Archives for October 2016

Matthew Roberts writes:

How should we keep the Sabbath? Let’s start with the Sabbath command in Exodus:

“Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labour and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God…” (Exodus 20:8-10)

God tells us to keep the Sabbath holy. “Holy” means “set apart especially for God’s use”. Note well—this does not mean “for us to use for God”; it means “for God to use us for his purposes”. But of course, since we’re his creatures, God’s using us for himself is also the very best thing that can happen to us.

So how do we keep the Sabbath day holy? How do we let God use it for his glory and our good?

 

Not a chore but a celebration

The main thing to grasp is that the Sabbath is a celebration. It’s not a chore but a delight. This is true of all God’s laws, of course. The fact that we often think of the Sabbath as a stifling restriction on our freedom says far more about our hearts than about the Sabbath command. That’s what sinful people think of all God’s good commandments! For example, the command not to commit adultery sounds incredibly restrictive to sinful human ears. But in fact it leads to blessings for everyone, whether married or not, which are infinitely better than the joys we imagine adultery might lead to; and which are the very opposite of the miseries adultery in fact leads to.

Now it’s the same with the Sabbath. It’s not a restriction to kill us but a blessing to give us life. It’s a celebration! It’s like a weekly Christmas day, or more accurately, a weekly Easter day—a day for celebrating the fact that God has made us and has saved us for himself through Christ.

 

So first, it’s a day for celebrating the goodness of God’s creation

When I was a child my parents would let us have golden syrup on our cereal on Sunday mornings. ‘Sunday Syrup’, as we called it, got the Sabbath right. The Lord’s Day is a day for the best food, the best wine, for eating together and celebrating God’s goodness in creation. We should see it as a feast day—a day of glorious rest from the normal run of life, a day of joyful celebration with our family—and especially with God’s family, the church. We keep the day holy by celebrating the incredible goodness that God has given us in making us and in providing all the good things of creation for us.

That’s why it’s a day to rest from work. Work is good, but it’s not everything. We’re supposed to enjoy and delight in the good gifts of God’s creation.

Resting from work is an act of faith. We show that we trust that God is God and we are not. The world will keep on running without us. The most common reason Christians give for working on Sunday is ‘I just have so much to do; I can’t get it done otherwise’. But that’s exactly why we should rest. You see, when we do that we show that we think that our lives are in our hands, when in fact they’re in God’s. God commands us to rest for this day and to trust that he has the results in his hand. The more we feel the pressure to work the more we need the discipline of trusting God, not ourselves, that resting on the Lord’s Day gives us.

Proper rest requires preparing in advance. You have to pack and plan properly for a holiday if it’s going to be a holiday. It’s the same with the Lord’s Day. Do the vacuuming, laundry, shopping, ironing, meal prep on Friday and Saturday. Do that and you’ll be able to rest properly on Sunday. It’s the same with paid work (or full-time study)—you’ll only rest if you’ve planned in advance that you’re not going to work on that day. Otherwise other people’s expectations, and your own pressure on yourself, will be too much to resist.

Of course, if our rest comes at the expense of having others work for us, then we haven’t yet grasped what the Sabbath is about. God is Lord of all creation. Christ died to bring in the new creation of all things. So Christians should not employ others to work for them on the Lord’s Day. That’s why God forbade having your servants or your ox or your donkey work for you on the Sabbath. The rule of thumb we follow in our family is that we don’t spend money on the Lord’s Day. We don’t buy or sell or do any kind of business, because that’s a form of making people work for us.

Now Jesus was clear that it’s right to do good on the Sabbath, and specifically caring and healing is an appropriate use of the day. The Westminster Confession calls this ‘duties of necessity and mercy’. So working in healthcare is certainly not a breach of the Sabbath. Also things which are a necessity for others’ wellbeing are appropriate—if you work for an electricity company, for example. For the same reason it’s acceptable to use electricity on the Sabbath! But we do well not to pay others to work for us in things other than true necessities. Buy your milk and bread the day before.

Rather than seeing this as a restriction on what we can do for ourselves, see it as an opportunity and invitation to do things for others. So instead of thinking ‘Bother, I can’t do the shopping’, think, ‘Who could I invite round for lunch/tea? Who in the church would be cheered up if I visited him/her this afternoon? Is there anyone on his own today who would love to be with people? Or someone I could take a meal to because she’s not well?

