Worship, Revised and Expanded Edition: Reformed according to Scripture

by Hughes Oliphant Old

We worship God because God created us to worship him. Worship is at the center of our existence, at the heart of our reason for being.

When the Westminster Shorter Catechism teaches us, “Man’s chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever,”1 it gives witness to this same basic principle; God created us to worship him. Surely it is here that we must begin when as Reformed theologians we ask what worship is. Worship must above all serve the glory of God.

Some people today justify worship for any number of other reasons. We are told that we should worship because it brings us happiness. Sometimes worship does make us happy, but not always. We are told that we should worship because it will give us a sense of self-fulfillment. Surely worship does fulfill the purpose of our existence, but we do not worship because it brings us self-fulfillment. We are often told that we should worship in order to build family solidarity: “The family that prays together stays together.”

The second commandment tells us that we are not to use images or idols in our worship, for as the apostle Paul tells us, God is not represented by human art and imagination; God created us to be the reflection of his image (Acts 17:22–31). Taking this commandment seriously has been fundamental to the Reformed understanding of worship. If today American Protestant worship services have confused worship with art, or even worse, if we have confused it with entertainment, it is because we have failed to fathom the meaning of the second commandment.

One cannot readily appreciate what the Reformers had to say about worship unless one sees how they brought it out of the Scriptures.

The second fundamental of Christian worship is that it should be in the name of Christ (Col. 3:17). We begin our worship as Christians by being baptized in his name (Acts 2:38). It is in his name that the Christian congregation is assembled, remembering the promise that when two or three are gathered together in his name he is present with us (Matt. 18:20). Jesus frequently taught his disciples to pray in his name (John 14:14; 15:16; 16:23). That we are to pray in the name of Jesus is a very important principle of Christian prayer. To do something in someone’s name is to do it as the agent of someone else. It is to do something in the service of someone else. When we pray in the name of Christ we are praying in his service; we are continuing the ministry of intercession that Jesus himself began on the cross.

Christian worship is inspired by the Spirit, empowered by the Spirit, directed by the Spirit, purified by the Spirit, and bears the fruit of the Spirit. Christian worship is Spirit-filled.

It is the Holy Spirit who purifies our worship by his continual work of sanctification. As the Spirit purifies the worshipers, the worship is made pure. When we worship, having our minds enlightened by the Spirit, our lives cleansed by the Spirit, our wills moved by the Spirit, and our hearts warmed by the Spirit, then our worship is transformed from being merely a human work into being a divine work.

Shoulx not all we do in worzhip thus have biblical warrent taht it is from God?

From the very beginning Reformed theologians have been fond of speaking of worship as being edifying. Martin Bucer in particular liked to use this word to describe Christian worship. He had in mind that passage where the apostle Paul tells us that everything in the service of worship should edify the church (1 Cor. 14:1–6), that is, it should teach or build up the church. Worship that puts first the praise of God’s glory, worship that is according to God’s Word, worship that serves God and God alone does in fact edify the church. It edifies the church because it is the work of the Holy Spirit in the body of Christ.

When the people had been prepared by learning the discipline of the law and by all the trials, wanderings, and testings that we read about in the story of the exodus, then they were led by Joshua across the Jordan River into the promised land. That John exercised his ministry in the wilderness and baptized in the Jordan implies a new entry into the promised land.

Jesus, like many other Jews of his day, went out into the wilderness to hear John and accepted baptism at his hand. In doing this, Jesus became the new Joshua, leading the new Israel into the new kingdom of God. It was by God’s specific direction that Jesus had been given the same name as Joshua. The name Jesus is but the Greek form of the name Joshua. Jesus was baptized not because he needed to have his sins washed away but because it was part of his ministry to lead the new Israel into the new kingdom of God. Through baptism Jesus entered into the kingdom of God, and through baptism the disciples followed Jesus into the kingdom. Even today, in baptism we too enter into the kingdom of God. Baptism is a prophetic sign at the beginning of our Christian life that we belong to the people of God. It is our entrance into the church.

