Join Us For Worship
But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, to an innumerable company of angels, to the general assembly and church of the firstborn who are registered in heaven, to God the Judge of all, to the spirits of just men made perfect, to Jesus the Mediator of the new covenant, and to the blood of sprinkling that speaks better things than that of Abel.
Hebrews 12:22–24
Sunday Morning Worship
10:00 a.m. Morning Worship Service
11:45 a.m. Bible Classes
Sunday Evening Worship
5:45 p.m. Hymn Sing
6:00 p.m. Evening Worship Service
We meet every Lord’s Day to worship the Lord at
4600 Three Bell Parkway, Fort Collins, Colorado.
From Interstate 25 go east 1.5 miles, turn right on Three Bell Parkway, and then turn right into the parking lot.
Oh come, let us worship and bow down; Let us kneel before the LORD our Maker. For He is our God, and we are the people of his pasture, and the sheep of his hand. Psalm 95:6–7
Experience God-honoring worship with God’s people
God breaks through the veil between heaven and earth, between eternity and time, and bows us down in His presence. We see the King’s face. There is a sense of the majesty and glory of God, a sense of the exaltation of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, the desire to worship the one true and living God in Spirit and in truth. That sense of awe, of reverence, of solemn joy, of pleasure, of the experience of the treasure of the presence of God lingers with us, transforms our lives, shapes our character, and puts dignity and reverence into our lives because it has begun to dawn on us that we, little though we are, have been in the presence of the Creator of the cosmos, and He has come to us as our loving heavenly Father to receive our worship.
Hear the holy, inspired, infallible Word of God
Sometimes the word doctrine is heard as though it were a slightly nasty word, but it is far too important in the Bible for that to be true. Knowing biblical doctrine is rather like having the architect’s drawings for a building. The building is put up in a building site, but if you do not have the architect’s drawings, you do not know what you are building and you are not going to be very successful in building it. If you have bad drawings, the building is going to be faulty.
The same is true in the Christian life. There is a very close relationship between our understanding of Christian doctrine and the way we live the Christian life. I know people often say, “Doctrine divides, experience unites,” but actually, if you think about it, that is not only far from the truth, it is almost the reverse of the truth. The reality is that true doctrine unites, and the New Testament itself teaches us that. Actually, when you think about it, in order to describe your spiritual experience, you need to use words. You are describing your spiritual experience in doctrinal terms. So, doctrine is important.
What do we think about the doctrine of the Bible? The Scots Confession was written in 1560. There were six authors, and they all had the Christian name John: John Winram, John Spottiswood, John Willock, John Douglas, John Row, and John Knox. Essentially, this confession was a kind of guiding light to Scottish Christians, pointing them to Christ and the faith once delivered to the saints. In the introduction to it, Knox and his friends wrote that if anyone found anything in the confession that was misleading, they should tell them and they would respond to them. Knox wrote that they would respond “from the mouth of God.” They were talking about the Bible, of course. What a tremendous way to describe the Bible—the mouth of God.
It was not John Knox who came up with that expression. It is how Jesus described the Bible. You remember when He was tempted? Jesus said in Matthew 4.4, “It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.” Jesus Himself was actually quoting from Deuteronomy 8:3. Of course, Paul puts it the same way, but in different words. He tells us that the Scriptures are “God-breathed.”
We could say in thinking about the doctrine of Scripture that perhaps the simplest, the most basic, and in many ways the most helpful way for us to read the Bible is to think of it as the mouth of God, when we read it, to think of ourselves as listening to God Himself speak because indeed He does speak through the Bible. Because that is true, it tells us a lot about the authority of the Bible and also about the reliability of the Bible. If God is speaking through it, we can trust it, and if God is telling us something by it, we should do it.
This little phrase “the mouth of God” has the power not only to instruct the way we think about the nature of the Bible, but to help us to read the Bible. Isaiah said about the coming Savior that morning by morning, the Lord opened His ear and He heard as one who was taught. He listened through the Word to the voice of God.
Think about it this way, and you will find yourself paying more attention to it. More than that, you will begin to think there can be few greater privileges in all the world than this: that I am able to sit here with my Bible and listen to our heavenly Father speaking to me through it. In Hebrews 12 when the author of Hebrews quotes from the book of Proverbs, he does not say, “This is what God said,” but he says, “This is what our heavenly Father is saying to us.” He is now, through the Scriptures, addressing us as sons. We need to recover that sense of the amazing privilege we have in possessing the Bible.
There are more editions of the Bible, more shapes and sizes of the Bible, more Christians own many, many copies of the Bible, but all the statistics tell us that we are a generation that knows so little about the Bible. Perhaps it is because we have forgotten what the Bible really is. It is the mouth of God. We need to learn to say with the Lord Jesus, in the words of Isaiah, “Morning by morning, he wakens my ear to hear as those who are taught.” If we do that, we will begin to grow and become more like our Lord Jesus.
Experience the Encouragement of Christian Fellowship
We are very much individuals, and yet the wonderful thing that happens to us when we come to faith in Jesus Christ is that we are not only bound together in Him, but because of that we are bound to one another. As the Shepherd calls His sheep to come to Him, they come nearer to each other. They are bound together in love, bound together in grace. That is why you feel nearer to fellow believers who may be a thousand miles away from you than you often do to the people who are standing next to you. That is because we belong to a family, the worldwide, eternity-long family of God.
Our Pastor and Elders Love Christ’s Sheep
Preaching God’s Word brings rebuke as it convicts us of sin, but it also brings healing and mends what is broken. It corrects in order that people may be trained in righteousness and be able to live fully for the glory of God. God’s Word works in our lives to bring healing and transformation, correction where things have gone wrong, and begins to put bite into our lives, but also creates a certain beauty.
Therefore take heed to yourselves and to all the flock, among which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to shepherd the church of God which he purchased with his own blood.
Acts 20:28
