Archives for February 2018

David Strain writes:

For a few people today, an hour or two on Sunday mornings is occupied with public worship, but for most people, the idea that Sunday is the Christian Sabbath – an entire day set apart for worship, rest, and ministry – is entirely novel. And yet, in an age of frenetic and unrelenting busyness, when technology allows us to stay plugged in to the world twenty-four-seven, when entertainment becomes the de facto purpose of so many lives, nothing could be more counter-cultural, nor bear more eloquent testimony to a Christian’s citizenship in another world, than a well-spent Lord’s Day.

Growing up in Scotland, I had a residual cultural awareness that Sunday was the Sabbath Day. Even my secular parents spent the day with the TV switched off, quietly reading and resting. Years later, I came to faith through the faithful witness of a Pentecostal friend, and I saw the Lord’s Day as nothing more than a needless imposition upon my Christian freedom, more reflective of old covenant convictions than new covenant joys.

When I went to college, however, that all changed. After worship every Sunday, church families would vie with one another to bring students and visitors into their homes for lunch. There we’d be invited to spend the afternoon enjoying a veritable banquet, returning to evening worship with them at day’s end. After lunch, the TV remained silent. Some dozed contentedly in an armchair. Others went for a walk. Some brought a Christian book to read. Often, lively discussion would spill over from the lunch table to fill the afternoon. Sometimes we’d gather around the piano and sing hymns together. Conversation ebbed and flowed, punctuated by gales of laughter and grunts (the Scottish equivalent of an “amen”) of affirmation at some helpful point or another. Well before I could ever articulate a clear theology of the Lord’s Day, I contracted the happy contagion of joyful Sabbath observance. Were there nothing to support a well-spent Lord’s Day but the practical benefits of it, I would still commend this day of rest as an excellent mechanism for promoting our spiritual best.

Not that the doctrine of the Sabbath is without scriptural warrant. Its origins are woven into the fabric of God’s own creative work at history’s dawn. The seventh-day Sabbath was established at the climax of the creation week (Gen. 2:1–3). God blessed the Sabbath day and consecrated it, so that it became a sign to our first parents of the eschatological rest into which Adam’s obedience would usher creation itself if he were to keep covenant with God. The persistence of a Sabbath day after Adam’s fall is a reminder of the grace of God, who continues to hold out to fallen humanity the offer of rest through faith in Jesus Christ (which is why both creation and redemption are urged as motives for Sabbath-keeping in Exodus 20:11 and Deuteronomy 5:15).

Part of the function of Mosaic law in the history of redemption was to act as a temporary paedagogos, a schoolmaster or tutor teaching God’s old covenant people of their need for a Saviour (Gal. 3:24–25). Thus, the Sabbath remained on Saturday, at the end of our weekly labours, a kind of enacted promise, offering Israel eternal rest should she perfectly obey the law. The persistence of the Sabbath, at the end of a week of imperfect obedience, was intended to teach Israel to look for a second Adam who would accomplish the ultimate exodus-redemption and obtain for his people the final Sabbath rest that the first Adam forfeited and our best works cannot now hope to secure.

And so when Jesus came, he obeyed and bled and died, keeping perfectly God’s law. The demands of the covenant of works were met in full. The representative of a new humanity won for all who believe what had been lost in Adam. On the first day of the week, the Father vindicated his obedient Son, declaring him to be righteous in his resurrection (Rom. 1:4; 1 Tim. 3:16). On Sunday, the day that light was made, the curse on Adam’s sin was undone (Gen. 2:17), death was abolished, and the light of the world brought life and immortality to light (2 Tim. 1:10). Now that “it is finished” (John 19:30), the Sabbath day comes no longer at the end of a week of work but at the beginning of it. The work by which the Sabbath rest is secured has been accomplished for us by Jesus. Now we rest in him and work in the strength his saving grace supplies (Heb. 3:7-4:10). A new creation has been inaugurated and a perfect exodus has occurred. We have been translated from the dominion of darkness into the kingdom of the Son of God’s love (Col. 1:13).

That’s why the church now meets on the first day of the week (John 20:19; Acts 20:7; 1 Cor. 16:2; Rev. 1:10). New creation and perfect redemption are the great realities that are ours already in Christ, and we celebrate them and enjoy them on the Christian Sabbath day. It is a gospel ordinance that is refreshing for us and glorifying to God.

from https://www.ligonier.org/learn/articles/well-spent-sabbath/

For more on the Lord’s Day, see:

• 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

William J. Vermeulen writes

Why God’s People Should Be Attending Evening Worship Services

• BECAUSE GOD IS WORTHY!