The apostle Paul tells us that in baptism we are joined to Christ in his death and resurrection (Rom. 6:1–11; Col. 2:11–13). There are two possible ways of understanding this. First, one could understand this from the standpoint of the ancient Greek mystery religions. Understood as a Greek mystery, baptism would be a dramatic rite portraying the death and resurrection of Christ. When one went through such a rite, it was believed, that which had been dramatized would become a reality in the life of the one going through the rite. Paul probably did not understand baptism in terms of the Greek mystery religions. He was far too Jewish for that. A second explanation of these words of the apostle reaches back to the Hebrew concept of covenant. It understands baptism as a covenant sign given by Christ to his disciples. This covenant sign promises to us that our Lord will share with us the spiritual benefits, or consequences, of his death and resurrection.

The fact that our union with Christ is to be understood as a covenantal union is made particularly clear by the strong emphasis the passage puts on the effects of receiving the covenant sign. The sign of baptism is not magic; it is a means of grace. God uses the sign to strengthen our faith, that we might “believe that we shall also live with him” (Rom. 6:8). God uses the sign to produce in us holiness of life, that “we too might walk in newness of life” (Rom. 6:4).

Zwingli began to understand that a sacrament was not a ritual that conferred salvation upon someone, but rather a sign or emblem that distinguished the members of a community.

For the Reformed understanding of baptism, the doctrine of the Holy Spirit is fundamental. In the fifth or sixth century, the sacrament of baptism began to be split into two sacraments. Baptism proper was understood as the washing away of sins, while the sacrament of confirmation was understood to confer the gift of the Holy Spirit. The Reformers were very much opposed to any understanding of baptism in which baptism with water was one thing and baptism of the Holy Spirit was something else. Using Augustinian terms, they saw baptism with water as the outward sign of baptism with the Holy Spirit, which was the inward grace. The physical washing with water did not save those who were baptized; rather the Holy Spirit in the hearts of the baptized gave them faith and thereby cleansed them from their sins. For the Reformers it became very important, then, that at the time of baptism the church should pray that the Holy Spirit accomplish inwardly the purification and sanctification that the outward sign of baptismal washing promised.

What did the outward sign promise for those who later would reject Christ ?

The Reformers saw the possibility of explaining baptism the same way, namely, that while we are justified by faith, the sacrament is given as a sign or seal of a righteousness that is to be had by faith alone.

There is a big difference between decisional regeneration and justification by faith. While the baptism of infants was perfectly consistent with a strong doctrine of grace and with the doctrine of justification by faith, it was not consistent with any kind of theology that makes salvation a matter of human decisions.

baptism has always been a sign of something received

Many Christians began to put the emphasis on conversion rather than on baptism as the way to salvation. This is not at all surprising. What could be more natural than that a century of revolution should understand the Christian faith in terms of conversion! In America the Great Awakening emphasized a very intense personal religious experience and presented the conversion experience as the means of entering this deeper kind of personal life. The preachers of the Great Awakening claimed that one’s baptism in early childhood did not assure one of salvation. Baptism was no guarantee of eternal life. Much more important was a conversion experience. In fact, many preachers of the Great Awakening saw no real significance to baptism at all. Congregationalists, Methodists, and Presbyterians continued to baptize infants, but covenantal theology was largely forgotten.

He came to have a new appreciation of the significance of the covenant given to Abraham and his descendants (Gen. 17:7). On the basis of this passage he decided that Christian faith was not only an individual experience but a family experience as well. The Christian life had a community dimension as well as an individual dimension. If this is the case, the maintaining of a Christian family life was of the utmost importance.

The commandment means much more than “Don’t forget today is the Sabbath.” The commandment has in mind far more than a mere mental noting of the fact that it is the Sabbath Day when it rolls around each week. It has much more the meaning of, “Hold a service of memorial on the Sabbath.” This becomes very clear when one compares the version of the Ten Commandments found in Exodus with the version in Deuteronomy. In Deuteronomy we find that the fourth commandment begins, “Observe the sabbath day” (Deut. 5:12). To remember the Sabbath Day means to observe the day, to celebrate the religious rites appropriate to the day.

First of all, we should notice how often the Gospels specifically tell us that Jesus healed people on the Sabbath (Mark 3:lff.; Luke 13:10–13; 14:1–4; John 5:1–10; 9:1–8). The frequency of healings might even suggest that Jesus very purposely chose to heal on the Sabbath. He did this not to shock people, not to break the law, not to show that the law was worn out and old-fashioned, but rather as a sign that the day of release had come. When Jesus healed the woman with the crooked back, he explained, “And ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen years, be loosed from this bond on the sabbath day?” (Luke 13:16). The Sabbath that the Messiah brought in was a day of release from the bondage of Satan. Healing is not a human work but a divine work. The work of Jesus in releasing the woman did not hinder the Sabbath rest but rather established a deeper quality of Sabbath rest.

