Transcript
Well, I can tell you for sure, Paul Tripp loves Sunday morning. I love the anticipation of that drive to Epiphany Fellowship in the northern part of the center of Philadelphia. I love what I’m going to get there and I love it because I know I need it. I need two things that are so important, such an important part of corporate worship. I need to be taught again and again and again. I need the biblical story applied to my story, so I live with a God-story mentality.
Now, I need more than just abstract teaching. What I love about the teaching in the church is I’m taught by a pastor who is with us, who walks long-term with us, who knows us, who can speak those truths with a specificity to people that he knows and he loves. And there’s a tenderness and compassion and a passion for us to get that because he lives with us. I don’t think anything replaces pastoral preaching. Books don’t replace that. The internet doesn’t replace that. Conferences [don’t] replace that. I know I’m loved by him. He speaks out of that love. We are known to him and that pastoral preaching is a beautiful thing.
I need corporate worship. I need to be reminded of the truths of the gospel in that worship. But I need something else. I need to hear my brothers and sisters sing the gospel into my ears. I need my dull heart awakened by their voices again. There are times in corporate singing where tears will fill my eyes because I hear my brothers and sisters singing those truths that are my life. Truths that I can be distracted by and forget I’m like everybody else. I drag into Sunday morning service, all the cares and frustrations and trials of life. I have an easily distracted and forgetful heart. I can be identity-amnesiac.
It’s a beautiful thing to hear brothers and sisters sing truth into my ears and to watch my heart get awakened once again. You need corporate worship. You need pastoral preaching. You need corporate singing. You need that and those are things you’ll never get by yourself. Those are elements of what God has designed his church. You should be there on Sunday morning and you should be there again and again and again. You need it and so do I.
