Lessons from Ephesians No.6 Early Christian Worship

This morning's reading is taken from the Psalms, Psalm 96. Psalm 96. Sing to the Lord a new song.

Sing to the Lord all the earth. Sing to the Lord, praise his name. Proclaim his salvation day after day.

Declare his glory among the nations. His marvelous deeds among all the peoples. For great is the Lord and most worthy of praise.

He is to be feared above all gods. For all the gods of the nations are idols. But the Lord made the heavens.

Splendor and majesty are before him. Strength and glory are in his sanctuary. Ascribe to the Lord, O families of nations.

Ascribe to the Lord glory and strength. Ascribe to the Lord the glory due to his name. Bring an offering and come into his courts.

Worship the Lord in the splendor of his holiness. Tremble before him all the earth. Say among the nations, the Lord reigns.

The world is firmly established. It cannot be moved. He will judge the peoples with equity.

Let the heavens rejoice. Let the earth be glad. Let the sea resound and all that is in it.

Let the fields be jubilant and everything in them. Then all the trees of the will sing before the Lord for he comes. He comes to judge the earth.

He will judge the world in righteousness and the peoples in his truth. Thanks be to God for his right word. Now I'd be grateful if you'd have your Bibles open at Ephesians and chapter five.

I think the psalm that we heard read so well earlier contains an illustration of what Paul is enjoining us to do in the 19th verse of Ephesians 5, but to catch the context I read from the 17th. Therefore do not be foolish but understand what the Lord's will is. Do not get drunk on wine which leads to debauchery.

Instead be filled with the Spirit. Speak to one another with psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs. Sing and make melody in your heart to the Lord.

Always giving thanks to God the Father for everything in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Well last time we were together looking into these very precious words I was speaking on the subject of being filled with the Spirit, and I suggested to you from these verses that to be filled with the Spirit as we are instructed to be by the Apostle Paul is not so much a climax, a climactic experience, but it is a condition. It is something in which you and I as Christian people ought to find ourselves in.

Therefore I went on to suggest to you that in this matter of being filled with the Spirit we're not passive. We're not waiting for something to happen to us. We are very active.

And then I went on to show you from this context and other scriptures certain do's and don'ts which are very important if one is going to know what it is to be continually filled with the Spirit. Now if you weren't here this last week, I particularly think of some of our young people who were out last Sunday morning ministering elsewhere. I would like you to get that tape and play it through together, maybe discuss it together, but I think it was an important word that is necessary for you to understand as we move on in Paul's teaching.

He goes on to say, having been filled with the Spirit, or rather because we are filled with the Spirit, certain things will follow. It will affect, from verse 19, the way we worship. Would you believe him? From verse 22, it will affect the way that you relate to your wife or your husband, assuming your marital state.

Verse 1 of this next chapter, it will affect the way that you bring up your children. Verse 5 of the sixth chapter, it will affect industrial relationships, the relationships between employer and employee. You see this, this whole business of being filled with the Spirit, it's not something academic.

It's not something just reserved for monks in a monastery. It is something that is worked out in the ordinary warp and woof of human life, and it has some very practical implications. However, I must resist the temptation to deal with it in general.

We are looking specifically at the nineteenth verse, and Paul is here dealing with our attitudes as Christian people, how we come together in worship, because we're filled with the Spirit. And so that's what I want to address you on this morning, because here I argue in the nineteenth verse, you get a snapshot, a picture of the early church. I don't think it's a full picture.

I don't think there's a wide-angle lens on the camera. Here is part of a whole, and the whole is important, but so also is this part. And so it's very important, it's very interesting for us to look into this nineteenth verse of Ephesians 5, and we could of course twin it with parallel scriptures.

Let's look at one of those. For example, in Colossians chapter 3 and verse 16, the Apostle is saying almost the same, though the picture is slightly larger, just fractionally bigger in size. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom, and as you sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs with gratitude in your hearts to God, and so forth.

And there's another verse which gives you perhaps an even wider picture in Corinthians, but maybe we'll come to that if we have time in a moment or two. Well, I put the question to you all this morning, whether you're in the galleries here or down on the ground floor, in what attitude did you come to church? Why did you come? What is your reason for being here? Well, it seems to me that these are questions that we can put up to our text, and from the answers that we discover, we shall find whether our objective in coming to worship in the twentieth century equals that of early Christian people. What was their intention of coming together? What was the reason? Well, recall that earlier on, Paul has been speaking of the man who likes drink.