The question is, did Jesus or did someone else change the Sabbath from Saturday to Sunday and make of the first day of the week the Christian Sabbath? The New Testament gives us no clear statement as to what happened or how it happened. All we know is that already in New Testament times Christians celebrated worship on the first day of the week and that they called it “the Lord’s Day” (Acts 20:7; 1 Cor. 16:2; Rev. 1:10). It is hard to imagine how any Jew would tamper with something so sacred as the Sabbath. Certainly the disciples would never have done it on their own. One can only imagine Jesus himself doing it, and then only if he had a profound sense of his having divine authority. Could we possibly imagine that Lord’s Day worship was something that gradually evolved because someone thought it was a meaningful idea and after a while it gradually caught on? Never! The Sabbath had been established by divine authority, and only by divine authority could it have been changed. The old Sabbath would only come to an end when the anointed Son of God brought in the final Sabbath of the last day, the day of the Lord. If the first Christians worshiped on the Lord’s Day, it was because they believed that Jesus, by his resurrection, had brought in the final age.

Let us look a bit more closely at some examples of Lord’s Day worship in the primitive Christian church. On the day of Pentecost, the fiftieth day, the first day of the week after seven weeks, the Holy Spirit descended upon the church, and the first believers were baptized. Had it already, after only a few weeks, become customary for all the Christians to gather together on the morning of the first day of the week? Notice that it was on the Lord’s Day that our Lord poured out his Holy Spirit. The first day of the week was not only the day of resurrection but the day of giving the Spirit as well.

In the course of the Middle Ages, the liturgical calendar showed great vitality and developed with flamboyant complexity. The multiplication of feasts and saints’ days tended to obscure the celebration of the Lord’s Day.

Another significant teaching of Willison’s is that the Sabbath need not be on the seventh day of the week. The word Sabbath means “rest”; it means “to cease from work.” A sabbath day can be made of the first day of the week as well as the seventh day, particularly if the change is made at God’s command. Willison teaches that the purpose of the Sabbath is, first of all, the manifestation of God’s glory, but the commandment is also given out of compassion for fallen humanity.

When the Temple of Solomon was destroyed and the Jews were deported to Babylon, the normal place of worship came to be the synagogue. This involved far more than just a change in architectural setting. It involved two very different liturgies and two very different approaches to worship. While the Temple service centered on the sacrifices, the synagogue service centered on the study of the law and on the saying of the daily prayers. The synagogue service never took over the sacrifices. They were performed exclusively in the Temple, but the synagogue did take over from the Temple the psalms that had accompanied the sacrifices. Just when these psalms began to be used in the synagogue service and just which psalms were used is not clear. When the psalms were used in the synagogue, however, they were sung without the elaborate instrumental accompaniment used in the Temple.

On weekdays Psalms 145–150 were sung and on the Sabbath Psalms 95–100. Again, although the sources are rather late, we learn that the seven psalms that were sung at the end of the Temple service were also sung at the end of the synagogue service.

The first Christians took over many of the worship traditions of the synagogue. They did not take over the rich and sumptuous ceremonial of the Temple, but rather the simpler synagogue service, with its Scripture reading, its sermon, its prayers, and its psalmody. We find many evidences of this in the New Testament. In Acts 4:23–31 we read of Christians gathering for prayer. Their prayer service began with the whole congregation singing psalms. Several times the apostle Paul tells Christians to sing psalms. In 1 Corinthians 14:26 Paul tells the church that when they are gathered together for worship, among other things they are to sing psalms. The text actually reads, “When you come together, each one has a hymn, . . . a revelation.” This probably means that the whole congregation is to sing a psalm, but it may indicate that the first Christians had cantors like the synagogue. The cantor would sing the text while the congregation answered by singing “Hallelujah” after each verse. It surely did not mean that everyone was supposed to get up and sing a solo. In

The first Christians were particularly conscious of the presence of the Holy Spirit in their worship. It was the Spirit who inspired their worship. Their preaching and their interpretation of the Scriptures was the work of God’s Spirit crying out within them. The Spirit within them bore witness that Jesus was the Christ, the Lord’s anointed. The same Holy Spirit moved them to praise. Often the mention of singing psalms and hymns in the New Testament is accompanied by references to the Holy Spirit.

