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A
Study of Dispensationalism |
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"But there is further reason, and a pressing one today, why we should write upon our present subject, and that is to expose the modern and pernicious error of Dispensationalism. This is a device of the Enemy, designed to rob the children of no small part of that bread which their heavenly Father has provided for their souls; a device wherein the wily serpent appears as an angel of light, feigning to "make the Bible a new book" by simplifying much in it which perplexes the spiritually unlearned. It is sad to see how widely successful the devil has been by means of this subtle innovation." |
| Ecclesiology |
| Rev. Paul Alexander | We should reaffirm this practice |
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Reformed churches have emphasized the necessity of the frequent public preaching of God's Word. PCANews - One of the small pleasures of my early childhood was playing with other children outside the church after Sunday evening worship. For half an hour or more, the adults seemed to forget their parental responsibilities and we ran wild and free in the soft summer air of a Kansas evening. While our parents pursued more mature interests, we captured lightning bugs, played tag, or chased girls with toads we had caught. It was one of the high points of the week. Life without Sunday evening worship would have been a drag! Fewer and fewer children would think so today. Sunday evening worship is not a part of their lives because an increasing number of churches are not including it in their schedules. Sunday evening worship seems to be on the endangered species list and there is a lot more at stake than a child’s game of tag. Sunday evening worship can meet important needs in the lives of God’s people. True, Sunday evening worship is nowhere specifically prescribed by scripture; but then neither is Sunday morning worship. Both services are established at the discretion and on the authority of the elders of the church on the basis of such texts as Hebrews 10:25-26 and 13:17. The historic fact is that the practice of worshiping twice on Sunday is a firmly established tradition in evangelical and Reformed churches. What has changed that would warrant a departure from the wisdom of our godly forefathers who established and maintained this practice for so many centuries? Below are four reasons which, I hope, may persuade us to keep this tradition alive, or revive it, as the case may require. 1.
The Importance of Frequent Public Preaching Since the Reformation of the 16th century Reformed churches have led the way in emphasizing the necessity for the frequent public preaching of God’s Word. John Calvin exemplified this principle in his own practice of preaching nearly every day of the week as well as on Sunday. First in Britain and then in the American Colonies, our Puritan forefathers followed Calvin’s example by preaching twice nearly every Sunday and often at a weeknight service called "the lecture." This pattern has characterized Reformed churches (and other evangelicals as well) until very recent times. The preaching of God’s Word, therefore, in both morning and evening worship services on the Lord’s Day has been regarded as an important application of this "frequent preaching" principle, crucial to the life of the church. Granted, this principle might be fulfilled at other times than Sunday evening, but experience has shown this to be the time that best suits most Christians. This practice has been regarded as axiomatic for Bible-believing churches and went almost unchallenged for nearly four centuries. Not so today! "Church Growth" experts are advising us that the evening service (and frequent preaching in general) is excess baggage, inhibiting evangelism and getting in the way of "small group" ministries now deemed more important than preaching. We are being advised that "the culture has changed", that evening worship no longer meets the "felt needs" of our contemporaries and that we need a great variety of programs to meet the needs of every age and interest in our world. If we do not change with the culture, it seems, we will be consigned to the trash heap of irrelevance, or, what may be even worse, to smallness, a fate worse than death to the "Church Growth" mind. We should be asking if this is really the time to reduce our own efforts at preaching, the means God has ordained and blessed for communicating His Word. Our times have been called "the information age" because of the rapid growth of data in every field of knowledge. The media is propagandizing us intensively with amoral as well as immoral messages that are quite obviously impacting our church people as well as the world. Add to this the vast bulk of distracting trivia that the media peddle as important and we have a seriously confused populace. To reduce our preaching either in quality or in quantity at this point in history appears to be a concession to the worst side of modernity. It is a dangerous experiment. The tried and true method of frequent preaching is being cast to one side for the sake of an unproven methodology, and right when there is the most crying need for the preaching of God’s Word. Writing in 1971, Dr. Martin Lloyd-Jones spoke clearly to this issue when he said, "The most urgent need in the Christian church today is true preaching; and as it is the greatest and most urgent need in the church, it is obviously the greatest need of the world also. A bit later in the same book, he said, " What is it that always heralds the dawn of a Reformation or of a Revival? It is renewed preaching. Not only a new interest in preaching but a new kind of preaching. A revival of true preaching has always heralded these great movements in the history of the church" (Preaching and Preachers, pp. 9, 24-25). This is the kind of guidance we need today. 2.
Greater Breadth In Our Preaching/Teaching Ministry This also has roots in Puritan practice. Our colonial fathers often used the "lecture" method as their Sunday afternoon or evening style of preaching. This meant that they would address topics of timely and practical interest that might not seem appropriate to the Sunday morning worship. Whether or not more informal or more topical style is used on Sunday evening, the point should be obvious that we need a greater breadth of biblical and theological instruction than can be given within the confines of the Sunday morning sermon. Our Christian colleges and seminaries are reporting that an increasing percentage of young people applying for training lack the basic Bible knowledge that used to characterize applicants. Failure to maintain Sunday evening worship and preaching will only add to the growing ignorance of the Bible and our confessional standards prevalent among too many of our young people. To feed God’s flock anything like an adequate diet of preaching and teaching, Sunday evening worship seems to be an absolute necessity. This is one of the things it takes to produce the kind of strong, well-rounded disciples needed to advance the kingdom. 3.