Now, you must always bear this analogy in mind, because it has certain positive lessons as well as certain dissimilarities. Why does a man have drink? Why does he go to the public house? Now, the majority of people who go to the public house, they are in no way hooked on drink. They're not alcoholics.

Some of them, many of them, are very good ordinary citizens in our country. Now, why do they go? Well, what do you find in a public house? You find a place where you can have fellowship. And so, after a hard day, if you're given to alcohol, someone comes to you and says, come, let's have a drink.

Let's relax together over a drink. And what do you mean by relaxing? Well, you can talk, can't you? You have a very convivial evening, or so the idea has it. And I understand in some public houses and in some restaurants that are licensed, that I've been into, that you find over the door of the saloon, licensed for singing.

Well, why do they license these places for singing? Well, because the man who's had some drink, he not only feels relaxed as far as his normal vocal cords are concerned, but sometimes, not always, sometimes he'll go into song. And so, when you're passing some of these places, you hear the people singing. Now, Paul doesn't blush to say that when you're filled with the Spirit, well, in a similar fashion, similar in one sense, dissimilar in another, you will react.

You will have vocal cords that are active. You want to say something. You want to do something.

Be filled with the Spirit. Speak, actually, I-N-G should be on the end of that, because it's, it brings out the participle, the present participle, speaking to one another with songs, singing and making music in your heart to the Lord. Why? Well, because you're happy, not because of some drug, some stimulant, but because the Blessed Spirit has come into your heart and you're glad as a result of that, so you speak.

And will you notice who you speak to? Speaking to one another. Actually, the verb speaking there really gives the same impression as the verb singing. It's got the idea of, of putting word into song, even in the first part of verse 19, speaking to one another.

I once recall reading a commentator, and how often commentators confuse us when we're reading Scripture. Think that one through. I once remember a commentator passing scorn on the idea of a solo.

What does a soloist do? And this is a Puritan commentator, incidentally. Well, the soloist exalts herself or himself, you know, and now singing it to be to the Lord. Well, I think that he went beyond Scripture, quite frankly.

Speaking, singing to one another. Architects are bad theologians. I wish that pastors, ministers, had constructed the plans around which church buildings were erected, and not architects alone.

Why do I say that? Well, because they're obsessed with the rectangle. The only person virtually that you can see in most non-conformist churches is a man in the pulpit. Now, that could be unfortunate or pleasing, depending presumably who's in the pulpit, but basically all that you can see in the majority of churches is people's heads, and generally we'd rather see their faces.

Now, here in the tabernacle, the epitome of balance, we've got a sort of compromise, because you've got the Grecian architecture, almost of the amphitheater, and you folks in the galleries, you can look across at one another, I trust you do, not to scowl. And when you're singing, to whom are you singing sometimes? Well, you're not always singing to God, are you? You say, that's heresy. Of course we aren't.

Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness. You don't need to sing that to the Lord Jesus. He planted the kingdom.

He's the king. He doesn't need to seek it. Our blessed Lord is the monarch who reigns.

So, who do you sing it to? We're encouraging one another. Seek ye first the kingdom of God. Here I've had a very bad week.

You don't know what they did to me at the sixth form college, but my Derby and Joan club, to put it the other end of the spectrum. Very difficult, and here I am, I'm flabby in the Christian life. I need encouragement.

Seek ye first the kingdom of God, brother, sister. What a friend we have in Jesus. To who are you singing that? To the Lord.

You're not singing it to heaven. They're, they're perfectly aware that you've got the best friend in the universe. We're singing it to one another.

What a friend we have in Jesus. I remember in a park in Zagreb, Yugoslavia, years ago being so encouraged, listening to Yugoslav Christians persecuted before their faith, going out and risking an open air. The local police had said that they couldn't speak in the open air, that nobody said anything about singing.

So we went and we sang. What a friend we have in Jesus. That was testimony, provocative testimony, encouraging one another.

Speak to one another. Sing to one another. You know the word antiphony, antiphonal singing? That's when one part of the congregation takes up a melody, and another part, and another part, and in a period of time the whole congregation are involved in singing.