In the first place we find a number of Christian psalms such as the Song of Mary (Luke 1:46–55), the Song of Zechariah (Luke 1:68–79), and the Song of Simeon (Luke 2:29–32). These are clearly Christian psalms written in the literary genre of the Hebrew votive thanksgiving psalms. In a sense these Christian psalms complete the Old Testament Psalms.

The Old Testament Psalms had for generations cried out for the Lord’s anointed; now the New Testament psalms confessed that the cry had been heard and the promise fulfilled.

There is little question that the first Christians wrote hymns to Christ and sang them in their worship side by side with the psalms they sang as fulfilled prophecies of the coming messiah. In fact, very shortly after New Testament times, we read in one of the letters of the Roman governor Pliny the Younger (61–ca. 113) to the Emperor Trajan (53–117) a short description of a Christian worship service. It clearly says that the Christians sang hymns to Christ.

The way the early church understood it, however, would have been more like this: just as the architectural structure of the Temple followed the patterns of the heavenly sanctuary, so the hymns of the Temple followed the pattern of the angelic worship. The hymns of Revelation are more nearly like the heavenly worship. John heard the heavenly worship more clearly than either David or Isaiah. He understood that the song of Moses was in reality the song of the Lamb. For this reason the canticles, reworked in a Christian manner, became increasingly important in the worship of the church.

But now the question is, did the first Christians understand their hymns, the hymns they wrote, to be the hymns of the Holy Spirit in the same way they understood the Psalms to be the hymns of the Holy Spirit or the canticles to be the reflection of the heavenly worship? When Paul spoke of “spiritual songs” did he mean songs inspired by the Holy Spirit, which were a Christian counterpart of the Old Testament Psalms? Probably not. The reason is that all these early Christian hymns disappeared. The New Testament never included a collection of Christian psalms to go with the Gospels and Epistles. In the course of the second century the gnostics wrote lots of “spirit-inspired hymns.” But the orthodox became more and more of the opinion that there was something much more inspired in the psalms and canticles than in the “spiritual hymns” that appeared in the worship of the early church. It seems much more likely that the earliest Christians understood their hymnody as a sort of elaboration, a sort of drawing out, a commentary, or perhaps a sort of meditation on the canonical psalms and canticles traditionally used in the worship of the Temple and the synagogue.

Thus ep can stil be true since thr hymns sung could have been inspired but not preserved

Not too long after the close of the New Testament period the church began to cultivate psalmody as the preferred expression of Christian praise. More and more the orthodox became weary of new hymns supposedly inspired by the Holy Spirit. In the Eastern churches the writing of Christian hymns enjoyed some popularity in orthodox circles, but it was more characteristic of various gnostic sects. In the West the church sang psalms and canticles almost exclusively until the time of Ambrose of Milan (ca. 339–97) toward the end of the fourth century. The hymns of Ambrose were so popular that other Christian poets began to try their hand at writing hymns. We find hymns by Prudentius (348–410), Venantius Fortunatus (530–610), and Gregory the Great (540–604). Prudentius, born and raised in Roman Spain, was a lawyer by profession. He was surely the most prolific of the Latin hymnodists of the patristic age. His hymns were widely used in the Spanish church until the Muslim conquest in the eighth century. These Latin hymns, however, never replaced the psalms during the patristic period either in cathedral churches or in monasteries. Both hymnody and psalmody continued to be cultivated. Gregory the Great did much to develop both hymnody and psalmody with the music that today we call Gregorian chant.

With Gregory the Great we begin to enter the Middle Ages. More and more it was the monks who were charged with the praise of the church, particularly in the monasteries, but also it was the monks who as members of the schola cantorum provided music for the cathedrals. It was only at the beginning of the ninth century that the church began to use organs. Up until that time, there was no instrumental music in Christian worship. As the Middle Ages progressed, church music became more and more elaborate. The monks did much to develop Christian praise during the period. They had both the leisure and the culture, and they used them well. It is really the church of the Middle Ages that developed the choral and instrumental music of the church that today we take so much for granted.