Keeping the Lord's Day Holy This is my briefest point, but not the least important. The fourth commandment is of equal importance with the other nine. To treat it with contempt or indifference is to treat the whole of God’s law and God Himself with contempt and indifference (James 2:10). Those who may not accept the full teaching of the Westminster Standards at this point are, nevertheless, under compelling biblical mandate to discover and practice what Scripture teaches on the keeping of the Lord’s Day. To decry every other kind of moral decay without recognizing Sabbath desecration as a great evil is to betray our whole cause. We must keep the Lord’s Day holy. God requires it and we need it. We were created with a need for the Sabbath, and Jesus reminds us of this need in Mark 2:27. Against a culture that seems bent on despising the Lord’s Day and all else that is holy, we need all the help we can get to hold our ground. The history of both ancient Israel (Ezekiel 20) and the modern church provides sufficient evidence to convince us that to lose the Sabbath will eventually mean to lose all Biblical distinctive and to lose our faith itself. The practice of morning and evening worship is conducive to preserving the sacred meaning of the day and thus the sacredness of all life. The ordained elders of Christ’s Church have been calling His people to worship twice on the Lord’s Day for many centuries. If we will continue to hear that call, He will continue to bless us. This point leads naturally into the next. The preaching of the Word and the keeping of the Sabbath are keys to Christian culture, a whole way of life that blossoms and spreads through the faithful use of these means. 4.
Maintaining and Propagating Our Christian Culture Such a church is modeled for us in Acts 2:42-47. Here is a beautiful example of a "normal" Christian church community. Frequent preaching and teaching of God’s Word is obviously the very heart of this early church, and was wonderfully productive of that first Christian culture, setting the pattern for healthy, self-propagating church life from that day to this. Churches that develop along these lines can expect God’s blessing for generations to come. Os Guiness sees the opposite in the modern "church growth" movement, the movement that, more than any other influence has contributed to the abandonment of Sunday evening worship. Guiness warns that such churches may have "no grandchildren" because "the tools of modernity are successful in one generation but cannot be sustained to the third generation" (No Good But God, p. 157, 1992). We should stay with the established pattern. It has proven itself. Evangelical and Reformed churches of recent history have come in for their share of just criticism. We have been far from perfect. At the same time, we should be reminded that it is those churches with their "twice every Sunday" pattern of preaching and teaching that have produced the many positive benefits of the Reformed and evangelical movement. These "twice very Sunday" churches were all we had until about 20 years ago. The older model may not have grown as fast as the new stream-lined "once on Sunday" types but they produced nearly all of our present pastors and denominational leaders, just about every Christian college and seminary professor you or I ever met, and an entire modern missionary movement. This is no small achievement. Experience also supports this point. Please forgive me for being just a little autobiographical at this point, but 37 years in one pastorate has given me a somewhat unusual perspective. I have been able to watch people in my congregation grow up, get married, raise children and finish careers - in short, live out large parts of their lives - during that lengthy tenure. My generalizations about my parishioners may seem to narrow a database to satisfy all the demands of contemporary scholarship, and I am sure that I am lacking in total objectivity. At the same time, I am confident in one conclusion: Those who regularly participate in morning and evening worship over a period of years are the most stable and productive Christians. They are, furthermore, the most joyful and effective. Our present membership is 300. Over the years more than 1,000 have come and gone, largely because of the nature of employment in Huntsville. Among those who have come to church twice on Sunday there is a remarkable record of family stability and spiritual productivity. Of course, there have been exceptions, but from these families had flowed a constant stream of children who have grown to maturity honoring the Lord, marrying in Christ and following the Lord in their vocations. This is what it is all about. Another interesting fact is that in all those years there have been only three divorces among those who have been regular in our morning and evening worship. I have been reluctant in the past to tell such a statistic in public for fear the devil would attack more of our marriages just to embarrass us. Confident that we can trust the Lord to protect our people, I tell it now in order to give praise to the Lord and to the means of grace He has given us to make us strong in Him. Participation in Sunday morning and evening worship is a proven means of helping God’s people to be "strong in the Lord and in His mighty power” (Ephesians 6:10). It certainly is not the only thing we need, but it is an important source of strength and blessing to those who have used it. Courage
Friends! J.C. Ryle,
a great evangelical leader of the 19th century, described the
leaders of the first Great Awakening in terms that should encourage
us all in this direction. Ryle said: Let's
Keep Our Sunday Evening Worship Permission to reprint this article has been given by PCANEWS (www.pcanews.com) , the web magazine of the Presbyterian Church in America.
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