I only heard this song once (on a Public Radio Station, too!), but found its chorus to be transcendent. But you’re right, Tim. Something tells me Mr. Cockburn wouldn’t bother to read your whole post.

But the acceptable way of worshipping the true God is instituted by Himself, and so limited by His own revealed will, that He may not be worshipped according to the imaginations and devices of men, or the suggestions of Satan, under any visible representation, or any other way not prescribed in the holy Scripture.

This means something roughly between these extremes:

1. That “things which qualify as worship activities” are explicitly listed in Scripture. These are things like praying, public reading of the Word, singing, etc. We can argue over the list, but the idea is that the list is fixed by God.
2. That the way we do those things is explicitly specified in Scripture. I confess that I don’t well understand how this is really supposed to work itself out, and I may not be characterizing it well. This extreme also tends to want to forbid anything vaguely worship-y which is not explicitly commanded in Scripture, like, say, Christmas or non-canonical hymns.

Also, add item zero to that list: “nothing.” Some people who claim to subscribe to the WCF really dumb the RPW idea down into oblivion, such that things like worship drama are accommodated. Which is fine at the end of the day, but at some point you have to start saying that you deny the RPW entirely and you take exception to the Confession on this point, rather than pretending that everything is fine and you love every jot and tittle of the document.

This is a point of Reformed culture which can get very, very silly. My personal take is than an RPW Lite is a good idea, but obsessing over exclusive Psalmody is a pretty quick route to Sixteenth Century Swiss Ghetto-ism.

But golly gee…”Open the eyes of my heart” makes me feel all warm and giddy inside…

Not, mind you, that I think that RPW in a larger, general sense, is not a good way to view the issue. Should we make things up and hope they’ll pass muster, or should we ask God (by means of seeing what He’s already said) how to go about things? Seems like the answer to that is fairly straightforward. I remain a confessional Presbyterian. However, it’s when you go beyond the P in RPW and make it the “regulative sentence that dictates every move we make” that you get into trouble and start coming up with forms of worship that make me say, “Did God really intend that worship be about not doing a lot of things we’re commanded to do all the rest of the time? Did God even intend that worship BE about not doing things?”

I think that page is what people get when the anti-spam system moves their comment to moderation. It should display an image with hard-to-read letters and numbers for you to type in to prove you’re a human, but I’ve never seen it myself. (Wordpress is always happy with my comments, since I own the blog. : ) ) If the CAPTCHA feature is broken, I may just turn that off.

If you see it again, I think you can safely ignore it, but you’ll have to wait until I find your moderated comment and approve it for posting. The next time I see a comment of yours in moderation I’ll pay more attention to what’s causing them to be flagged, so hopefully I can adjust that setting in your favor. If it’s happening to you, it’ll happen to somebody else. I get almost no false negative spam comments, so opening up the system won’t kill me.

Sorry for the inconvenience, and enjoy the tea and studying.