Real rest requires thankfulness to God. It’s not just a day to have fun, though it should be thoroughly enjoyable; real enjoyment comes from receiving things from God with thankful hearts. So learn particularly on the Lord’s Day to thank God for the things he has given us.

 

It’s a day for celebrating the goodness of our redemption

That last reason links to the very heart of the Sabbath day. It’s for the worship of God. Gathering with fellow Christians to worship God in our churches isn’t something we do on Sunday because it’s a convenient day to do it. It’s the very centre and purpose of what the Sabbath is about. Leviticus 23:3 describes it as a ‘holy convocation’. ‘Convocation’ means ‘calling together’. The risen Lord Jesus seems particularly to have met with the disciples on the first day of the week. John’s vision of the heavenly worship in God’s throne room in the book of Revelation happened on the Lord’s Day (Revelation 1:10). The purpose of the day is so that God can call us together to meet with him to worship him.

Even the word ‘church’ speaks of this: the Greek word means ‘assembly’ or ‘gathering’, which deliberately echoes the ‘gathering’ of God’s people at Mount Sinai when God first set them free from slavery in Egypt. And as the book of Exodus makes clear, the reason he freed them was so that they could gather and worship him at Mount Sinai. So since the Sabbath celebrates our freedom from slavery to sin (Deuteronomy 5:15)—which is what the exodus was all about—then the heart of that freedom is that we get to assemble to worship together the God who made us and who has saved us.

So make meeting with the church the main thing in the day! Come to church expecting to meet with God, and be ready to listen to him. God takes us through the gospel again in every service to remind us again how to relate to him rightly. The things that happen in a service are designed by God as tools he uses to work in us and change us. He speaks to us in his Word to make us more into his images. He calls us to pray so that he can answer and we can grow in our trust in him. He shares the meal of the Lord’s Supper with us, to assure us of his grace and call us actively to put our trust in Christ crucified again for our lives. Our morning service is the main place we do this. The evening service provides an opportunity to end the day doing the same thing.

Make the whole day about the church. That doesn’t mean being at church the whole day—but seeing it as a day to spend with your church family. That’s why it’s great to spend the day with other Christians from church, including your lunch and afternoon. If you have your own family, make it a day very special for them; pray together in the morning, eat together at lunchtime. And it’s all the better if you’re able to show or receive hospitality to join your family with others from the wider church family.

And why not invite non-Christians to join us? The Sabbath is a foretaste of the coming new creation. That means that it’s a shop-window for all the blessings of the gospel. Our neighbours should look over our garden walls or into our living room windows on Sunday afternoon, and see something that they too would love to be part of. Why not invite them to join in? Or even better, invite them to come to church and see for themselves what it means for human beings like them to meet with the living God who made them? I suspect that the majority of those who become Christians from a non-Christian background do so because they were invited to church by a Christian. The glory of the gospel of Christ is on display as his people worship him on the Lord’s Day in a way that happens at no other time.

And if you do have time on your own, don’t slip back into doing chores. Sit down with a cup of tea and read a good Christian book, or catch up on reading the Bible.

To sum up, God gives the Sabbath to us to be a delight (Isaiah 58:13–15). Naturally, we struggle to believe that. But if we do, then we find that God uses it to be an incredible blessing to us—the focal point of what it means to know God as our Father through the Son by the work of the Holy Spirit.

 

slightly edited from http://www.trinitychurchyork.org.uk/resources/blog/post/how-should-we-think-about-the-sabbath-part-2

TO DELVE DEEPER:

• A Sign of Hope
  by Richard B. Gaffin, Jr.
• Why on Sunday?
  by O. Palmer Robertson
• Proper Sabbath Observance: The Sojourner’s Sabbath
  by Herman C. Hoeksema

Matthew Roberts writes:

Is Sunday the Sabbath day? And if it is, then how do we keep it without being legalistic? Here is a summary of how Reformed churches have generally understood the Bible’s teaching on the Sabbath.

1. God established the Sabbath at creation: he made the world in six days, and then rested on the seventh. So he blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy (see Gen. 2:1–3). Note well: ‘holy’ means specially set aside to, or devoted to, God. It’s a day for creation to remember its Creator, for creation to especially remember and celebrate its relationship with its Creator.

