Devotional 110: The Religious Oath: A Part of Solemn Worship

The Confession Read

The reading of the Scriptures with godly fear, the sound preaching and conscionable hearing of the Word, in obedience unto God, with understanding, faith, and reverence, singing of psalms with grace in the heart; as also, the due administration and worthy receiving of the sacraments instituted by Christ, are all parts of the ordinary religious worship of God: beside religious oaths, vows, solemn fastings, and thanksgivings upon special occasions, which are, in their several times and seasons, to be used in an holy and religious manner.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 21, Section 5

Introduction

Consider what a strange and wonderful thing it is that the living God should sit down with His people at all. He who inhabits eternity, who is not worshipped with men's hands as though He needed any thing, before whom the seraphim cover their faces. And this God has appointed a way in which He will meet with dust and ashes, a fixed place where heaven touches earth. Our chapter has already taught us that this way is not of man's devising, for God alone may institute His own worship; and that this worship is offered to God alone, through the one Mediator, Jesus Christ. We have learned how to pray, and for whom to pray. Now the Divines set before us the very substance of the thing: what is it, precisely, that we do when we worship? And their answer is disarmingly, almost scandalously, plain. They do not point us to ecstasies, to elaborate ceremonies, to inventions of human genius. They point us to a table spread with ordinary fare: a Book to be read, a Word to be preached and heard, a psalm to be sung, a bread and a cup to be received. These, they tell us, are the ordinary parts of religious worship. The word "ordinary" is the key that unlocks the whole section, and we must not let it slip past us. For "ordinary" here does not mean "commonplace" in the sense of "negligible." It means appointed, regular, standing, perpetual: the diet upon which the soul is meant to live from Lord's Day to Lord's Day, as surely as the body lives upon daily bread. Feasts there may be, but it is bread that sustains. And alongside these standing ordinances there are certain occasional duties, oaths, vows, fastings, thanksgivings, reserved for special seasons, and to be used then in a holy and religious manner. Here, beloved, is the question that should grip every one of us before we rise from this study: Am I living upon the ordinary means of grace that God has appointed? It is a searching question, and a sweet one, for in answering it we shall discover that God has not hidden His presence in some inaccessible height, but has spread a table in the wilderness and summoned us to come and eat. The table is set every Lord's Day. The bread is fresh. The Host is waiting. The only question that remains is whether we will come with appetite, or sit idly by and starve in the presence of the feast. Let us hear, then, what His Word has to say about each dish upon that table.

