Selected Scriptures

January 14, 2018

Lord’s Day Worship

Sean Higgins

Download the bulletin.

Download the Kids’ Korner.

The sermon starts at 13:25 in the audio file.

Or, Liturgy and the Word of the Cross

A few years ago I read the Venerable Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People. He wrote in AD 731 (which, by the way, is the year-counting system Bede himself developed and popularized) when the gospel was spreading to many nations, but also during a time when people did not have their own copies of God’s Word. An additional complicating factor was that many people did not live in or even near a city, yet parishes were assigned to pastors for them to shepherd all the folks living in a certain district. The goals that the pastors had for their people are both astonishing, and not that surprising after thinking about it. Since they might not see all their flock on a weekly basis, they would try to visit the families and took to catechizing them. But without books to share or CDs to leave, Bede recorded that the pastors simply wanted their people to know the Apostles’ Creed and the Lord’s Prayer. That is not much equipment for Christian discipleship.

I grew up in a good church, but it wasn’t deep. We certainly had access to more than Christians in the Middle Ages. We cared about the Bible, we believed that Jesus was the only way to be saved and that salvation was by faith, not works. But we didn’t use the word “theology,” we used “devotional” materials. We didn’t study verse by verse through books of the Bible, though there was typically a verse the sermon was based on. After I thought God was calling me to be a pastor the summer before my senior year of high school, and a year after I had started college and studying for the pastorate, I got really excited about theology (systematic, and especially Calvinistic) as well as sequential exposition. I started buying fat books about the Bible, even reading through commentaries for fun. I started borrowing cassette tapes and tracking preachers and writers that were explaining truth. My life was being transformed by this information. I hit a multi-year growth spurt in my understanding of who God is and what discipleship is about. And, I totally stopped too early. It wasn’t that I stopped learning, but I stopped at learning.

I know I am not the only one with a similar experience because I know many of your testimonies. Some of you came out of Charismatic churches where listening to the Spirit’s personal messages was more important than the Bible, or at least as important. You came to love the objective, fixed, dependable truth able to be read and not stuck in someone’s head. Many of you have come from “weak” churches, even if you didn’t know it at the time, where there were genuine Christians and Christian teaching but also a fear among the leaders that people can’t handle too much teaching. Then you found that there were some churches where the sermon was an hour! Heaven on earth!

For hungry people this is like a full table. But what if you could have all the food on the table yet no one else around it? Starving is bad, so is isolation. And, at least in the experience for many of us, the kind of food became more important than the fellowship the food enabled. Professional chefs made the food and brought it to the table, but they didn’t really associate with the guests. Food is better than no food, but fellowship around food is better.

When it comes to our meeting together as a church on Sunday mornings, what do we expect here? What does God want with us here? These are liturgy questions. These are questions that concern what is said and how it is said and in what order it is said.

We are gathering around truth for more than gathering truth. We are assembling for more than continuing the tradition of assembling. We meet, according to the truth of God’s Word, for f[...]