Now I believe that that was part of the practice. I don't want to make too much from this comment, but I think that I can demonstrate to you that this was part of the way that the early Christians used to go about praising the Lord. It's horizontal, you see, provoking one another, encouraging one another, but of course the whole idea was a vertical, bringing praise to the Lord.

It's not always easy, is it, to praise the Lord at the beginning of a service, particularly if it's at night, if it's an evening service, maybe the prayer meeting on a Monday. There you are, you had a difficult job during the day just to keep going, and it took a lot of energy and initiative just to come to the prayer meeting. You felt that you'd rather be in your garden, and you'd rather be watching the television, or what have you.

You came along and you felt absolutely flaked, did you not? And then you waited upon the Lord, and somebody got going in prayer and praise, and they touched your heart, and by nine o'clock you weren't the same person as you were at 7 30. They that wait upon the Lord renew their strength, and ere long in a prayer meeting, it happens so often here in the town, it becomes electric towards the end. I use the word because I don't know what other word to use.

What has happened? Well, you see, our hearts have been warmed, enlarged, and together now we're in a condition where we can bring a cacophony of sound, of praise, of melody to the Lord, singing in our hearts, and making melody to the Lord God, giving thanks to the Lord in everything. Do you know, I wish they didn't call this place the tabernacle. I say that because very few people know what the tabernacle is.

Of course, we've been here a long time, some longer than others, and some of the people in the town have now worked out that we're not a Jewish synagogue, but I have had letters to the chief rabbi. I'm being quite serious. I think I'd like to call this place the Melody Land Fellowship.

In my heart there rings a melody. Song is the language of heaven. Jesus has come that our joy might be full.

I was talking to a young teenage girl this week, lovely lass if ever there was one, came into my office, had never met her before. She was about to be pulled into one of the sects in the town, and I said, well, what is it that puts you off about Christianity? She hadn't been in the town very long. She said, it's a joylessness.

Within the sect I found joy. You smile when I say Melody Land, and maybe I want to put my suggestion in inverted commas, but the principle is there, and I don't apologize, neither do I qualify it. One moment, Him serve with mirth His praise foretell.

Our Lord Jesus has done so much for us, and He inhabits the praises of His people. That's what the psalmist says of God of Jehovah, Psalm 22 and verse 3. Well, what was the intention of these people when they came together? They came to worship God, and worship means giving full value to an ocean, thanking God for His greatness, for His goodness. How did they go about it? Well, look at the latter part of the 19th verse.

Indeed, it's not the latter part, it's right in the middle. Speak to one another with psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs. There are those who say that this is really just repetition, psalm equals hymns equals spiritual songs.

This, in grammatical terms, is tautology. Paul is emphasizing to make a point. Well, I'm not so sure.

Let's try and define what he's talking about. I don't have a great amount of time to go into this, so I can't give you all my reasoning, though I'd be very glad to give it in private. Speak to one another with psalms.

Well, psalms, that's quite easy, isn't it? We have the psaltery, the book of psalms in the Old Testament. We read that when our Lord took His leave from the upper room with His disciples, He sang a psalm. One of the Hallel psalms, the second part of the Hallel, Jewish collection of psalms incorporated in the book of psalms.

Full of joy, I will keep my vows in the presence of the Lord, sang our Lord Jesus Christ. The psalms, so often they're the jubilati, so often there is worship, so often there is emotion, and the Hebrews were not afraid to release emotion. Sometimes I think that we harm ourselves spiritually because of our fear in this area.

Nobody wants a false emotionalism, but there is a blessed religious emotion that is part of worship, without which worship cannot proceed. The psalms. Well, the early church, they used to sing the psalms, but let's remember we're talking about Gentiles here.

Paul is writing to the Ephesians. They didn't have the Old Testament, at least not many of them, only the Jewish part of the church. They wouldn't have known many of the psalms, doubtless they were learning them as we learn them and sing them.

But because Christianity is in effect an entry into melody land, then they became vocal themselves. Again, you know, we can be very pious sometimes, can't we? In our evangelicalism, we're intellectuals, we're academic. A curse on intellectualism, a curse on being academic, if it strips you from the simplicity as it is in Christ and causes you not to enjoy emotionally your faith.