Scripture Foundation

The first part of ordinary worship named by the Confession is the reading of the Scriptures. And no scene in the Old Testament so vividly presents this ordinance as the great assembly in the book of Nehemiah. After the walls of Jerusalem were rebuilt, the people gathered as one man into the street before the water gate, and Ezra the scribe "brought the law before the congregation both of men and women, and all that could hear with understanding... and he read therein... from the morning until midday... and the ears of all the people were attentive unto the book of the law" (Nehemiah 8:2-3). Mark the posture of that congregation: they stood upon their feet, they attended with their ears, and when the book was opened, "all the people stood up" (Nehemiah 8:5). Then Ezra and the Levites "read in the book in the law of God distinctly, and gave the sense, and caused them to understand the reading" (Nehemiah 8:8). Here is the whole substance of our section in miniature: the Word read, the Word expounded, the people hearing with understanding — and the whole thing bathed in a reverence so deep that the people wept and bowed their heads and worshipped. The New Testament carries the ordinance forward. When Paul writes to Timothy, he charges him, "till I come, give attendance to reading, to exhortation, to doctrine" (1 Timothy 4:13). The Greek word is anagnōsis, the public reading aloud, and it stands first in the list of the minister's duties. In the synagogue at Antioch of Pisidia, it was after "the reading of the law and the prophets" that Paul stood up to preach (Acts 13:15). So deeply was this ingrained that the Apostle could command the Thessalonians, "I charge you by the Lord that this epistle be read unto all the holy brethren" (1 Thessalonians 5:27), and the Colossians, "when this epistle is read among you, cause that it be read also in the church of the Laodiceans" (Colossians 4:16). The reading of Scripture is not a preliminary to worship, a kind of noise made while the congregation settles; it is itself worship, the first and foundational part of the public service. It is God speaking to His people, and the people answering with their ears and their hearts. But the Word is not only to be read; it is to be preached. The charge that falls from Paul's lips to Timothy rings down the ages: "Preach the word; be instant in season, out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort with all longsuffering and doctrine" (2 Timothy 4:2). The verb is kēryssō, to herald, to proclaim as a herald announces the decree of a king. A herald does not invent his message; he delivers what he has been given, in the very words he has been given, with the authority of the one who sent him. And this is precisely what preaching is: the heralding of the King's own decree. It pleased God, Paul tells the Corinthians, "by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe" (1 Corinthians 1:21). The means is despised by the world, but it is the means God has chosen, and He has not been pleased to save men by any other. "For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. How then shall they call on him in whom they have not believed? and how shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard? and how shall they hear without a preacher?" (Romans 10:13-14). Faith does not spring up from the bare soil of nature; it is planted by the preached Word, and so "faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God" (Romans 10:17). Yet the Confession is careful to add that the Word must be heard conscionably — with understanding, faith, and reverence — and here Scripture speaks as plainly as it does of preaching. The writer to the Hebrews sets the warning before us: "unto us was the gospel preached, as well as unto them: but the word preached did not profit them, not being mixed with faith in them that heard it" (Hebrews 4:2). The same sermon may be life to one soul and death to another, for the difference lies not in the preacher but in the hearer. James presses the point home with his characteristic directness: "Be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves. For if any be a hearer of the word, and not a doer, he is like unto a man beholding his natural face in a glass: for he beholdeth himself, and goeth his way, and straightway forgetteth what manner of man he was" (James 1:22-24). The man who hears and forgets is a man who looks into a mirror and walks away unchanged, the most pitiable of all sights. And our Lord Himself, in the parable of the sower, bids us hear with a sense of the weight of the act: "Take heed therefore how ye hear" (Luke 8:18). The Bereans show us what it means to hear conscionably, for they "received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so" (Acts 17:11). They did not swallow the sermon unexamined; they tested it by the Word, and in so testing they honored both preacher and God. Then there is the singing of psalms. Here the Apostolic command is direct and twofold. "Speaking to yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord" (Ephesians 5:19); and again, "Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom; teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord" (Colossians 3:16). Three words describe our songs: psalmois, psalms; hymnois, hymns; ōdais pneumatikais, spiritual songs. Whatever the precise distinctions among them, the point is that the singing of the church is to be filled with the Spirit and with the Word of Christ. See what the Apostle says such singing does: it teaches, it admonishes, it makes the word of Christ dwell richly among the saints. A congregation that sings is a congregation that preaches to itself. And lest we think singing a mere New Testament embellishment, consider our Lord Himself: on the very night in which He was betrayed, "when they had sung an hymn... went out into the mount of Olives" (Matthew 26:30). Even on the threshold of Gethsemane, the Savior sang. And in the dungeon at Philippi, at midnight, with their backs bleeding, "Paul and Silas prayed, and sang praises unto God" (Acts 16:25). The prison shook, and the doors opened. Singing is no ornament of worship; it is a weapon, a means of grace, a channel through which the word of Christ flows into a believing heart. Then come the sacraments, "the due administration and worthy receiving of the sacraments instituted by Christ." The word "instituted" is weighty, for it reminds us that the church has no authority to invent sacraments; only Christ, the King of the church, may appoint them, and He has appointed but two. Of the first, He commanded, "Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost" (Matthew 28:19). Of the second, the Apostle received and delivered that "the Lord Jesus the same night in which he was betrayed took bread... and said, Take, eat: this is my body, which is broken for you... This cup is the new testament in my blood" (1 Corinthians 11:23-25). Both are tied by Christ's own words to His finished work: baptism to our washing and engrafting into Him, the Supper to His broken body and shed blood. And the receiving is not a bare ceremony; it is to be worthy, which the Apostle expounds when he warns that a man must "examine himself, and so let him eat of that bread, and drink of that cup" (1 Corinthians 11:28). Here is a worship in which God speaks to us and seals His promises to us in visible signs: the Word made touchable, the covenant made tasteable. Finally, the occasional duties. Scripture knows of oaths and vows, and commands them to be kept: "Thou shalt fear the LORD thy God, and serve him, and shalt swear by his name" (Deuteronomy 6:13); "Vow, and pay unto the LORD your God" (Psalm 76:11). A vow is a solemn promise made to God, and God treats it as a bond laid upon the soul; the Preacher warns that it is better not to vow than to vow and not pay, "for God is angry with thy voice" (Ecclesiastes 5:4-6). It knows of fasting, and our Lord Himself instructed His disciples in it, not whether to fast but how: "when ye fast, be not, as the hypocrites, of a sad countenance" (Matthew 6:16). Isaiah cries out that the fast God has chosen is "to loose the bands of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, and to let the oppressed go free" (Isaiah 58:6). The Greek word is nēsteia, the abstaining from food for a season that the soul may give itself wholly to prayer; Ezra proclaimed such a fast by the river Ahava, "to afflict ourselves before our God, to seek of him a right way for us" (Ezra 8:21), and the Lord was intreated. It knows of thanksgivings, for "it is a good thing to give thanks unto the LORD" (Psalm 92:1), and the Apostle bids us "in every thing give thanks: for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you" (1 Thessalonians 5:18). The Hebrew of the Psalter rings with it: todah, the sacrifice of praise, the thanksgiving offered with a loud voice. These are not the daily bread of the soul, but they are appointed for their seasons, and woe to the man who neglects them when the season calls.

