Sermons

The Public Reading of Scripture: God Addresses His People

{ "description": "In this sermon, Pastor Jared Pulliam explores the vital role of Scripture in the public worship life of the church, focusing on 1 Timothy 4:14. Drawing from the Apostle Paul's instructions to Timothy, Jared emphasizes the pastoral priority of the public reading, exhortation, and teaching of God's Word as central to Sunday gatherings. He highlights how this practice, rooted in Jewish synagogue tradition and early Christian worship, remains essential for grounding believers in the truth of the gospel amid a world saturated with competing voices and ideologies.\n\nPastor Jared reflects on the unique significance of Sunday worship as a corporate expression of praise and spiritual formation, where the Word of God is proclaimed to reorient hearts and minds toward Jesus Christ. He underscores the necessity of regular, faithful engagement with Scripture to combat forgetfulness and spiritual drift, encouraging the congregation to embrace the public reading and teaching of the Bible as a means of grace that refreshes, convicts, and transforms. The sermon invites listeners to recognize the power of God's Word to sustain faith, foster godliness, and prepare believers to live faithfully in a challenging cultural context.", "transcript": "Good morning, Trinity Church. My name is Samuel. I'm a member of Trinity, and I also serve as one of the pastors to the members that make up Trinity Church. This morning, I'm here to introduce to you someone who some of you may know. Many of you may not know Jared, but we have Jared Pulliam with us this morning, and Jared Pulliam has a long history with Trinity. In 2013, Jared was serving as an elder to the members of Trinity Church, and at that time, out of Trinity Church, he was the founding pastor of Christ Church Selwood. Jared has served faithfully as a staff pastor at Christ Church Selwood since then, and he is here this morning to faithfully bring God's Word to us. So, Jared, thank you for your many years of faithful ministry in Portland, and thank you for bringing God's Word to us this morning. Let me pray for you and for us, and then please do that very thing.\n\nFather God, we come before you, Lord, and we praise you for the fact that you are not a distant or far-off God. You have revealed yourself to us. You have made yourself known to us through your Son, Jesus Christ, and through your Word that you have given to us, Lord. We pray for Jared this morning as he brings us your Word. Would you empower him through your Spirit? May he speak that which is of you, Lord. May you use your Word to penetrate, to convict, to transform our lives, to be more like Christ for your glory. In your Son's name we pray, amen.\n\nThank you, Jared.\n\nWell, good morning, everybody. It's good to be with you today. Last time I was at Trinity, I didn't need reading glasses. This time I do, so time marches on. But we're going to begin this morning, we're going to focus our attention for our study today on 1 Timothy 4:13, but I think what I'll do just to start with is I'll read all of chapter 4, and then we'll have a prayer, and then we'll study that together. So let's hear God's Word from 1 Timothy chapter 4.\n\n\"Now the Spirit expressly says that in later times some will depart from the faith by devoting themselves to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons, through the insincerity of liars whose consciences are seared, who forbid marriage and require abstinence from food that God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and know the truth. For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, for it is made holy by the Word of God and prayer. If you put these things before the brothers, you will be a good servant of Christ Jesus, being trained in the words of the faith and of the good doctrine that you have followed. Have nothing to do with the irreverent silly myths. Rather train yourself for godliness, for while bodily training is of some value, godliness is of value in every way as it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come. The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance. For to this end we toil and strive because we have our hope set on the living God who is the Savior of all people, especially of those who believe. Command and teach these things. Let no one despise you for your youth, but set the believers an example in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith, in purity. While I come, devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture, to exhortation, to teaching. Do not neglect the gift you have which was given you by prophecy when the council of elders laid their hands on you. Practice these things, immerse yourself in them, so that all may see your progress. Keep a close watch on yourself and on the teaching, persist in this, for by so doing you will save both yourself and your hearers.\"\n\nThis is the word of the Lord.\n\nThanks be to God.\n\nLet's go before God just for a brief prayer and then we'll study together.\n\nOur Father in heaven, as we come unto your word this morning, we trust that by the ministry of your Holy Spirit, your truth permeates our hearts. We need that this morning, Lord. We need to hear you, we need to hear you speak to us, we need to hear your word point us in a direction that exalts the Lord Jesus. And so as we come unto your truth today, we pray that by the ministry of the Spirit, you would do that work in us. We depend upon you for that, in Jesus' name, amen.