In the church, all that we do fall somewhere on the continuum between fine culture and folk culture.

Our music, our architecture, our furnishings, our dress, our written materials, our preaching and teaching, our conversation between the services so really what

I'm doing here is just trying to create an awareness of this fact the values of both the

people that come dressed in three-piece suits like I do on Sunday morning and the people

that come with open collars that the one is folk and one is fine, and there's something right, I believe, happening in both.

I don't think most of us walk in the church on a Sunday thinking, I wonder where this

service falls on the cultural spectrum between folk and fine.

But that spectrum actually shapes more than we realize.

I'm Dan Kroover. In this episode of Light and Truth, John Piper helps us think more clearly

about the cultural layers that shape our worship, and near the end, he answers some questions

that push the conversation even deeper.

His teaching was originally delivered at Bethlehem Baptist Church on Wednesday evening,

October 3, 1990.

What I'd like to do is pick up where we left off with thoughts on culture and worship last time.

And let me review for you.

Some of you might not have been here, but I have nine points to make about worship and culture.

And the first one was that not much in the New Testament is specific about the way we worship.

And therefore, I assume the Lord did not want to bind us very closely in the forms that we use,

which is good because there's so many different cultures around the world that want to use the New Testament, we would be in a fix if

God did that. The second observation was that there is such a thing as fine culture and folk culture. And I think it's helpful to try to just see the values in

both. And I pointed out that both have unique propensities to evil or sin, and both have unique

potentials for good.

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