What the Divines Meant

When the Westminster Divines composed this section, they were not merely listing pleasant religious activities. They were drawing the precise shape of public worship under the regulative principle, and they did so with two errors and one great positive aim in view. The first error was the Roman system of worship, in which the public service had been buried beneath a mass of ceremonies, images, and gestures that God had never commanded, while the preaching of the Word had been crowded out almost entirely. Against this the Divines set the reading and preaching and hearing of Scripture in the very first rank of worship. The second error was the opposite temptation, more insidious in their own day and no stranger in ours: the notion that because the Spirit is free, forms and ordinances may be despised, and that the soul may soar to God without the humble ladder of Word and sacrament. Against this they insisted that God has appointed certain ordinary means, and that He has promised to meet His people in them. The Spirit does not ordinarily work apart from the means; He works through them. To despise the sermon because one has the Spirit is like despising the meal because one has an appetite. But mark the great positive aim that governs the whole section. The Divines were teaching that worship is, at its heart, a conversation. God speaks to His people in the reading and preaching of the Word; His people answer Him in their conscionable hearing, their singing, and their receiving of the sacraments; and both sides of the conversation are to be carried on with reverence and faith. This is why the section is so careful about the manner of each part. The Scriptures are to be read with godly fear; the Word is to be sound, that is, healthy, wholesome, faithful to the whole counsel of God, and conscionably heard, in obedience, with understanding, faith, and reverence; the psalms are to be sung with grace in the heart, not merely with the lips; the sacraments are to be duly administered and worthily received. Every clause is a guard against the great sin of worship, which is not the absence of the outward act but the presence of the act without the heart. The body may be in the pew while the soul is in the marketplace; the Divines mean to call the soul back into the pew. Two particular phrases deserve our lingering attention. The first is conscionable hearing. This is a distinctively Puritan emphasis, and it dignifies the office of the hearer in a way the medieval church had almost forgotten. In the medieval system, the people largely watched worship; the great act was performed by the priest at the altar, and the laity were spectators of a sacred drama in a tongue they did not understand. The Reformation restored the pulpit and the open Bible, but the Puritans went further and insisted that hearing itself is a sacred act, for which the hearer must prepare, upon which he must attend with his whole soul, and for which he will give account. The Directory for the Public Worship of God, framed by the same Assembly, directs that the people be exhorted to hear with attention, diligence, and prayer, and to take heed that they do not hear in vain. The sermon is not a performance to be critiqued but a word to be obeyed. The second phrase is the sharp little adjective ordinary. The Divines were not forbidding oaths, vows, fastings, and thanksgivings; they were assigning them their proper place as occasional duties, to be used "in their several times and seasons." A fast has its season: a day of humiliation, a calamity, a special seeking of God. A thanksgiving has its season: a deliverance, a harvest, an answer to prayer. But the soul cannot live upon fasts and feasts. It lives upon the daily bread of reading, preaching, hearing, singing, and the sacraments. To live always in the extraordinary is to court spiritual delusion; to neglect the ordinary for want of excitement is to starve in the midst of plenty.