\n\nWell, this morning, our purpose is to continue in the series that you've begun here at Trinity, which I've been told by Samuel is one of thinking about various aspects of Christian worship, particularly focusing on aspects of what worship means for our gathering on the Lord's Day. So focusing on Sunday morning public worship.\n\nNow in thinking about this, we know, as I'm sure has been mentioned already, that as those who are following Jesus, the totality of our lives is marked out by worship. In fact, even in this section we just read from 1 Timothy, we have hints of this where Paul says things like, \"everything created by God is good and nothing is to be rejected if it's received with thanksgiving.\" So even in what Paul's saying there, thanksgiving, that's a worship word. Everything received with thanksgiving. Our whole life as Christian believers is worship. Our whole life is lived in a posture of grateful acknowledging of the glorious godness of God. Our whole life as Christian believers is lived in a posture of worship.\n\nIn fact, about a week ago, I was with a group of friends and we took a few day motorcycle trip down Highway 101 into the beginning of the Redwoods. And as you're going down 101, especially in that Southern Oregon portion, you're coming over these hills and going around these amazing corners and the Pacific Ocean is opened up there before you. And it's just amazing enough to leave you singing the doxology in your motorcycle helmet a couple different times, which would have been fine, except in one particular instance I've left my intercom on. And so the other guy in the group, after hearing me, didn't have the same reasons to be thankful that I had to be thankful.\n\nBut as you view the enormity of the landscape out there and then the enormous trees that you get into in the Northern California geography, it's just a cause for praise. And we realize that the totality of our life is lived in honor of this God who made everything and who saved us.\n\nBut that whole Highway 101 experience, while it was doxological and while the totality of our life is lived in worship and that's something we embrace as part of our Christian experience, we also recognize that there is something uniquely special about Sunday morning worship. So while the totality of our lives is lived in worship, how I engage in my marriage is a matter of worship, how I engage in my parenting is a matter of worship, how I engage in my work and my professional life, even in my suffering, how I engage in hardship. All these things function out of a posture of worship before the Lord who's great and greatly to be praised.\n\nThere is something special about Sunday morning worship as we gather together with the people of Christ to sing His praises, as we gather together with the people of Christ to hear His Word read and preached, as we gather together with the people of Christ to witness baptisms as people are professing their faith in the Lord Jesus's cleansing power, as we gather on Sunday morning to remember Jesus's sacrifice in the Lord's Supper like we'll do later on.\n\nThere is something special and unique in the way we come together on the Lord's Day, as the Apostle John calls it, the day Jesus rose from the dead. There's something special and unique about the Lord's Day as we gather to climactically express the fact that this is the Lord we serve and worship.\n\nAnd that something special is actually there for us in so many different ways in the Scriptures, but there's a fairly obscure lyric in a psalm that speaks to this. It's in Psalm 87 where the psalmist says, \"The Lord loves the gates of Zion more than all the dwelling places of Jacob.\" And that strikes us as kind of a strange thing to say. \"The Lord loves the gates of Zion more than all the dwelling places of Jacob.\" That strikes us as strange until we think more about the context of that line and realize that what the psalmist is highlighting there is that while all the dwelling places of Jacob, while all the places that the people of Israel live and as they're spread out throughout the land, while they're all there as a product of God's providential care and love and promise-keeping power, still there's something about those gates of Jerusalem, the gates of the holy city of God, that expresses something unique about the Lord's affection in that that holy city, those gates, are the gates through which people will enter as they come to those worship festivals that were part of Israel's corporate worship life together.\n\n\"The Lord loves those gates more than all the dwelling places of Jacob.\" The psalmist is saying, in effect, the Lord loves in a special kind of way His people gathering for His praise, coming through those gates to praise Him. Something of course that points to the glorious gathering on our final day when the people from every tribe, tongue, and nation will gather around the throne and praise the Lamb who is our Redeemer.\n\nSo while all of life is worship, the Lord particularly loves His people's expression of worship as we're gathered together for that purpose. So that's something we do now on Sunday mornings.