2. At the same time the Sabbath day is looking forwards. The purpose of creation is rest: the whole of creation is looking forward to its coming rest when all things are complete. We can see this because the New Testament shows that the dominion of man over all creation, described on day 6 in Genesis 1, is only truly fulfilled in the resurrection of Jesus; he is the man who is given all authority in heaven and on earth, who has all things put under his feet. So the true seventh, Sabbath day, the day of rest, comes after Jesus has been raised from the dead and entered into his kingdom. i.e. it still lies in the future.

Even in the Old Testament this can be seen, because the idea of ‘rest’ – clearly connected to the Sabbath – is always about a future hope. Israel in the Wilderness looks forward to ‘rest’ in the promised land. And once they are there, it quickly becomes clear that the true day of ‘rest’ still lies in the future. Psalm 95 makes this point, as Hebrews 3:7-4:13 explains.

So to summarise: the Sabbath is about creation (remembering God made us) and redemption (remembering God has saved us, for a glorious future rest). When we rest from our work on the Sabbath day God is reminding us that he made us and that he has rescued us. The two accounts of the ten commandments (Exodus 20:11 & Deuteronomy 5:15) bring out these two aspects of the Sabbath. Both these things mean the Sabbath is to be kept holy – a day especially for God, and especially for us to meet with and serve and worship God.

3. Thanks to their fulfilment in Jesus, lots of Old Testament commands change in the way they apply in the New Testament. Some lapse completely (e.g. don’t eat shellfish) while others are essentially unchanged (e.g. don’t murder). The difference is in whether the commands are grounded in the unchanging realities of who God is and who we are (traditionally called ‘moral’ laws) or are grounded simply in God’s decision to command them. The latter God can clearly decide to withdraw, and he has done exactly that with many commands which were given for a specific purpose to God’s people during the time between Mount Sinai and Jesus. But God can never withdraw moral laws because they are grounded in his nature, in who he is and what he is like. So Jesus declared all foods clean (see Mk. 7:19); but he did not, indeed he could not, say it’s now OK to worship other Gods!

Lots of modern Christians assume that the Sabbath command no longer applies, just like the command not to eat pork. But there are two serious problems with this.

First, until very recently almost no Christians thought this. That should always be a red flag for us! We’re not very likely to be the first Christians to get this right. And if we are, the fact that the scales have fallen from our eyes at the very moment in western history when the culture has turned secular and is putting huge social pressure on us not to keep the Sabbath seems to be a bit too much of a coincidence.

Second, and more importantly, it’s very hard to make the case for this from Scripture. It’s true that there are changes in how the Sabbath works in the New Testament (not least the change of day from the seventh to the first), but it can’t be put in the same class as the laws that apply just to Old Testament Israel. This is because:

a) it is so explicitly grounded in creation. It’s not something which God introduced for Israel. Given Genesis 2:1-3 and Exodus 20:11, it clearly applies to all of creation.

b) It is in the ten commandments. All the other nine commandments, although they were spoken to Israel at Mount Sinai, already applied to the whole world. When Moses murdered the Egyptian in Exodus 2, it was already wrong, even though it was 40 years earlier. And when Pharoah commanded the murder of baby boys, that was also wrong. So why would the Sabbath be listed in this specific place if the same were not true? More than that, it is made quite explicit that the same is true: the Sabbath applies to all of God’s creation, ever since creation, because it is about creation. Just like the goodness of truth and the wrongness of lying, and like the sanctity of human life and the wrongness of murder, it is hard-wired into creation itself. And therefore it cannot simply have evaporated in the New Testament.

c) What’s more, it clearly hasn’t evaporated in the New Testament. Jesus addressed the Sabbath repeatedly, and not once did he declare it to be abolished. Rather he refocused people’s attention on what it was really for and on himself as the Lord of the Sabbath (which of course can only be true of God himself).

4. Why then has the day changed from the seventh day to the first day of the week? The clue is that it is called ‘the Lord’s Day’ in Revelation 1:10. This is the day that the Lord Jesus was raised from the dead.