Theological Depth

The Puritan Jeremiah Burroughs, in his treatise Gospel Worship, takes up this very theme and presses it to the heart. He observes that in all the duties of worship, hearing, reading, and the rest, the great matter is that we sanctify the name of God in the performance of them. When we come to hear the Word, Burroughs writes, we must come as to the great work of our souls, "with our hearts lifted up to God, expecting to meet with God, and to receive some communication from God." The preparation of the heart is half the work. A man who comes to the assembly without preparation, without prayer, without a sense that he is about to deal with God, profanes the ordinance even while he sits through it. Burroughs would have us ask before every sermon: Have I come to meet with God, or merely to pass an hour? The question is not what the minister may give us, but whether our souls are set to receive from God Himself. David Clarkson, another of the Puritans, goes further still and argues in a celebrated sermon that public worship is to be preferred before private, precisely because of the promise of Christ's presence in the midst of the gathered church. "Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them" (Matthew 18:20). Private devotion has its glory, but the Lord has annexed peculiar promises to the public assembly: the reading of His Word in the congregation, the preaching of the gospel, the common prayers, the songs of Zion, the sacraments, promises that no closet, however sweet, can claim. To neglect the public means of grace while resting in one's private devotions is to forsake the very place where Christ has promised to be. Clarkson does not diminish the closet; he magnifies the assembly, and bids us prize what Christ has crowned. Richard Baxter, that unwearied pastor of Kidderminster, spoke directly to the hearer in a way that still searches the conscience. In his Christian Directory he lays down the rules by which a man may hear the Word to profit: come with a humble, teachable heart; come with an appetite, hungering for the bread of life; come purposing to obey whatsoever shall be discovered; and carry the Word away with you, meditating upon it, and turning it into practice. Above all, Baxter warns against hearing with a critical spirit, turning the sermon into an occasion to judge the preacher rather than to be judged by God. The man who hears to find fault will find fault and miss grace; the man who hears to be made holy will find holiness, for God gives to him who asks. Baxter's counsel is simply the confession's "conscionable hearing" worked out into the details of a week of practical godliness. On the sacraments, the great catechetical tradition of the Reformed churches, the Heidelberg Catechism of Ursinus and Olevianus, reminds us why the due administration and worthy receiving matter so much. The sacraments are "holy visible signs and seals, appointed of God... to represent more fully and seal to us the promise of the gospel." They do not work salvation by the mere doing of them; they seal to the believing recipient what the Word declares. Hence the danger of an unworthy receiving, which is not merely a breach of etiquette but a sin against the body and blood of the Lord. And hence the comfort of a worthy receiving, in which the believer finds his faith confirmed as he tastes and sees that the Lord is good. The sacraments are the gospel made visible; to receive them carelessly is to despise the gospel itself, and to receive them in faith is to lay hold of the very Christ whose death they proclaim. Finally, the Scottish divine George Gillespie, one of the youngest and ablest of the Westminster Assembly, gave the church its clearest statement of the principle that underlies this entire section. In his writings against the ceremonies of the church of England, Gillespie insisted that worship must be ordered by Scripture alone, not merely negatively (avoiding what Scripture forbids) but positively (doing what Scripture appoints). The section before us is that principle in its constructive form. It is not a list of what the Divines happened to like; it is a list of what God has appointed in His Word: reading, preaching, hearing, singing, sacraments, and the occasional duties, no more and no less. To add to this list is presumption; to subtract from it is neglect; and to perform any part of it without the heart is profanation. Between those three errors, the section walks the narrow path of obedient, heartfelt, scriptural worship.