Why do I say that? Well, come to this business of choruses. I've known people sort of turn up their nose at a chorus. They're so theologically erudite, they cannot sing choruses, even when these are chock-a-block full of Scripture.

I admit, they're not all, and some are quite banal, but some of the hymns are. Let's face it. But what did these early Christians do? Well, I put it to you, they composed their own hymns, not lengthy hymns.

They didn't have hymn books like we have. They didn't have the printing press as we have. They had to memorize.

Do you want an example of an early Christian song? Then go to the fourteenth verse of this chapter. In fact, it may be very appropriate to you at this point. Wake up, O sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.

That's an early Christian song. The man who taught me historical theology, Professor Ralph Martin, has almost given up a major part of his life into the researching in the Bible of ancient hymns, of early church hymns, and he translates this one as such, and his translation is, Awake, O sleeper, from the grave arise, the light of Christ upon you shines. And the idea is the baptismal service, you see.

The candidate's gone in, and he's being immersed, and the brothers, the elders, they're lifting him out of the water, and the congregation, to a man, to a woman, they start to sing, perhaps antiphonally, one section singing one line, another section the other line, and so forth. Wake up, O sleeper, arise from the grave, the light of Christ upon you shines. Do you want another example? I could give you several.

Let me settle for one more. Here's Paul writing to Timothy, the end of the sixteenth, the end of the third chapter, the sixteenth verse of the first epistle. Here are words you find nowhere else in Scripture, but it's a quotation.

Those of you who follow the NIV will see it. Set out, as such, speaks of our Lord Jesus, tells us several things about Him. He appeared in a body, was vindicated by the Spirit, was seen by angels, was preached among the nations, was believed on in the world, and taken up into glory.

What is that? Well, it's none other than a New Testament song, praising the Lord Jesus Christ, bringing Him honor and glory, a New Testament hymn. Augustine said that a hymn, to be a Christian hymn, must be praised. It must be praised to God, and it must be sung.

But then the Apostle Paul interestingly makes reference to spiritual songs. He doesn't need the word spiritual to define psalms, because there isn't anything else apart from a spiritual psalm, and despite the quotation from Augustine that there's nothing else in a hymn apart from a spiritual hymn. You never talk of a secular hymn.

Well, if you do, then you use the word wrongly, the word hymn wrongly. But a song, that's different. You have secular songs, don't you? Comic songs, and so forth, folk songs.

But Paul is here saying spiritual songs. What does he mean by spiritual songs? Well, remember we're in the language of the Spirit. We're talking about the experience of the Spirit.

Therefore, it's reasonable to suppose that he's talking about songs which the Spirit inspires. When a great and glad thing happens to one, what do they do? In the Christian realm, in the religious realm, they sing. Hannah is without child.

She takes her need to God, and God says, Hannah, you'll have a child. She bursts out into song, the Magnificat of the Old Testament. Here is Mary corresponding to Hannah in the New Testament.

She hears that she will be with child. She goes to see cousin Elizabeth, and together they praise the Lord. And that glorious poem, that glorious song, the Magnificat, falls from her lips.

It's not prepared. She hasn't premeditated upon it. It's what naturally comes into her heart as the Spirit moves upon her, and prophetically and winsomely she sings about the greatness of her God.

You find exactly the same, I say, as you move into Revelation. You smiled at me. I'm getting my own back now.

You smiled when I said I'd call this place Melodyland. But how, how would you describe heaven? A land of song. Look at Revelation in chapter five, verse nine, and they sang a new song.

Who were these people? Well, those who have been redeemed by the precious blood of Jesus, and they sing to Him. And you've got to have a new song if you're a new singer, as Cliff Richard will tell you in a book that carries part of his autobiography. You are worthy to take the scroll, to open the seals, because you were slain and with your blood you purchased men from God, for God from every tribe and language and people and nation, and so forth.

You go on in the book of Revelation. You come to the fourteenth chapter in the, and the third verse there, and you get another comment about people. One hundred and forty-four thousand.

The number of perfection. Twelve times twelve. One hundred times one hundred.

People coming to the Lord. All the redeemed. And what are they doing? They're singing.

What is a song? It's a new song. It has to be new. It's not Old Testament.

Inasmuch as now, what was hidden in the Old Testament is revealed. The lambs that were slain in the Old Testament, they pointed to the Lamb of God, the Son of God, who takes away the sin of the world. Who knows about these things? The Christian knows.