\n\nAnd so it's this unique expression of Sunday morning worship, as I understand it, that is your current focus of study. And so this morning we're going to continue along these lines, focusing our attention on 1 Timothy 4:13, where the Apostle Paul is directing his pastoral understudy, Timothy. He's directing him, saying, \"Until I come, devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture, to exhortation, to teaching.\"\n\nNow we know from the book of Acts and from other New Testament letters that Paul was unceasingly and very faithfully engaged in his apostolic ministry, bringing the good news of Christ to the world. And with that, we also know that Paul was not engaged in that ministry alone. He had gospel partners to help him. He had lots of gospel partners to help him. And Timothy was one of those gospel partners who was alongside Paul in a number of his missionary endeavors.\n\nAnd along with that, Timothy was also given particular assignments by Paul, one of them being the temporary post of pastoral ministry in the town of Ephesus. So we read back in 1 Timothy 1, where this letter starts, that Paul says this to Timothy. He says, \"As I urged you when I was going to Macedonia, remain at Ephesus.\"\n\nSo as we drop into Paul and Timothy's ministry lives in the letter of 1 Timothy, we have Paul on a missionary excursion, and we have Timothy left in Ephesus to help build up the church there. And as Paul makes it clear in this letter that the ministry that Timothy is left to work out, that ministry has some particular facets.\n\nSo on the one hand, in the church at this time, there's a primary concern around dealing with some false teaching that's troubling the church. So part of the reason Timothy's there is Timothy's going to need to deal with that. He's going to need to help sort that out. And then there's instruction from Paul around appointing qualified elders and deacons in the church. So that's part of what Timothy's there to do. That's part of the work he has before him.\n\nBut right at the center of all this, and in a way, in a kind of summation of all this, is Paul's concern that he expresses in chapter 3, where he says that he wants Timothy to remain in Ephesus so that Timothy would promote proper gospel behavior in the household of God. Proper gospel behavior in the household of God. That's 1 Timothy 3.\n\nSo Timothy's work is centered on, here's how it looks for us to live as faithful gospel people in the household of faith, in the community of the church, in a way that properly glorifies Christ. That's Timothy's job. That's what he's there to promote.\n\nAnd while that reality of living as God's people touches on all of life, again, everything from how we think about marriage to how we think about meals we eat, like chapter 4 speaks about both of those things, the reality of who Jesus is affects everything.\n\nWith that being true, one thing it affects in a primary way is how we navigate public worship. What does it look like for us as the people of God to gather in our local fellowship and respond properly, responding in a way that the Lord approves through Christ? How do we respond to the God of our salvation? Which is a huge question, and it's no surprise that Paul has a great deal to say about this all throughout his letter to Timothy, not least of all as we think about what he has to say here in our verse for this morning.\n\n\"Until I come, devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture, to exhortation, to teaching.\"\n\nSo here in our verse, Paul gives Timothy specific instructions about the place of Scripture in the public worship life of the church. And so that's what we're going to think through in some detail this morning, the place of Scripture in our public worship. What does it look like for the Bible to be properly present in our corporate gatherings on the Lord's Day?\n\nAnd while there's certainly more to say about this than time will allow this morning, we can be helped to think about this aspect of our worship from this verse.\n\nNow before we get into the deeper specifics of what's here, it does seem like it would be helpful just to provide a little background to Paul's directive that he gives here in verse 13. So we're reading from our English Bibles this morning, but in the original Greek text of this passage, it reads in an even more succinct way, really, but that does require some clarification for us.\n\nSo if you're following along, which I hope you are, you have your Bibles open, if you look at verse 13, I'm going to give you just a little bit more of a literal translation where Paul says, \"Until I come, devote yourself,\" and then he just says, \"to reading, to exhortation, to teaching.\"\n\nDevote yourself to reading, to exhortation, to teaching.\n\nNow you notice how our English Bibles are helping get the sense of what the text means by adding \"to the public reading of Scripture.\" The original text doesn't have that, it just says \"to reading, to exhortation, to teaching.\"\n\nNow our English translations add some words in to, quite helpfully, bring some clarity to what that statement does mean. Those are helpful translation additions there.\n\nBecause if we just read that phrase with our contemporary culture reading glasses on, if we just have \"devote yourself to reading,\" we would immediately ask, devote ourselves to the reading of what? What are you talking about, Paul? The reading of a certain book, the reading of a specific passage every Sunday morning, what is this exact reading that you speak of? That would be a natural question for us.