God is eminently worthy and is not pleased when his worship is preempted by a choice of lesser things. There is no better way for God’s children to spend their time on the day he has chosen for us to “remember,” “observe” and “keep holy” than in the house of the Lord on the Lord’s Day, morning and evening.

• BECAUSE OF THE TESTIMONY OF SCRIPTURE!

In Psalm 134 there is a call to worship and a benediction in the context of evening congregational services. The ministering Levites are encouraged in their all-night ministry in the temple as God’s people leave after the evening service. In 1 Chronicles 9:33 we’re told that there were musicians who played their instruments for worship both “day and night.” In 1 Chronicles 23:24-32 we’re given a description of the work of the Levites in worship. It says, “They were to stand every morning to thank and praise the Lord. Thy were to do the same in the evening.” In Acts 20:7 God’s people were worshipping and celebrating the Lord’s Supper late into the evening.

• BECAUSE WE NEED IT!

Worship services accompanied by the preaching of the Word are a primary means of grace in which God ministers to the sincere heart a sanctifying work by the Holy Spirit. God’s people need and ought to have a hunger for all the grace and spiritual growth they can obtain!

• BECAUSE OTHER BELIEVERS NEED US!

God calls his children to “encourage” one another, and our presence in all worship services is a major way in which we fulfil this obligation. The proof is found in the heartfelt discouragement of believers when they see others absenting themselves.

• BECAUSE OF OUR NATURAL TENDENCY TO SUBSTITUTE OUR OWN DESIRES!

Attendance at evening services aids us in avoiding the temptations of things forbidden by the Lord to be done on his day of rest, such as work, buying and selling, and participation in sports (Isa. 58:13-14). These and other things are fine to do on the other six days, but not on the Lord’s Day. The result in the lives of those who attend only morning services is that for all intent and purposes the Lord’s Day for them is over at noon (adopting the curse of Roman Catholic tradition). And what follows is usually in direct disobedience of mandates for his creation ordinance.

• BECAUSE OF THE DISASTROUS RESULTS OF VIOLATING GODS LAW!

When the doors of the sheepfold are closed, the sheep, who are so weak and prone to go in the error of their way, are scattered and left to fill God’s holy day on their own with their own ideas and inventions. The history of the church tells us this is disastrous. A half hour or so of weekly feeding from the Word of God—a tiny fraction of our waking hours—will not suffice for the needs of the hearts and minds of God’s people and maintain them in their need to walk in the truth (3 John 1:3-4). The Lord repeatedly pronounces curses on Lord’s Day violators (e.g., Ex. 31:13-17; Num. 15:32).

• BECAUSE IT WAS MODELLED FOR US!

Worship services today are generally not much more than an hour and the preaching approximately thirty minutes. That is not very much time given to what the Lord calls his children to do on a full day he has set aside for their remembrance and worship of him and his granting them a special blessing. It is the “Lord’s Day”—from sunset to sunset—not just the morning. Our parents and grandparents, and the saints before them, knew it was necessary and delighted to be in morning and evening services. Do we need it any less? Or is there any excuse that our hearts fail to possess the spiritual desires they had? Were they at fault for their desire to be in God’s presence to enjoy and worship him for more than one hour a week, the One in whose presence they and we will soon be for all eternity? Were they not biblical in crying out with the Psalmist, “How lovely is your dwelling place, O Lord Almighty! My soul yearns, even faints, for the courts of the Lord; my heart and my flesh cry out for the living God … Better is one day in your courts than a thousand elsewhere”? (Ps. 84:1-2, 10). “I rejoiced with those who said to me, ’Let us go to the house of the Lord’ ” (Ps. 122:1).

• BECAUSE OF THE HISTORICAL TESTIMONY OF THE CHURCH!

We are a Reformation church in the Calvinistic tradition, and it has been the judgement of the spiritual leaders of the church since the days of John Calvin that God’s people are to be in worship at least twice on Sunday. Indeed, Calvin and many after him held worship services several times each Lord’s Day. And the preaching was not the truncated version with its anaemic diet so prevalent in many churches today. Even today, in parts of the world where there is an anti-Christian climate and it is more difficult to follow Christ, the hunger for God is so great that it is common for the Lord’s persecuted children to be in worship services for two to three hours twice a Sunday (Acts 20).