The Sabbath was about creation. It was the seventh day because it was pointing forward to the great coming day when all creation would have reached its fulfilment, entered the rest God planned for it. That day arrived on the first Easter Sunday. That is the day when the new creation began. When God’s design for his creation: that it should all be ruled over by the man he has appointed, was first fulfilled. From that day onwards he has been building his kingdom. Of course, it is not yet complete, which is why we are still looking forwards to the true Sabbath rest arriving when Christ returns, and the new creation is completed. But we look forward to it knowing that it is done. Jesus in his death and resurrection from the dead has completed God’s works. It is finished. Now is simply the time of gathering people into his kingdom.

You see, the Sabbath is still about our creation and our redemption. But now, since Jesus’ death and resurrection, it is about not just our first creation, in the image of Adam, but also our new creation in the image of Christ. It is about his finished and certain work to make us perfect and bring us into perfect, eternal worship of God in his new creation. So now the week starts with Sabbath. We don’t rest at the end of our week’s work, as a pointer to a rest not yet here. We rest at the beginning, before we begin our week’s work, as a pointer to what Christ has completely accomplished, in which we will certainly share. We work in joyful celebration of what God has already done.

So the Sabbath is not less important for New Testament Christians than for Old Testament Israelites, but actually more! It is the Lord’s Day, a day for joyful celebration and particularly for joyful worship of the God who has made us and re-made us in Christ.

Here is the Westminster Confession’s paragraph on understanding the Sabbath:

“As God’s creatures, all people know that they ought to set apart a fitting proportion of time to worship God. Similarly, God in his Word explicitly appoints one day in seven as a Sabbath to be kept holy to him. This is a positive, moral, and ongoing commandment that binds all people in all ages.

“From the beginning of the world to the resurrection of Christ, God’s appointed Sabbath was the last day of the week. With the resurrection of Christ, God changed the Sabbath to the first day of the week. Scripture calls this the Lord’s Day. We are to continue keeping the Lord’s Day as the Christian Sabbath until the end of the age” (21.7).   _{(paraphrased into modern English by LEW)}

slightly edited from http://www.trinitychurchyork.org.uk/resources/blog/post/how-should-we-think-about-the-sabbath

TO DELVE DEEPER:

• A Sign of Hope
  by Richard B. Gaffin, Jr.
• Why on Sunday?
  by O. Palmer Robertson
• Proper Sabbath Observance: The Sojourner’s Sabbath
  by Herman C. Hoeksema

This post is adapted from Reading the Word of God in the Presence of God: A Handbook for Biblical Interpretation by Vern Poythress.

1. THE BIBLE IS GOD’S OWN WORD.

That means that what the Bible says, God says.

2. GOD GOVERNS THE WHOLE WORLD THROUGH HIS DIVINE SPEECH, WHICH SPECIFIES AND CONTROLS WHAT HAPPENS (Heb. 1:3).

The Bible indicates that God speaks to govern the world, but we do not hear this speech; we only see its effects (for example, Ps. 33:6, 9; 147:15–18). The Bible, by contrast, is the Word of God, designed by God to speak specifically to us as human beings. All divine speech, whether directed toward governing the world in general or directed toward us as human beings, has divine character. In particular, it displays God’s lordship in authority, control, and presence.

3. GOD SPEAKS HIS WORDS TO US IN COVENANTS (Gen. 9:9; 15:18; 17:7; Ex. 19:5; etc.).

A “covenant” is a solemn, legally binding agreement between two parties. In this case, the two parties are God and human beings. In the Old Testament, God’s covenants with human beings show some affinities with ancient Near Eastern suzerainty treaties. These treaties show five elements, which also appear either explicitly or by implication in God’s covenants in the Old Testament: identification of the suzerain (Ex. 20:2); historical prologue (Ex. 20:2); stipulations (Ex. 20:3–17); sanctions (i.e., blessings and curses) (Ex. 20:7; see also v. 12); recording and passing on (Ex. 31:18; Deut. 31).

The identification of God proclaims his transcendent authority, and the stipulations as norms imply his authority over the people. The historical prologue shows how he has exercised his control in past history. The blessings and curses indicate how he will exercise his control in the future. His identification also proclaims his presence, and the recording and passing on of the covenantal words imply his continuing presence with the people.

