Recently I had an interesting and enlightening experience. One of our high school students was given the opportunity to receive extra credit for a class if she would attend an Ash Wednesday service. So I took Trinity along and we joined her family in attendance at a local Episcopal Church. You might be thinking my interesting experience related to the ashes placed on our foreheads. Nope. What was interesting was the amount of Scripture we were exposed to. As far as I can tell this was a liberal Episcopal Church (is there any other kind? There are a few ones still). And yet, in spite of that, we heard read and read responsively together almost five entire chapters of Scripture (Ps. 51; 103; Joel 2; Matt. 6; 2 Cor. 5).

At one level this makes a lot of sense. Their liturgies, whether liberal or conservative, are historic and date back the days when the Anglicans/Episcopals were bastions of conservatism. However, conservative theology (read: a belief in the inerrancy, inspiration, authority, and sufficiency of Scripture) has, for the most part, left the Anglican/Episcopal communion. It has been taken up by the Evangelical wing of Christianity in the West. So then, it follows that we would find a similar permeation of and emphasis on Scripture within Evangelicalism. This is where it gets fuzzy and doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Today you can go to an Evangelical church service and hear little if any of the Bible read, let alone preached. A little closer to home, while on vacation a couple of years ago our family attended a PCA church wherein the Bible was not even opened! The minister (read: speaker) sat on a stool with Bible closed for the entire service! Where has the Bible gone?

How shall we overcome this? The only way is by making our services intentionally laden with the words of God. How do we do this? Consider a typical service. It begins with a scriptural Call to Worship. Herein the Bible is opened, God speaks and we respond. During the Reading of the Law we hear entire chapters read with little or no comments. I have adopted the practice of reading from the alternate testament from which I am currently preaching. Aside from fulfilling the admonition of 1 Tim. 4:13, this allows for us to be exposed to the diversity of the Biblical cannon. We also sing the Psalms (cf. Col. 3:16; Js. 5:13). There seems to be two positions in the church when it comes to singing Psalms; the Psalms only position and the Psalms never position. We have adopted a mediating position of singing “psalms, hymns and spiritual songs” (Col. 3:16). Add to this that almost always the Elder leading the congregational prayer will begin with a reading from God’s Word. Finally, because of our commitment to the Scriptures we preach expositional sermons, working our way book-by-book through the Holy Scriptures.

This is why our worship services are intentionally imbued with the Bible. Taken together this confronts you with a massive amount of Scriptural truth week in and week out. Left to ourselves we will are lost in the woods without a compass (better, without a GPS unit). But when God’s Word is opened we are put on the straight and narrow and we are guided by God’s divine grace and wisdom.