\n\nBut that wouldn't have been a question for Paul's original audience, not least of all Timothy, that wouldn't have been a question for Timothy at all, simply because the threefold expression that's there would be very familiar to them.\n\nWhen Paul speaks to reading, and to exhortation, and to teaching, he has something specific and quite recognizable in mind. And that specific and recognizable element that would be very present in the minds of his first readers has to do with what would traditionally be reflected in a synagogue worship service, and then that which was adopted into Christian worship services.\n\nYou can read about it in Luke chapter 4, where Jesus is in the synagogue, there's examples of this in Acts chapter 13, Acts chapter 15. When there would be a gathering for synagogue worship, and then as Christianity grew and modeled its worship service in the historic practice of God's people, when there was a service, a part of that service would include the reading, so a reading from the Scriptures, it would include the exhortation, so a call to respond to that reading, and then it would include a teaching, which would clarify what we need to believe based on what Scripture was read.\n\nAnd we'll talk about each of those parts in a moment, but in that sense, what you have here is Paul promoting one formal aspect of the corporate worship service. This isn't all there is to a corporate worship service. We know he speaks about praying and a number of other things in different places, but he's speaking to one formal aspect of the worship service, and it's an aspect that's grounded in the historical practice of the people of God, and it's something then that's continuing on in the life of the New Testament church.\n\nPart of what a worship service is going to prioritize is reading, exhortation, and teaching from the Bible.\n\nSo in that sense, this three-fold Scripture focus is something that Timothy wouldn't just recognize, but it's actually something that Timothy would already be promoting. Paul's just encouraging him to continue to do this. Timothy would know exactly what Paul meant, \"devote yourself to reading, to exhortation, to teaching.\"\n\nTimothy would be all about this business, and in fact, this practice carries on down through history. So just as an example from the early church apologist, Justin Martyr, he comments on church practices in his day, which might have been maybe 60 years after Timothy. He makes this comment. He says, \"On the day called Sunday, all who live in cities or in the country gather together in one place, and the memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read. Then when the reader has ceased, the leader verbally instructs and exhorts to the imitation of these good things.\"\n\nSo that's first century Christianity. Timothy's day, that's what was happening. In about 100 AD or so, this is what's happening, and it continues in our own day, doesn't it? We have our scripture reading and our call to respond to that scripture and the teaching that helps us learn the truth, that it's part and parcel of that scripture that's been read. That's what we're doing right now. We're doing that right now.\n\nAnd so it helps us just to have that background behind what Paul says here, but it does beg the question, why bother mentioning it? Why bring it up? Why mention it to Timothy if he would be more than familiar and comfortable with this practice? And how about for us? Why bring this up for us?\n\nClearly, you at Trinity Church are committed to the reading of scripture, the exhortation, and the teaching of scripture. We're committed to this at Christ Church Selwa. This is what we do as gospel people under the word of God. This is a main and basic Christian practice for the people of God, which extends back to the tune of thousands of years. You can read back in Nehemiah 8 and see ancient Israel gathering, and what are they gathering for? Well, they're gathering for the reading, and the exhortation, and the instruction from the law.\n\nSo why, Paul, take the time to mention this to Timothy? Not only mention it, but exhort to this devotion toward this task. Why take the time with it for Timothy? Why take the time with it for us this morning?\n\nWell, I'll give you one reason, one reason. As humans, we are prone to have leaky minds and hearts. We're prone to leak.\n\nIn my role at Christ Church, one of the things that I regularly engage in is premarital counseling, which can basically be summed up by saying you think you're compatible, but you're not, and Jesus is sufficient for these things. So we engage in premarital counseling, and I do this with my wife, Julia. She comes along with me, and every time Julia and I are done with the sessions with a couple, and we've done this countless times, it seems like, at this point, but every time we're done, maybe with a session or even a whole course of study, we always comment to ourselves, \"I think we needed this more than they did. I think we needed to go through this more than they did.\"\n\nJulia and I will have been married 26 years next week, but a few months ago, we just finished going through premarital again with another couple in our church, and again, we realized just how much we needed that refresher. Not because our marriage was going south or anything like that, but because our minds and hearts leak. We forget about the significance of what it means to be husband and wife to each other. Right? Maybe because we have leaky minds and hearts as humans.