4. ALL THE BIBLE IS THE COVENANTAL WORD OF GOD.

That is, the idea of covenant offers us one perspective on the Bible. The New Testament proclaims the gospel concerning the death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ. The apostle Paul characterises his entire ministry as a ministry of the “new covenant” (2 Cor. 3:6). So all of Paul’s writings are covenantal words in a broad sense. At the Last Supper, Jesus inaugurated “the new covenant” (Luke 22:20; 1 Cor. 11:25). The other apostles and New Testament writers function to convey the words of the new covenant to us.

When the Bible uses the word new to describe the new covenant, it clearly presupposes an older one. The new covenant fulfils the Abrahamic covenant (Gal. 3:7–14) and the Davidic covenant (Acts 2:30–36), but the Mosaic covenant is principally in mind when the New Testament implies a covenant that is “old” (Heb. 8:8–13). The Mosaic covenant also contains, in Deuteronomy 31, explicit instructions for preserving canonical covenantal documents and explicit instructions about future prophets (Deut. 18:18–22). The entirety of the Old Testament consists in divinely authorised additions to the initial Mosaic deposit, so it fits into the covenantal structure inaugurated with Moses. The entire Old Testament is covenantal in character.

Thus both the New Testament and the Old Testament can be viewed as covenantal in a broad sense. Indeed, the traditional names, in which they are called “Testaments,” signify their covenantal character (“testament” is a near synonym for “covenant” in later theological usage, which builds on Heb. 9:15–16).

5. THE BIBLE IS A SINGLE BOOK, WITH GOD AS ITS AUTHOR.

It does of course have multiple human authors. But its unity according to the divine author implies that we should see it as a single unified message, and should use each passage and each book to help us in understanding others. Because God is faithful to his own character, he is consistent with himself. We should therefore interpret each passage of the Bible in harmony with the rest of the Bible.

6. THE BIBLE IS GOD-CENTRED.

It not only has God as its author, but in a fundamental way it speaks about God as its principal subject. It does so even in historical passages that do not directly mention God, because the history it recounts is history governed by God.

7. THE BIBLE IS CHRIST-CENTRED.

Covenants mediate God’s presence to us, and at the heart of the covenants is Christ, who is the one mediator between God and men (1 Tim. 2:5). Christ, as the coming servant of the Lord, is virtually identified with the covenant in Isaiah 42:6 and 49:8. In Luke 24, Jesus teaches the apostles that all of the Old Testament Scriptures are about him and his work (Luke 24:25–27, 44–49).

Understanding how the Old Testament speaks about Christ is challenging, but in view of Jesus’s teaching it cannot be evaded. Fortunately, we have the New Testament to aid us. It contains not only teachings that help us to understand the Old Testament as a whole, but many quotations from the Old Testament that illustrate Jesus’s claims in Luke 24.

8. THE BIBLE IS ORIENTED TO THE HISTORY OF REDEMPTION.

God caused the Bible’s individual books to be written over a period of centuries. God’s later speech builds on earlier speech, and further unfolds the significance of his plan for history. God’s redemption takes place in history. Christianity is not merely a religious philosophy, a set of general truths about God and the world. At its heart is the gospel, the good news that Christ has come and has lived and died and has risen from the dead, and now lives to intercede for us. God has worked out our salvation by coming in the person of Christ and acting in time and space. The message of what he has done now goes out to the nations (Matt. 28:18–20; Acts 1:8).

9. CHRIST’S FIRST AND SECOND COMING ARE CENTRAL TO HISTORY.

God’s work of redemption came to a climax in the work of Christ on earth, especially in his crucifixion, death, resurrection, and ascension. Christ now reigns at the right hand of the Father (Eph. 1:20–21). We look forward to the future consummation of redemption when Christ returns.