The hymnody of the late Middle Ages became increasingly subjective, and yet that hymnody became an ever more important part of sacred worship. Medieval hymnody was essentially meditative, leading the worshiper to meditate on the mysteries that the liturgy celebrated and supporting the highly contemplative piety of the age. It was beautifully otherworldly and mysterious. Set apart from the sounds and rhythms of this world, it aimed at discovering the melodies of heaven. Nevertheless, it has to be admitted that the very fact that the great bulk of this hymnody was in Latin kept much of its glory within the confines of religious communities. The common people could neither sing it nor understand it. It was by and large, although not completely, the treasure of the cathedral and the monastery rather than the town church or the village chapel. With the Reformation the praises of the church took a very different direction. The Reformers wanted the whole congregation to sing the praises of the church. They wanted the people to sing in their own language and in music simple enough for the people to learn. This meant, quite practically speaking, the production of a wholly new church music. One could not really expect the whole congregation to sing what the trained monastic choirs had been singing, nor could one simply translate the Latin texts into German or French and sing the new text to the old music. Besides thar, taste in music was changing rapidly. The average Renaissance mus...

When the Genevan Psalter, or as it is more popularly called, the Huguenot Psalter, was finally finished, it was a classic, providing the prototype of Reformed psalmody for generations to come. Unfortunately Calvin did not follow the lead of Strasbourg and Constance in maintaining a balance between psalmody and hymnody. The Genevan Psalter, while it contained a few gospel canticles and catechetical pieces, settled almost exclusively for psalmody. In the preface to the Genevan Psalter Calvin gives us his reasons for this: “The psalms incite us to praise God, to pray to Him, to meditate on His works to the end that we love Him, fear, honor and glorify Him. What St. Augustine says is quite true, one can not sing anything more worthy of God than that which we have received from Him.” For this reason, Calvin continues, no matter where we search, we will not find better or more appropriate songs for our worship than the Psalms of David. For after all, these songs come from the Holy Spirit. When we sing them, God himself is putting the words in our mouths so that he himself sings within us, exalting his glory. For this reason, Calvin tells us, Chrysostom exhorts men, women, and children regularly to sing the psalms so that in this way they might join themselves to the company of the angels. One notices that Calvin does not appeal to the authority of Scripture in this matter. In defending his preference for psalmody, Calvin appeals not to Scripture but to John Chrysostom (ca. 347–4...

But how can one deny what augustine is stating

Like Bucer before him, Calvin began work on a commentary on the Hebrew text of the Psalms. Today this four-volume work is considered by some Calvin’s greatest biblical commentary. The commentary gives considerable attention to the nature of prayer as revealed in the Psalms. Calvin begins his commentary by developing one of the themes set forth by Athanasius in his essay on the devotional use of the Psalms. The book of Psalms is an anatomy of all the parts of the soul. Every emotion that we experience is reflected in the book of Psalms as in a mirror. Here the Holy Spirit has revealed all the griefs, sorrows, fears, doubts, hopes, and confusions with which our minds are apt to be disturbed. The Spirit has uttered these prayers in our own utterance that we might the better grasp them. In the psalms we are drawn to examine ourselves and discover our true need; for, as Calvin never tires of saying, true prayer proceeds first from a sense of our need and next from faith in the promises of God. Calvin sees the use of psalms in meditation and self-examination as an important function of the psalms in worship. He has in mind particularly the many psalms of lamentation found in the Psalter.

The Bay Psalter had the distinction of being the first book printed in America.

With the coming of Pietism, hymnody came to a new flowering. In fact, it is in the field of hymnody that Pietism has made one of its most lasting contributions to Christian worship. In Germany toward the close of the seventeenth century Pietism came to its classic expression in the ministry of Philipp Spener (1635–1705) and August Hermann Francke (1663–1727). Putting an emphasis on religion as an inward personal experience, Pietism preached and practiced holiness of life, simple devotional disciplines, and practical charity. The backbone of the Pietist movement was the small group fellowship where faith was nurtured by an intimate sharing of one’s religious experiences, Bible study, extemporaneous prayer, and, as the movement developed, the singing of hymns.

Many of the earliest Wesleyan hymns were written to follow the preaching of a particular sermon. After the preaching of the sermon, the newly written hymn would be lined out so that the congregation could affirm the Word that had been preached. It belongs to a covenantal theology of worship that God is worshiped when his people, having experienced his grace, confess and bear witness to that grace. This is what the typical Wesley hymn does. It is thanksgiving in its most biblical form, a witness to God’s saving power and a confession of the obligation we therefore have to God of living out that salvation. The Wesleyan hymn—and in fact this is true of the hymnody of Pietism in general—is a confession of faith. It is a creed sung by the congregation in thanksgiving to God and in witness to the world.