\n\nIn fact, this is something that the Apostle Peter recognizes when he writes his second letter. And he speaks to the churches as he writes to them. And he says, \"I write to stir you up by way of, do you know the text? By way of reminder.\"\n\nBy way of reminder. It's not that you don't know the Gospel. It's just that you need to remember the significance of these things. They need to be brought to mind again and again. And he's reteaching them old main elements of Gospel truth.\n\nSo C.S. Lewis, he makes that comment where he says we need to be reminded more often than we need to be instructed. Because we're leaky.\n\nAnd part of what refreshes us in truth that might be taken for granted or even forgotten is to come again and again to truth already known.\n\nSo there's good reason for thinking about what Paul will say here today. There was good reason for Timothy. And there's good reason for us to think about this. Because we don't want how corporate worship is done properly to the glory of God. We don't want that to leak out of us.\n\nOne writer gives a word of caution saying, \"It is a solemn fact that any given church can depart from the faith in less than a generation. To imagine otherwise is to be so inflated with the helium of naive pride that we imagine we are above the human condition.\"\n\nSo all that helps give some background to what's here and frame some purpose for why Paul even brings this subject matter up. Timothy knew this stuff, but he needed the reminder. We know this stuff, but we need the reminder.\n\nSo that having been said, let's think about the content of what's here now. Looking specifically at this exhortation from Paul.\n\nSo in the first part of verse 13, let's notice that the place of scripture in public worship is first of all a matter of pastoral priority. It's a matter of pastoral priority. We hear it in Paul's words where he's saying to Timothy, \"Until I come, devote yourself to this. Devote yourself, occupy yourself, apply yourself to the public reading of scripture in corporate worship.\"\n\nIt's worth noting here, and we mentioned it in passing already, but the church in Ephesus is currently facing some trouble from teaching that's contrary to the gospel. And we can actually notice that this word Paul uses here translated as devoted in relationship to Timothy's scriptural commitment. This word is used back in chapter 1 verse 4 to speak to people in the church who are in danger of devoting themselves to myths and endless genealogies. And then the word is used again in the beginning of our chapter where Paul talks about days coming when people will devote themselves to deceitful spirits and the teaching of demons.\n\nSo devotion, being very committed to a certain kind of teaching, that's not the present problem in Ephesus. There's devotion. The present problem, the present threat is what kind of content are you devoting yourself to, you see.\n\nAnd then Paul's charge to Timothy is to devote himself to the public practice of putting the word of God before the people of God as they gather on Sunday mornings.\n\nAs the church comes together, devote yourself to this, Timothy, the public reading, exhortation and teaching of the word of God.\n\nAnd that's something that doesn't just help frame Timothy's pastoral priority, and that's something that doesn't just help frame the priority for those of us engaged in pastoral leadership in the church today, but that's something that helps frame congregational expectations.\n\nAnd if it frames our expectations as those in the church, not only as those who are in pastoral ministry, but it's an expectation that those in pastoral ministry do what your elders are doing here, do what your pastors are doing here, and that is set the scriptures robustly and regularly before you as the centerpiece of the service as you come to worship.\n\nSo as a member of the church on Sunday morning, I should have an expectation set that the priority word in this service is not going to be, you know, some pontifications of the person leading the singing, and it's not going to be some personal reflections of a person who's standing up to give some kind of encouraging talk, no, no, I should have the Christian expectation that the word of God is going to be in the paramount place of focus in the context of this worship service.\n\nAnd when that's there, I rejoice in the fact that the pastors in the church are responding to this apostolic imperative from Paul, I can rejoice that the worship service isn't being moved along by matters of mere personal preference, our worship isn't being moved along by a kind of contemporary human innovation sort of thing, or any kind of cultural concession, no, the Lord's Day worship is moved by the word of the God whom we worship, who speaks to us, and in hearing His voice, new life the dead receive.\n\nYour pastors here at Trinity, they have this priority. I didn't pick this text to preach, Samuel called and told me what I was supposed to preach, this is their priority, and that should be a cause for your rejoicing as a church, because that means the primary word in your midst is not the word of the world around us but it's the word of the Redeemer who lives.\n\nSo the high place of Scripture in public worship is a pastoral priority, that's critical.