• BECAUSE OF OUR NEED TO PREPARE FOR OUR ETERNAL VOCATION!

Scripture emphasises the importance of the day for our preparation for our eternal home in glory. Think about it—soon you will leave this life, and you never know when! “This life is nothing but a vestibule”—John Calvin. How well are you prepared to go into God’s presence? The Bible says heaven is our eternal “rest,” but it also tells us that we will serve the Lord Jesus Christ “both day and night in his temple.” How ready are you to serve in the heavenly sanctuary? It is God’s design that our presence in the earthly one prepare us for our heavenly worship and service.

• BECAUSE OF THE SPIRITUAL NEEDS OF OUR WORLD!

Absence makes one a part of the broad spiritual decline of our day and the weakening of the church’s witness to the world. The more the church doors are closed the greater the devil’s victory to shut down the witness of Christ. What kind of a witness can we be when we gather for worship 1 in 168 hours a week?

• BECAUSE WE SAID WE WANTED IT!

Members of many churches—both past and present—believing it to be of great importance, voted before the presence of God to call a minister with a stipulation that he was to lead two worship services, and prepare and deliver two sermons on the Lord’s day, and then absented themselves from evening services. God will not look lightly on those who lack a desire to be in his presence during set times of worship called by his elders (Heb. 13:17). Our obligation is to be there and respond appropriately “at all times of public worship appointed by the elders.” Such times are “not carelessly or wilfully to be neglected.”

• BECAUSE OF THE PROMISED BENEFITS, REWARDS AND BLESSINGS OBTAINED THROUGH IT!
  • In Psalm 65:4
    • All the blessings and comforts of the everlasting New Covenant.
  • In Psalm 92:13-14
    • We will be like a fruitful tree planted by the Lord, bearing the fruit of devotion and good works, even in old age.
  • In Isaiah 56
    • God will give us a “memorial and a name” in his holy house that will not be removed.
    • God will bring us to his holy mountain and give us joy in his house of prayer.
    • Our sacrifices and offerings will be accepted.
  • In Isaiah 58
    • We will find great joy in the Lord.
    • God will cause us to “ride on the heights of the land” (a picture of a conqueror).
    • We will feast on the inheritance of the fathers of the faith.
  • In Matthew 18:20
    • The Lord is present administering special grace with a spiritual work through the Word by his Spirit with our spirits.
  • In Hebrews 10:25
    • We receive encouragement from fellow believers.
  • In Acts 20:32
    • We receive “the Word of his grace” which “builds us up” and gives us “an inheritance among all those who are sanctified.”

Sunday morning and evening services are times set aside by the Lord, who governs through his elders, in which we receive:

• a foretaste of glory
• feeding by him from the Word of God, preparing us more and more for our eternal home
• encouragement by the Holy Spirit, God’s promises and God’s people
• enjoyment of the formal fellowship of God’s people in worship and sacrament
• finding joy in worship and singing and receiving God’s benediction

Considering all the above, who among God’s children should not delight in evening worship?

John Frame writes:

         In my heart, I wish there was no need for creeds or for the denominations that subscribe to them. Denominations are always to some extent the result of sin, of party spirit (see 1 Cor. 1–4). I wish that when someone asked me my religious affiliation, I could simply say “Christian,” and that when someone asked me my religious beliefs, I could simply say, “the Bible.”

         Unfortunately, such simple answers are no longer sufficient. All sorts of people today claim to be “Christians”, and even “Bible-believers”, who are actually far from the kingdom of Christ. Liberals, cultists, and new-age syncretists abound. When you visit a neighbour, inviting him to church, he has a right to know what you believe. If you tell him you are a Christian and believe the Bible, he has a right to ask the further question, “What do you (and your church) think the Bible teaches?” That is the question which creeds and confessions are designed to answer. A creed is simply a summary of an individual’s or church’s beliefs as to the teachings of Scripture. And surely there can be no objection to placing such a summary in writing for the convenience of members and inquirers.

