That's what we need today. Everything we do in our church, the way we go about things, the way we order things has to be ordered by the word of God. The New Testament particularly, in the case of the church, tells us everything we need to know. So we reject the bright sparks, however well intended they may be, who come along with innovations and gimmicks and new ways and say to us, ‘What you have been doing up till now is no use; here is the way you ought to do things.
You can see other signs of obedience to God in these chapters: the meticulous care taken in the rebuilding of the temple to follow God's prescription. There are other references in these verses to being completely faithful to God's word. That's what has been abandoned today. There is a book entitled Total Church, which has become very popular among Bible believing churches in this country. Although the authors themselves come across as Bible believers, and even strong on doctrine and Reformed in their way, they want to say how churches ought to be today, and how they should work in our present culture in order to be successful. It is really a challenge to the traditional way of churches operating and evangelising. The book doesn't really like traditional ways of doing things, the godly Biblical traditions that we have it; it wants a whole new method. It isn’t particularly original, because like many of these modern church growth books, it is really, in some shape or form, adopting the plan which we associate with Paul Yonggi Cho, in Korea, and his cell group method. When you have a church, you work in groups, mini churches, house groups; it is all friendship and entertainment and that's how you work. You get together once a week as a big church perhaps, where you have something like a rave up and a concert and all the usual type of Charismatic worship, which is about decibels more than anything else. This book is really another version of the same old thing. But it's been wildly received among churches, and it’s so disappointing because the book doesn't even believe in, or adhere to, the regulative or normative principles. There is no notion that everything that we do must have a warrant in the word of God. The word of God alone is normative, and if we have a method or an approach, we must test it against Scripture. They like to use the hip language, ‘doing church’, as though the church is something you can reinvent – its appearance, its government, and its methods – from generation to generation. Nobody who endorses this book seems to notice that the authors clearly don't believe in the sufficiency of Scripture, however Reformed they claim to be, so you have got an abundance of human innovation. God's way has to be complied with, and that's what we must stick to and believe in.