\n\nAnd then we go on, we see that Paul works this priority out in those three ways we already mentioned, reading, exhorting, teaching. So we're going to take each of those three in turn, we'll spend a little bit more time with the reading than the other two, but we'll get there.\n\nSo reading, or as our English Bible smooths things out, the public reading of Scripture.\n\nNow when Paul called for reading like this, he would have had primarily the Old Testament in mind. We know that, there was no New Testament Scriptures in their final collected form when Paul wrote this letter, however Paul would also have had in mind his own letters as his apostolic authority was recognized by the churches and Paul's letters along with others would eventually be gathered as part of the New Testament Scripture.\n\nSo for example, Paul says in Colossians 4, he says, \"And when this letter has been read among you, have it also read to the Laodiceans.\" And we have examples of that kind of instruction in other places, like in First Thessalonians 5, we have it in Revelation chapter 1.\n\nSo Paul's directive to read here would have appropriately, initially included all the Old Testament, but then it would also include all that would eventually be recognized as the New Testament, which we have now as that process took place.\n\nAnd this public reading would have been important for one thing, because the people of the early church didn't have the same ready access to the Bible like we have today. So in many cases, the Lord's Day may be a primary and it may even be their singular opportunity to hear the Scriptures.\n\nBut even more than that, this public Lord's Day reading of the Bible provides that central place to have the high focus of Scripture emphasized in the lives of believers.\n\nWe gather on the first day of the week and we hear the Word of God read.\n\nWe remember in Timothy's context that there was a variety of unhelpful teaching going on, and in that context, the re-centering that was necessary came, as in the midst of all those other words, words that might even bring great harm, doctrines of demons he calls them, right?\n\nIn the midst of all those other words, it was God's Word that needed to be heard.\n\nThat applied in the context of false teaching in Ephesus, and no doubt, no doubt, the benefit of the primary place of the Word of God read for us Sunday by Sunday by Sunday, that applies to us just as much, if not more so, even in our own day.\n\nWe need the reader to stand up on Sunday morning, open the Bible, and read the truth to us.\n\nBecause what are our weeks like? What are our days like? We live in a world where the words we take in are just endless. Aren't the words endless? The words of political opinion, they're endless. The advertising slogans, they're endless. We know them all by heart. The catechism has been very, very well done with that. There's some things money can't buy for everything else, there's MasterCard. We know that.\n\nWe're catechized continually by the words around us, the social agendas, the way our friends and co-workers speak about their worldview, the way the company we work for frames their mission statement and vision for success, the ways our news feeds and social media feeds drop these tidy lines to inform us how we should interpret the world around us.\n\nWe live in a world of words.\n\nBut in the midst of all those words, there is a Word that is over and above them all.\n\nAnd we come in on the Lord's day from a week filled with words, and whose word do we really need? We need God to speak to us. We need to hear what God says to us through His inspired scripture. We need the Bible opened, and we need the Spirit of God to humble our hearts, and we need to hear the Word of God as the totality of the scripture points us to the significance of Jesus our Savior.\n\nSo we sit here on Sunday morning and the Bible is open, and the reader walks up and starts to read, and what do our hearts start taking in? What do we begin digesting? Is it slogans? Is it social rhetoric? No, no. No, we start hearing this Word that orients us and reorients us to a person, to Jesus who's the King of glory.\n\nAnd as the scriptures are read, we corporately hear what it means to know this person, Jesus, and to know the hope and purpose and meaning in life that only Jesus can bring, extending to life eternal.\n\nSo the scriptures are open and the reading begins, and if that reading is from the Old Testament, we have the person of Jesus anticipated, don't we? So the Old Testament in its entirety helps to fill out our proper sense of need for the ultimate salvation that God promised through Jesus.\n\nJesus is the better prophet, Jesus is the better priest, He's the better king, the better sacrifice, the better shepherd, the better temple, the better wise man, and on and on and on we go.\n\nAnd in the Old Testament, we're brought to feel our need for Jesus coming.\n\nThe passage from the Old Testament is read, and in that, Jesus is anticipated, and our hopes for the life He brings are kindled.\n\nAnd then maybe we read from the New Testament and we hear that in the Gospels, Jesus is revealed. We need to be able to hear the Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. We need to hear the truth of who Jesus is, and why He came, and what it means to follow Him as the crucified and resurrected One.