         Confessions are not Scripture, and they should not be treated as infallible or as ultimately normative. Indeed, I believe it is important that in a church fellowship it be possible to revise the creeds. And for that purpose, it must also be possible for members and officers to dissent from the creed within some limits. Otherwise, practically speaking, the creed will be elevated to a position of authority equivalent to Scripture. A “strict” view of subscription in which ministers are never permitted to speak contrary to any detail of the creed might be seen as a way to protect the orthodoxy of the church. However, in my view, such a view is actually subversive of orthodoxy. The reason why is because it is subversive of biblical authority and sufficiency. Under such a form of subscription, Scripture is not given the freedom to reform the church according to God’s will.

         But creeds themselves are perfectly legitimate – not only for churches and individuals, but even for seminaries. For seminaries, too, need to be able to tell supporters, students, and prospective students what kind of doctrine is taught in the curriculum.

         The Reformed faith is a wonderful discovery for many Christians. I have heard many people testify that when they began to study Reformed theology, they saw for the first time that the Bible really made sense. In other forms of theology, there is a lot of artificial exegesis: implausible divisions of verses, rationalising “hard passages,” imposing extra-scriptural schemes on the text. Reformed theology seeks to take Scripture very naturally, as the authors (human and divine) evidently intended it to be taken. There are, of course, difficulties within the Reformed system as in others. But many people, when they begin to read the Bible under Reformed teaching, experience an enormous increase in comprehension and in confidence. The Word of God speaks to them in greater power and gives them a greater motivation toward holiness.

From https://www.monergism.com/introduction-reformed-faith

The law of God is good and wise
and sets his will before our eyes,
shows us the way of righteousness,
and dooms to death when we transgress.

Its light of holiness imparts
the knowledge of our sinful hearts
that we may see our lost estate
and seek deliv’rance ere too late.

To those who help in Christ have found
and would in works of love abound
it shows what deeds are his delight
and should be done as good and right.

When men the offered help disdain
and wilfully in sin remain,
its terror in their ear resounds
and keeps their wickedness in bounds.

The law is good; but since the fall
its holiness condemns us all;
it dooms us for our sin to die
and has no power to justify.

To Jesus we for refuge flee,
who from the curse has set us free,
and humbly worship at his throne,
saved by his grace through faith alone.

~ Matthias Loy, 1863

* by “moralism,” I do not mean the pointed preaching of God’s Law
which, if my experience is any guide, is all too scarce.
I mean a predominance of “how-to” messages that
consist of “do’s” and “don’ts” to such a degree that
they omit or eclipse the message of salvation
by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone
and thus seem to boil down mainly to self-help advice
or motivational messages.

Sinclair Ferguson wrote:

Although provoked by the indulgences peddled by Johannes Tetzel, the very first proposition that Luther offered for public debate in his Ninety Five Theses put the axe to the root of the tree of medieval theology: “When our Lord and Master, Jesus Christ, said ‘Repent,’ he meant that the entire life of believers should be one of repentance.” From Erasmus’ Greek New Testament, Luther had come to realise that the Vulgate’s rendering of Matthew 4:17 by penitentiam agite (“do penance”) completely misinterpreted Jesus’ meaning. The gospel called not for an act of penance but for a radical change of mind-set and an equally deep transformation of life. Later he’d write to Staupitz about this glowing discovery: “I venture to say they are wrong who make more of the act in Latin than of the change of heart in Greek!”

Isn’t it true that we’ve lost sight of this note that was so prominent in Reformation theology? We could well do with a Luther redivivus today. For a number of important reasons evangelicals need to reconsider the centrality of repentance in our thinking about the gospel, the church, and the Christian life.

One of our great needs is for the ability to view some of the directions in which evangelicalism is heading, or perhaps more accurately, disintegrating. We desperately need the long-term perspective that the history of the church gives us.

Even within the period of my own Christian life, from my teenage years in the 1960s, there’s been a sea-change in evangelicalism. Many “positions” that had long been standard evangelical teaching are now, after less than my lifetime, regarded as either reactionary or even dinosauric.

If we take an even longer-term view, however, we face the alarming possibility that there may already be a medieval darkness encroaching upon evangelicalism. Can’t we detect, at least as a tendency, dynamics within evangelicalism that bear resemblances to the life of the medieval church? The possibility of a new Babylonian (or more accurately, following Luther, Pagan) Captivity of the Church looms nearer than we may be able to believe.

Consider the following five features of medieval Christianity which are evident to varying degrees in contemporary evangelicalism.

