that after the Ten Commandments (pg. 11) we sing an Offertory song (pg. 12), during which Kirby, one of our deacons, walks down the aisle carrying the Offering Box. We then ask for God’s blessing on our tithes and the offerings and transition to the Communion Homily.
• This morning, we are going to be adding the singing of the Sanctus (which we have recently learned), after that offertory prayer. So you will see at the bottom of page 12 we will remain standing after I pray, “in Jesus’ name, Amen.” And then the piano will begin, and we’ll sing the Holy Holy Holy of Isaiah 6 that is followed by the Benedictus from Psalm 118, “Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord…”
• And then while we are singing, the elders and deacons who will be distributing communion are going to process down the aisle with the bread and the wine and set it here on the pulpit (Word and Sacrament).
  • And the symbolism of this procession is that of Jesus entering Jerusalem on Palm Sunday while these very words of Psalm 118 were being sung. Why is Jesus coming to Jerusalem in the name of the Lord? So that he can offer his body and blood upon the altar of the cross for our salvation.
• One of the amazing things about theSanctus is that the church has been singing this song at this moment in the service right before communion for over 1,600 years.
  • We find it in the Ancient Greek Liturgies of St. John Chrysostom, of St. Basil, of St. James. We find it in the Latin Liturgies, we find it in the English liturgies. Even Martin Luther the great liturgical reformer placed the Sanctus here in the German liturgy.
• And that is because Communion with God through the death of Christ is the high point, the climax, of our worship. Therefore, we ought to have a song of praise as loud and as glorious as the Sanctus here to prepare ourselves for the Lord’s coming to dine with us.

Conclusion

• The Life of Jesus is a life of covenant renewal. He came to bring us the New Covenant! And so not only does our worship service mirror the Levitical sacrificial system, it also mirrors the life of Jesus:
  • 1. The Call to Worship corresponds to the birth of Christ. For Jesus is the very Word from the Father, and the one who of whom it says in Matthew 1:15, “Out of Egypt have I called my son.”
  • 2. The Confession of Sin corresponds to the circumcision and baptism of Christ, who undergoes these ritual cleansings not for any sins of his own but for us and to fulfill all righteousness.
  • 3. The Consecration corresponds to the ministry of Christ, his teaching, his preaching, his praying, his healing and consecrating those in need.
  • 4. The Communion corresponds to the Last Supper, to His Passion and death and triumph over the grave.
  • 5. The Commission (with its charge and benediction) corresponds to Jesus’ Great Commission and His ascension on high, and the pouring out of the Holy Spirit. For as it says in John 20:21-22, “Then said Jesus to them again, Peace be unto you: as my Father hath sent me, even so send I you. And when he had said this, he breathed on them, and saith unto them, Receive ye the Holy Ghost.”
• So behold Jesus everywhere in the worship service. Because there is no true worship apart from Him. In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.