\n\nOr maybe the reading is from the book of Acts, and in Acts we hear how Jesus is proclaimed. In Acts, Jesus ascends to heaven and the new covenant promise of the Holy Spirit is realized, and the word about Jesus spreads from Jerusalem to the ends of the known world. We need to hear about how the word of Jesus spreads in Acts, Jesus is proclaimed.\n\nAnd then in the epistles, in the letters, we hear how Jesus is explained. So we have writings in the New Testament letters, like we're studying this morning, that help us understand rich theological truth about God's plan for His people presently and eternally as we're purified by Christ and His cross, and united with Christ and with one another in the church, and then as we're continually transformed more and more into the image of Christ, looking forward to resurrection glory through the power that raised Jesus Christ from the dead.\n\nWhen the epistles are read, we have that truth explained to us.\n\nAnd then Revelation. In Revelation, we hear Jesus expected. Revelation is read and we hear how Jesus is the only one worthy of exercising God's divine and cosmic purposes for the ages beginning to end.\n\nAnd while history cycles round and round, and earthly powers and dominions rise and fall, and while spiritual powers battle and rage, there is this one victor, Jesus Christ, the Lion and the Lamb, the Alpha and the Omega, the faithful and true, the rider on the white horse whose name is King of kings and Lord of lords, who will vanquish evil forever, and bring His people into the presence of God and the city of God to praise Him world without end.\n\nIn Revelation, we hear how our hope in Jesus is expanded cosmically. Jesus is expected.\n\nAnd so for all the voices that we might have dominating our weeks, on the Lord's day, we're all of a sudden brought to this place of worship, and we hear the word that is above all words, revealing the name that is above all names, to whom every knee will bow. We hear that.\n\nAnd all of a sudden, what happens? Well, the wars of this world grow a little less hopeless. The politics grows a little less desperate. The social pressure grows a little less potent. And the anxiety and the fear and the unknowns and the guilt begins to fade away in light of this word of the Lord who brings us life through His truth.\n\nThe place of scripture in public worship. Devote yourself to the reading.\n\nOn Sunday morning, we come together for a number of things, and right at the center, we expect to hear the word of the Lord, reading, reading.\n\nAnd then we have these elements that flow from the reading, these next two, exhortation and teaching.\n\nNow, I'm not going to take too much time with these, since I understand you also have a week in this series devoted to the subject of preaching, which is really what's going on here with exhortation and teaching. So I won't say much about this, but I'm going to say just a little, just a little bit.\n\nExhortation, let's do that first.\n\nThis exhortation language indicates encouragement that flows from the scripture reading, which functionally calls for a response to scriptural truth, right? Exhortation is, how am I to be in light of this? That's what exhortation comes and does.\n\nThe Greek word here is translated in different ways in the New Testament, sometimes just as preaching. In fact, I think if you're reading from an NIV this morning, I think they just translate it as preaching, but it's also translated as encouragement or comfort or appeal. It's just that kind of word.\n\nThe point here is that when scripture is read, our behavior is not left where it was, but how we are is then encouraged forward in Christ-centered progress, right?\n\nSo our Sunday morning reading may be something like Psalm 23, and we hear the reading, and in hearing that, there's comfort as I'm hearing the truth of God's word about the Lord as my shepherd, and then the exhortation might follow.\n\nSomething like, do you feel alone and lost in your life of faith and struggle? The Lord Jesus here, who's the good shepherd who goes ahead of you, guiding you, who's the good shepherd who walks next to you through the valleys of darkest shadows, and who follows close behind you, assuring you of your heavenly home.\n\nThat's exhortation.\n\nIt could be an exhortation to repentance. Under this word read, do you see where your life needs to do an about-face if you're really going to be following Jesus? It could be an exhortation to repentance.\n\nIt could be an exhortation to honesty in your spiritual life. You know, the psalmist in Psalm 77, maybe it's Psalm 77 read in the course of the service, and we get to that point where the psalmist says, \"When I remember God, I moan.\"\n\nI moan, and the exhortation comes. Are you honest with God like that in your prayers on the hardest day? Can you say to him in prayer, \"When I think about you, I'm actually not immediately helped, but I'm immediately troubled.\" Are you honest in your spirituality and your prayers before the Lord?\n\nThat's exhortation.\n\nIt could be an exhortation to rest. You know, maybe you hear the Lord Jesus' words, \"Come to me, all you who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest,\" and the exhortation goes something like, maybe you've been trying to get yourself right before coming to Jesus. You know, if I could just have all my ducks in a row, have my life looking like I think my life is supposed to look, make sure all the buttons are done up on my shirt and