1. REPENTANCE.

Repentance has increasingly been seen as a single act, severed from a lifelong restoration of godliness. There are complex reasons for this – not all of them modern – which we can’t explore here. Nevertheless, this seems self-evident. Seeing repentance as an isolated, completed act at the beginning of the Christian life has been a staple principle of much of modern evangelicalism. It’s sad that evangelicals have often despised the theology of the confessing churches. It has spawned two generations who look back on a single act, abstracted from its consequences, as determinative of salvation. The ‘altar call’ has replaced the sacrament of penance. Thus repentance has been divorced from genuine regeneration, and sanctification severed from justification.

2. MYSTICISM

The canon for Christian living has increasingly been sought in the Spirit’s ‘living voice’ within the church rather than in the Spirit’s voice heard in Scripture. What was once little more than a mystical tendency has become a flood. But what does this have to do with the medieval church? Just this. The entire medieval church operated on the same principle, even if they expressed it in a different form – the Spirit speaks outside of Scripture; the believer cannot know the detailed guidance of God if he tries to depend on his or her Bible alone.

Not only so, but once the ‘living voice’ of the Spirit has been introduced it follows by a kind of psychological inevitability that it’s this ‘living voice’ that becomes the canon for Christian living.

This view – inscripturated Word plus ‘living voice’ equals divine revelation – lay at the heart of the medieval church’s groping in the dark for the power of the gospel. Now, at the beginning of the third millennium we’re on the verge – perhaps even more than the verge – of being overwhelmed by a parallel phenomenon. The result then was a famine of hearing and understanding the Word of God, all under the guise of what the Spirit was still saying to the church. What of today?

3. SACRED POWERS

It was thought that the divine presence was brought to the church by an individual with sacred powers deposited within him and communicated by physical means.

Today an uncanny parallel is visible wherever TV can be seen and the internet accessed. Admittedly it’s no longer Jesus who’s given by priestly hands. Now it’s the Spirit who’s bestowed by physical means – apparently at will – by the new evangelical priest. Special sanctity is no longer confirmed by the beauty of the fruit of the Spirit, but with signs that are predominantly physical.

What we ought to find alarming about contemporary evangelicalism is the extent to which we’re impressed by performance rather than piety. The Reformers weren’t unfamiliar with similar phenomena. In fact, one of the major charges the Roman Catholic Church made against them was that they didn’t really have the gospel because they lacked physical miracles.

4. SPECTATORS

The worship of God is increasingly presented as a spectator event of visual and sensory power, rather than a verbal event in which we engage in a deep soul dialogue with the Triune God.

The mood of contemporary evangelicalism is to focus on the centrality of what ‘happens’ in the spectacle of worship rather than on what’s heard in worship. Aesthetics, be they artistic or musical, are given a priority over holiness. More and more is seen; less and less is heard. There’s a sensory feast, but a hearing famine. Professionalism in worship leadership has become a cheap substitute for genuine access to heaven, however faltering. Drama, not preaching, has become the ‘Didache’ of choice.

This is a spectrum, of course, not a single point. But most modern evangelical worship is to be found somewhere on that spectrum. There was a time when four words would bring out goose-bumps on the necks of our grandfathers: ‘Let Us Worship God’. Not so for twenty-first century evangelicals. Now there must be colour, movement, audio-visual effects, or else God cannot be known, loved, praised, and trusted for his own sake.

5. BIGGER MEANS BETTER?

The success of ministry is measured by crowds and cathedrals rather than by the preaching of the cross and the quality of Christians’ lives.

It was the medieval church leaders, bishops and archbishops, cardinals and popes, who built large cathedrals, ostensibly soli Deo gloria – all this to the neglect of gospel proclamation, the life of the body of Christ as a whole, the needs of the poor, and the evangelism of the world. Hence, the ‘mega-church’ isn’t a modern, but a medieval, phenomenon.

Ideal congregational size and specific ecclesiastical architecture thankfully are matters of indifference. That’s not really the central concern here. Rather it’s the almost endemic addiction of contemporary evangelicalism to size and numbers as an index of the success of ‘my ministry’ – a phrase which can itself be strikingly contradictory. We must raise the question of reality, depth, and integrity in church life and in Christian ministry. The lust for ‘bigger’ makes us materially and financially vulnerable. But worse, it makes us spiritually vulnerable. For it’s hard to say to those on whom we’ve come to depend materially, “When our Lord and Master, Jesus Christ, said ‘Repent,’ he meant that the entire life of believers should be one of repentance.”

from https://banneroftruth.org/us/resources/articles/2002/medieval-mistakes/