10. GOD’S WORK OF REDEMPTION INTERWEAVES WORD AND DEED.

We see this interweaving even during his work of creation:

Word: God said, “Let there be light.”
Deed: And there was light.
Word: And God saw that the light was good [similar to verbal evaluation]. (Gen. 1:3–4)

Word: “Let us make man in our image . . .”
Deed: So God created man in his own image, . . .
Word: And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply . . .” (Gen. 1:26–28)

Likewise, Jesus’s words interpret his deeds and vice versa:

If I am not doing the works of my Father, then do not believe me; but if I do them, even though you do not believe me, believe the works, that you may know and understand that the Father is in me and I am in the Father. (John 10:37–38)

In the book of Acts, the miracles and the growth of the church help unbelievers to grasp the implications of apostolic preaching, and vice versa:

Philip went down to the city of Samaria and proclaimed to them the Christ. And the crowds with one accord paid attention to what was being said by Philip when they heard him and saw the signs that he did. For unclean spirits, crying out with a loud voice, came out of many who had them, and many who were paralysed or lame were healed. (Acts 8:5–7)

 

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Vern S. Poythress is professor of New Testament interpretation at Westminster Theological Seminary, where he has taught for nearly four decades. In addition to earning six academic degrees, including a Ph.D. from Harvard University and a Th.D. from the University of Stellenbosch, he is the author of numerous books and articles on a variety of topics, including biblical interpretation, language, and science. His most recent book is Reading the Word of God in the Presence of God: A Handbook for Biblical Interpretation.

Again and again we hear it. Some say, “Our worship seems so lifeless! Let’s revitalise it by adding guitar and drums!” Others respond, “No! Worship must be marked by reverence!” The first group counters, “But shouldn’t it also be marked by joy?”

God says that worship that’s genuinely vital—alive and enlivening—will be characterised both by reverence (Heb. 12:28) and by joy (Ps. 100:1–2). Why then do we find ourselves trying to choose between them?

Could it be because we imagine that worship is primarily something that we do? We very much need to understand that the heart of true worship is the living God himself meeting with and working in his people by his means of grace. He alone can genuinely vitalise his church. We need to get out of the way anything that might distract or divert us from his supernatural working. If we do, then what’ll worship look like? First Corinthians 14 provides five touchstones of vital worship.

The Centrality of God’s Word

In vital worship, God addresses his people through his Word. The Father draws near through his Son by his Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit works to draw God’s people in faith near to the Father through the Son’s mediation (Eph. 2:18). He uses God’s Word to create this response of faith (Rom. 10:17; Eph. 6:17).

That’s why prophecy—the forthtelling of God’s Word—was permitted in public worship, while uninterpreted tongues weren’t (1 Cor. 14:28). Prophecy instructs and edifies (vs. 3). But if uninterpreted tongues can’t be understood, they can’t edify (vs. 2). On the other hand, interpreted tongues could properly be used in worship during the apostolic era because they expressed God’s Word in an understandable way (vv. 5, 13, 18–19).

Today, we’ve got the functional equivalent of prophecy and tongues in the reading and preaching of Scripture. The gifts our Lord designed to be central to public worship are those which he gives to teach and edify the church. First, then, the ministry of God’s Word will be central to vital worship.

Clarity

This implies a second touchstone: “Let all things be done for building up” (1 Cor. 14:26). In vital worship, everything will be clear and understandable so that it edifies God’s redeemed people.

Order

Third, we tend to think that sincere worship must be spontaneous, but God insists that public worship must be marked by order. Why? Because only God can grant authenticity and vitality, and he “is not a God of confusion but of peace” (v. 33). Therefore, in worship “all things should be done decently and in order” (v. 40).

One Voice at a Time

Fourth, worship can be orderly only if one “voice” speaks at a time. In vital worship, God speaks to his assembled people, and the congregation responds to God. These voices are to be clear and distinct.

Those who have the spiritual gifts—and are authorised to use them—speak on God’s behalf. Through them, our Lord addresses his people. “Two or at most three, and each in turn,” may speak (1 Cor. 14:27, 29). Only a few in the congregation may represent the voice of God in worship, and only one at a time (vv. 30–31). Our Lord wants his voice to be clear and edifying. And so verse 31 insists, “Prophesy one by one, so that all may learn and all be encouraged.”

Accordingly, in elements of worship where God speaks to the congregation, only one voice is to speak at a time. Likewise, in elements of worship where the congregation speaks to God, only one voice is to speak at a time.

