The Righteous Branch Who Restores Household Worship guide from Jeremiah 33 + Hearers and Doers of the Word Preached

by Ed Blackwood

This week we will consider A Righteous Branch and Restored from Jeremiah 33. At Springs Reformed Church we distribute a weekly guide running from the Lord's Day to Saturday with Monday-Wednesday reviewing the sermons that were preached the Lord's Day at the start of the week and Thursday-Saturday previewing the sermons that will be preached the coming Lord's Day.

However, for the posts here I am linking to the guide from Thursday to Wednesday so that all are aimed at the Lord's Day as the peak of the 7-day rhythm as seen in the image above. The Lord's Day post includes links to the sermons.

Thursday Jeremiah 33:1-13—Call to God
Friday Jeremiah 33:14-18—A Righteous Branch
Saturday Jeremiah 33:19-26—Daily Reminders
Lord’s Day
Monday Galatians 4:1-7—When the Fullness of Time Had Come
Tuesday Romans 4:9-25—Lessons from Abraham’s Faith
Wednesday Luke 22:31–34, John 21:15–19—Restored!

If you find it useful to use these in your household/family worship, consider asking your pastor to speak to me about him developing something similar in your congregation.

Thoughts for Pastors:

James calls on us to “be doers of the word and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves (James 1:22).” For every Christian on every Lord’s Day, today is the day to hear the word preached. Today is the day to respond to the word preached. Today, if you will hear his voice, do not harden your hearts (Ps 95:7-8). Yet, Ash points out, “Every time we listen to a sermon, the devil will whisper in our ear: ‘That was good stuff. Why not do something about it tomorrow?’ And we instinctively want to agree, because tomorrow never comes.”[1] However, we must resist, because “to hear a sermon and not respond is worse than not hearing at all.”[2]

Preaching that makes a church Christ-like under grace takes a double miracle: the sinful preacher must be shaped by grace to preach; and sinful listeners must be awakened by grace to listen together week by week in humble expectancy. Only God can do this. So praying before the sermon is not a formality. Unless God works, the whole thing will be a waste of time. But God loves to change us through preaching, and He loves it when we pray to be given fresh repentance, renewed faith, joyful obedience and a corporate Christ-likeness in the local church. So let us pray for this with confidence.[3]

I would say, as we pray for this, let’s prepare for it as well in our daily household worship. That is, to enhance the hearing of the Word preached with a review of the word that has been preached and a preview of the Word that will be preached is one of the aims of Worship Connected.

Calvin comments on listeners receiving sermons with saving faith, stating somewhat shockingly that “if the same sermon is preached, say, to a hundred people, twenty receive it with the ready obedience of faith, while the rest hold it valueless, or laugh, or hiss, or loathe it.”[4] As Joel Beeke notes, “If proper hearing was a problem in Calvin’s Day, how much more is it so today, when ministers have to compete for the attention of people who are bombarded with various forms of media on a daily basis?”[5]

[1] Christopher Ash, Listen up!: A Practical Guide to Listening to Sermons (New Malden: Good Book Company, 2010), 3.

[2] Ash, 22.

[3] Ash, 23.

[4] Jean Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John Thomas McNeill, The Library of Christian Classics (Louisville, Ky. London: Westminster John Knox Press, 20), 979.

[5] Joel R. Beeke, The Family at Church: Listening to Sermons and Attending Prayer Meetings, 2nd ed, Family Guidance Series (Grand Rapids, Mich: Reformation Heritage Books, 2008), 4.