Puritan Application

First, then, prepare for public worship as for an appointment with God. Do not stumble into the assembly late and uncomposed, as a man drops into a shop. The night before the Lord's Day, and the morning of it, bow the knee in private and ask the Lord to meet you in the Word. Confess the sins of the week, that your hearing may be with a broken and contrite heart. Read the passage beforehand if the minister's text is known; sharpen the appetite that must feed upon the sermon. Burroughs was right: the preparation of the heart is half the work, and the soul that comes prepared rarely goes away empty. Second, hear the Word as a doer, not a hearer only. As the sermon is preached, do not sit in judgment upon it but sit under it, saying in your heart, "Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?" Listen for the particular word that is for you, the reproof that pricks your conscience, the promise that meets your need. And when the sermon is done, do not let it die in the air; carry it home with you, meditate upon it, and this week, by the grace of God, practice one thing you heard. The man who hears a hundred sermons and does none of them is poorer, not richer, for the hearing. The mirror shows us our face that we may wash it. Third, sing with grace in the heart, and let your singing teach you. Do not merely mouth the words of the psalm while your thoughts wander to the dinner or the week ahead. The psalms are the Word of Christ dwelling in you richly; they are given to teach and admonish, to instruct the understanding and stir the affections. Sing as one who means what he sings, and you will find that the psalm preaches to your soul long after the sermon is forgotten. And when you are alone, or in the night watches, or in the midst of trouble, let the psalm rise again, for Paul and Silas sang in the dungeon, and the prison doors opened. Fourth, come to the table worthily, but come. There is a danger on both sides of the Lord's Supper: the careless presumption that comes without self-examination, and the morbid scruple that keeps the trembling believer away altogether. The Apostle bids us examine ourselves, and so eat; he does not bid the broken-hearted to stay home. If you find in yourself a sense of sin and an appetite for Christ, that very hunger is the mark of a worthy receiver, for the table is spread for sinners, not for the righteous. Examine, repent, and come, and in the bread and the cup taste afresh that Christ is yours and you are His. Fifth, use the occasional duties in their season, and do not live upon them. If a special calamity befalls you or the church, if a great deliverance comes, if a weighty matter calls for a vow, then fast, or give thanks, or vow, and do it in a holy and religious manner, for these are appointed helps for appointed seasons. But do not mistake the feast for the daily bread. The soul that is always seeking some new and extraordinary experience will starve upon the very diet God has provided; for it is the reading, the preaching, the hearing, the singing, and the sacraments, the ordinary means faithfully used, that carry a soul from grace to glory. And mark this comfort as you go: the Lord has not left the strength of His church to depend upon rare raptures or occasional heights. He has anchored it in the steady, returning rhythm of the Lord's Day, in the Word that is read and preached, in the psalm that is sung, in the cup that is poured, so that the humblest believer, week by ordinary week, may be fed, and strengthened, and carried home.

Prayer

O Lord our God, who hast appointed the reading of Thy Word, the preaching and hearing of the gospel, the singing of psalms, and the sacraments of Christ to be the ordinary means by which Thou dost meet with Thy people: we bless Thee that Thou hast not hidden Thyself in an inaccessible height, but hast spread a table for us in the wilderness and bidden us come. Forgive us, we pray Thee, the coldness with which we have used Thy holy ordinances. We have read Thy Word without godly fear, heard it without faith or obedience, sung Thy praises with wandering hearts, and sat at Thy table without self-examination. We have turned the means of grace into a form, and the form has profaned the grace. O Lord, quicken us. Put upon our hearts a holy preparation before every assembly. Make us conscionable hearers, doers of the Word and not hearers only. Fill our singing with grace in our hearts, that the word of Christ may dwell in us richly. Give us worthy receiving of the sacraments, that we may taste and see that Thou art good. And teach us to keep the occasional duties in their season — to fast when the season calls, and to give thanks for every deliverance. And grant, we beseech Thee, that we may never despise the ordinary means because they are familiar, nor rest in them without seeking Thee through them. Meet with us, we pray, in every sermon and every psalm and every cup, until faith is swallowed up in sight, and we worship Thee no more through Word and sign but face to face, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.