As Orthodox Presbyterians, there is no hesitation when it comes to defending the regulative principle of worship because Scripture is certainly not silent on the matter of how Scripture regulates the worship of God. Cain’s offering to the Lord was not acceptable to the Lord, while Abel’s was pleasing to the Lord. Why? Abel offered the choicest of his herd in faith according to what the Lord had revealed in the garden when he covered his parents with garments of animal skin in Genesis 3:21. Cain brought an offering from the earth—an offering devoid of the animal offering set before his parents in Genesis 3:21, which disregarded God’s revelation of the way of salvation and the way to approach him in worship.

The books of Exodus and Leviticus supply detailed instruction on how God must be worshiped. The building of the tabernacle, all the furnishings inside and outside, and everything that pertains to the worship of God must proceed after the pattern that God shows to Moses the mediator (Ex. 25:40; Heb. 8:5). Worship must be according to God’s commandments alone; what is not commanded by God is forbidden in worship. The offering of “strange fire” that God did not command in Leviticus 10, followed by the death sanction brought by the Lord upon Nadab and Abihu, graphically confirms this crucial point.

The Decalogue sets forth the substance of the regulative principle of worship in the first and second commandments:

I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the LORD your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments. (Ex. 20:2–6)

In summary form, the substance of the regulative principle of worship consists in this: you shall worship only the living and true God, and you shall not worship the true God falsely but only according to his commandments.

As confessional Presbyterians, we are aware of these Scriptures, and others like them, that frame the regulative principle of worship. Yet I want to suggest the urgency
of applying the regulative principle to the preaching of the Word of God. How does the regulative principle bear on what Christ-centered preaching to the glory of God looks like?

The Gospel Contains Its Own Relevance

Scripture has many examples of preaching to the glory of God: Peter’s sermon at Pentecost in Acts 2 and before the people in the Portico of Solomon in Acts 3; Stephen’s sermon in Acts 7; Peter preaching to the Gentiles in Acts 10; Paul and Barnabas’s sermon at Antioch in Pisidia in Acts 13; and the entire book of Hebrews, which functions as a protracted sermon (Heb. 13:22). Each of these is an exemplar. Each sermon is an instance of “redemptive-historical” preaching that is thoroughly christocentric—Christ is the central redemptive subject matter—and christotelic—Christ the climactic fulfillment of the Old Testament. Christ, crucified and glorified, forges both the substance and goal of the Old Testament Scriptures that the apostles proclaim in their heralding of the gospel.

This gospel of God’s Son contains its own relevance in the way that it addresses sin and supplies salvation in Christ. You will not find biblical examples of preaching that finds its relevance in the preacher’s religious experience or in the exemplary character of a biblical figure.

Paul never anchors the gospel in his own life experience, no matter how important his own apostolic life experience might be in the unfolding of redemptive history. Rather, from beginning to end, he preaches a Son-centered gospel (Rom. 1:1–4) that centers not on the experience of the Christian but on the experience of Christ himself. It is a gospel primarily about the Benefactor of redemption—and then and only then a gospel about the benefits sinners receive in union with the Benefactor by the Spirit and through faith (1 Cor. 15:3–4; Eph. 1:3; 1 Cor. 1:30). The sinless Son of God as the Mediator himself was justified (1 Tim. 3:16), adopted (Rom. 1:4), sanctified (Rom. 6:9), and glorified in his resurrection (2 Cor. 4:5–6), and the church receives the benefits of salvation only in union and communion with her crucified and glorified Lord.

Moreover, you will not find in apostolic preaching the exemplary sermons so common in American pulpits. The narrative of David and Goliath is not about how to fight the giants in your life, but rather how Christ has fought death, sin, and Satan on your behalf. It is the story of redemption accomplished and applied to the cowering Israelites looking on as their Champion defeats their and his enemy. You will not find sermon application in the Scriptures that seeks to make the gospel culturally relevant. Rather you will find an application first to Jesus Christ—and then and only then to believers united to him by the Spirit and through faith. The application found in the apostolic proclamation of the gospel draws attention from earth to the reality of heaven, where Christ is seated at the Father’s right hand. Longtime OP historian and pastor Charles Dennison wrote that

good preaching is God-centered, not man-centered. Enough of these litanies of illustrations, auto-biographical and otherwise, often more important to the preacher than the text itself. Enough of these shameful anecdotal homilies invented out of half truths and out-and-out untruths, the stuff of evangelical folklore. Preaching is not first of all about what may have happened to me or to you, disgracefully embellished and exaggerated, but what has most assuredly happened to Jesus Christ. (“Some Thoughts on Preaching,” Kerux, 1996)

The Application of Christ to the Christian

How, then, does the regulative principle of worship bear on preaching the Word of God? When Paul commands Timothy to “preach the word” in 2 Timothy 4:2, he commands Timothy to preach the gospel as he has received it from the apostles (2 Tim 2:8, 1 Cor. 15:1). The force of Paul’s command to Timothy carries with it the force of the regulative principle applied to preaching. What it means to “reprove, rebuke, and exhort” in terms of the preaching of the Word is set on display as the apostles call sinners to union and communion with Christ as Savior and the worship and service of Jesus Christ as Lord. Such gospel theology entails that the entire Christian life consists in the laying down of life to serve others in the way Christ has served you, what has been called a “cruciform life.” The comprehensive character of the preaching of the gospel thus envelops and bears on the whole of the cruciform life in union with Christ. When pastors depart from the Christ-centered gospel in the ways I have outlined, they are departing from what Paul commanded Timothy, and by extension all ministers, to do in the preaching of the gospel. The resurrection life of Christ in the Spirit conforms the Christian comprehensively to his suffering and cruciform love in new obedience, thereby making the application of Christ to the Christian totalizing and comprehensive.

We must apply the regulative principle of worship to our preaching. Let me conclude with a few more health-giving words from Charles Dennison:

Therefore, the message to preachers is not as it should be, namely, “You and your people have died with Christ to the world, therefore flee the world that, in following the cross and living from heaven, you might be given back as true servants of Christ in the world.” Instead the message to preachers becomes, “Master the world, become experts about the world so that you and your people might have influence for Christ and thereby prevail in the world, even as you make your way to God’s final benediction.” . . . Good preaching doesn’t pull the word into our world as if the word were deficient in itself and in need of our applicatory skills. Instead good preaching testifies and declares to us that we have been pulled into the word which has its own marvellous sufficiency.

The author is pastor of Providence OPC in Kingwood, Texas. New Horizons, December 2024.