One advantage of a systematic responsive reading of the whole Psalter is that it exercises the congregation in the full diet of prayer. It teaches the congregation the language of prayer, the vocabulary, the similes, and the metaphors of the life of prayer. Each Lord’s Day, at the dominical service, there should be a regular responsive reading of at least twenty verses, even if this means doing two or three psalms together. Clearly some psalms ought to be used more than others, such as Psalms 96, 97, and 98 or Psalms 103, 104, 105, 136, and 145. These psalms are especially helpful as expressions of wonder and adoration. There are a few psalms one should use only on the rarest occasions. Then, there are some shorter psalms that would be better used as choral anthems, such as Psalms 8, 19, 84, 100, 113, 117, and 133.

One practice my pastoral experience leads me to recommend is the regular use of psalms of lamentation. Psalms 22, 27, 42–43, 51, 80, 90, and 91 are good examples. These psalms might be used most often at Sunday evening vespers. Over the years I have given special attention to the value of crying before God when we are in pain. The Psalms help us to do this. It may not pass the muster of those who insist on positive thinking, but it helps us to minister to those who need our prayer support. The psalms of lamentation give us a way of praying both for and with those who suffer. They give us an opportunity to put our arms around those who are in pain. Nothing makes more clear the fellowship of corporate prayer.

A second passage of Scripture that tells us how the Scriptures were read and preached in the synagogue is found in the Gospel of Luke. It is the familiar story of Jesus preaching in the synagogue of Nazareth. We can assume that the service began with the traditional psalmody and the traditional prayers. We can also assume that the law was read in the manner that by then was traditional. Jesus was called to the platform. It was already an old custom that a visiting rabbi should be invited to read a passage of Scripture and then to comment on it. Jesus was handed the book of the prophet Isaiah, and he opened it to the place he had in mind. He stood at the pulpit and read the passage. The book was closed and handed to an attendant, who replaced it in the ark, a great cupboardlike chest where the copies of sacred Scriptures were kept. While this was being done, a psalm may well have been sung, and Jesus sat down in the seat of Moses, a great thronelike chair behind the pulpit, and began to preach.

When controversy over Jesus began to divide the synagogues, Christians established their own synagogues (Jas. 2:2). In these Christian synagogues many of the traditional forms of worship were continued, much as they had been previously observed in the Jewish synagogues. Certainly one of these traditions was the reading of the Old Testament Scriptures. Paul tells Timothy to see to the public reading of the Scriptures in the same way that he instructs him in conducting public prayers (1 Tim. 4:13). Paul’s admonition obviously concerns the reading of the Law and the Prophets, not the New Testament books, which were probably not yet considered Holy Scripture.

The forcefulness of his sermons is to be found in the clarity of his analysis of the text. Calvin seems to have no fear that the Scriptures will be boring or irrelevant unless the preacher spices them up. In fact, Calvin seems to have a horror of decorating the Word of God. Scripture does not need to be painted with artists’ colors! So confident is the reformer that God will make his Word alive in the hearts of his people, that Calvin simply explains the text and draws out its implication. The simplicity and directness of his style is based in his confidence that what he is preaching is indeed the Word of God. This simplicity is an expression of reverence.

The most important method Calvin used to explain a text was to bring to it a parallel text. A single sermon will often quote a dozen or more passages from other parts of the Bible. Like Augustine, he believed Scripture is best interpreted by Scripture. It is rather strange that Calvin did not use a second Scripture lesson, but then he probably figured that was best done in the course of the sermon. Another method Calvin frequently used was to paraphrase the text. Often he says something like, “It is as though Jeremiah had said . . .” Sometimes he engages the prophets or apostles in conversation. He frequently delves into the reasons behind the biblical characters’ actions or thoughts, “Why then did the shepherds go to Bethlehem?” All these methods Calvin found used in most exemplary fashion in the sermons of John Chrysostom.

While Calvin’s appeal was to the mind, Knox’s appeal was to the heart. That does not mean that Knox was simply an emotional rabble-rouser, as some people have presented him. Knox was far more. Like Calvin, Knox was a studying preacher. He knew how to search out the meaning of the text and make it speak to the problems of the day. For Knox a careful exposition of the text was essential to a sermon. For this reason Knox could awaken the conscience in a way that a simple emotional appeal could never do.

According to Perkins the prophet is the voice of God when he preaches and the voice of the people when he prays.