Silence

This implies, fifth, that vital worship will be marked by substantial silence. Jesus said that in this new age of covenant fulfilment, worship is in Spirit and in truth—i.e., by the Holy Spirit and through the mediation of Christ (John 4:23–24). This adds a new dimension and dynamic to worship. Because of Christ’s accomplished work and the Holy Spirit’s application of it, New Testament worship is personal and intimate in a way that Old Testament saints could only long for. Our heavenly High Priest grants access to the very throne room of God (Heb. 10:19–22). He graciously makes it possible for you to experience a new and deep interaction with the living God by his Spirit and through his Word. A tremendous amount of activity goes on when, in worship, the Triune God speaks to you and you genuinely listen in silence.

This helps us understand 1 Corinthians 14:33b–35, “As in all the churches of the saints, the women should keep silent in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak….” That prohibition is clear and emphatic. But that instruction applies to everyone’s attitude in public worship. That very same imperative—”keep silent”—is given two other times in this context (vv. 28, 30) to men! When it’s not appropriate for you to speak, “keep silent.” That goes for everyone.

How can we follow this principle? First, we must realise that in worship, not speaking does not mean not worshipping. God calls everyone to participate actively during every element of worship. At the same time, the way you do that in most of public worship is by means of outward silence. As the minister reads or preaches God’s Word, everyone else is to be silent. But when you are really worshipping, a lot will be happening in your silence. You will actively listen for God’s voice. The Holy Spirit will inwardly apply God’s Word. You will respond in faith. You will commune with your Lord by means of his ordinances. Keeping silent in worship is not the same as not participating in worship. Indeed, in order to participate fully, most of the congregation has to keep silent for most of the worship service.

Second, when the congregation as a whole speaks as a single voice to God, you should add your voice. Your voice sincerely raised together with the rest of the church is part and parcel of vital worship. But so is your silence. The genuine worship which you offer to God in silence is just as important and just as spiritual and just as vital. When God allows only a few men to speak on his behalf or to speak on behalf of the congregation, he does so precisely to enable you to enter more fully into the essence of worship—the intimacy of Spirit-and-truth communion with the living and true God.

Genuine Reverence and Genuine Joy

We see in 1 Corinthians 14 that vital worship is intensely spiritual. Does this help to explain why we keep finding ourselves choosing between reverence and joy in worship?

Francis Schaeffer once observed that it’s possible to counterfeit holiness in the flesh, but it’ll be legalistic and unloving. Similarly, it’s possible to counterfeit love in the flesh, but it’ll be permissive and unholy. But, he said, it’s impossible simultaneously to counterfeit both holiness and love in the flesh. Only the Holy Spirit can produce holy love and loving holiness.

Could it be that our worship dilemma arises because we’re too fleshly? It’s possible to counterfeit reverence in the flesh, but it’ll be sterile and joyless. It’s possible to counterfeit joy in the flesh, but it’ll be shallow and irreverent. But it’s impossible simultaneously to counterfeit both reverence and joy in the flesh; only the Holy Spirit can produce reverent joy and joyful reverence. “It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh is of no avail” (John 6:63).

Accordingly, while these touchstones do have implications for our worship practices, the first step toward solving our worship dilemma is not to make external changes to our practices. The first step to cure counterfeit reverence is not to add guitars and drums, nor will counterfeit joy be cured by insisting on solemnity. The first step is to get down on our knees in repentance for our sinful reliance on the flesh. It’s to admit to God that we are “wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked,” and that our only hope is the grace of God in Christ. It’s to seek the Lord for the internal changes that will draw us into close fellowship with him (Rev. 3:17–20).

Vital worship depends wholly on the living God. He’s not limited by external circumstances. He can produce vital worship—Spirit-and-truth communion with himself—in any circumstances, from cathedrals to catacombs, using a whole spectrum of preachers and a whole spectrum of music.

But you’ll never, ever really enjoy Spirit-and-truth communion with the living God unless the Holy Spirit regenerates you. It’s impossible for you to participate in the spiritual intimacy of new covenant worship unless you’re in living contact with the living Christ. Apart from that, vital biblical worship will always seem boring to you.

Moreover, unless you’re also abiding in Christ, vital biblical worship will still seem boring to you. You’ll go to worship just to meet other people, or just to be entertained, or just to be intellectually stimulated, or just to be emotionally stirred, or just to be motivated to action. But you’ll miss the main point. Worship is first and foremost about communing with the living, life-giving God.

Reprinted (slightly edited) from New Horizons, June 2009