On earth and in heaven. And what does the Christian church do in response? They sing. They sing a new song before the throne and before the four living creatures and elders.

No one could learn the song, except the one hundred and forty-four thousand. You can't learn to sing spiritually, you see. You can't learn it.

It's something that's given you, because you have the experience. There's a new song in my heart. Even praise unto our God.

Once as David the psalmist, I was in the mire. I was in the clay. I was deep down there, but God lifted me from the mire and he put me in the choir.

From the rubbish to the glory. The new song. And these Christians in New Testament times, they experience the winsomeness, the inspiration of the Spirit, and it gives vent to song, sometimes unpremeditated, as they come together and as they rejoice before the Lord.

The immediacy of praise is how I would describe it. Well, let's hasten on. What about the application of all this? The application of all this.

Well, go back to my thought that this is a snapshot. It's not the whole of worship. I make that point because some people get worship in their understanding completely wrong these days.

I read of meetings where they have the worship and then the preaching, or the preaching and then the worship. You get it in some evangelical circles. You even get it in a more sacramental fashion in the high church circles.

They have the liturgy, then the preaching. Not a bit. If you were to read Acts 17, where Paul speaks of, or where there's a description of Paul's activity in Ephesus when he was there for two years plus, you'll find that day after day he expounded the Scriptures.

That's why I say this is just a snapshot. There's more to be added, but what is there in the snapshot is important. It doesn't speak of preaching.

It doesn't speak of prophesying. Many things, several things, it doesn't touch on, but what it does touch on, I argue, is important. This whole business of praising, praising the Lord.

Now I can demonstrate that this is something that was historically applied to the church. Take a great man of God by the name of Tertullian. He lived between 150 and 220 AD.

I was reading some of his writings just last week. Tertullian was a man who reacted against the dullness and drabness that soon set into Christian worship when it became liturgical and formal, and he says that to counter this, he describes one of the love feasts of the early vibrant Christians, and he says they rejoiced together after water for their hands and lights had been brought in. Each one, each believer is invited to sing to God in the presence of the others from what he knows of the Holy Scriptures or from his own heart.

You have it again. You see this unpremeditated praise. They come in, they're warm, they're enlivened by the Christian people as they speak to one another, as they sing to one another, and then suddenly a man gets up, a woman gets up, and she, she speaks out.

She, he sings forth what God is revealing, the kiss of God upon the soul with great spontaneity. And now it seems that I could demonstrate this to you, not only in New Testament times, not only in the second century A.D., I would take you to some of the great revivals. Go to the, the class meetings of John and Charles Wesley.

You remember these great brothers ministered in this country at the same time as George Whitefield and Marshall, they're converts into an organization which had a method about it. Thus the method is church. Well, part of the method was bringing together people in classes, and in these classes they would share together, and they would praise God together.

There would be an element of spontaneity. You get it also in the experienced meetings in the, in the Welsh hills when revival touched that land, and people would come together and they would say what God had done. It wouldn't just be a case of the preacher.

There was no threat between the laity and the clergy, so to speak. That distinction evaporates in revival. It must do, because it's a false distinction.

They all have things to say. They all have things to testify. There were men who were given specific gifts.

That is so. It is always so, because God gives the gifts. As Ephesians 4 tells us, the Lord Jesus gives certain gifts to his church in terms of ministry, of teaching, and so forth.

But these people, their hearts are overjoyed. And I go so far as to argue that if there is no opportunity for spontaneity in the structure of any church program, then in effect you are squeezing out, you're cancelling out what is one of the most beneficial and one of the most blessed means of enjoying the presence of God together. Well then, here we are.

My time is nigh on gone. We're looking into these teachings of Scripture, and we're seeing that the early Christians, when they came together, there was a sort of equivalent to, but an improvement on, the jollification of the people who are drunk, of the people who are intoxicated. In a drunken orgy, everyone has something to say.

Now, it's never like that. It's not an orgy. There's not confusion.

Where there is confusion, then it has to be controlled. But the opposite to control is not to cancel everything out, it's to have order. That's why Paul, when he writes to the Corinthians, puts up several controls.

He'd never have to control the majority of evangelical communities in these days. Why not? Well, you see, the spontaneous element, it's almost eliminated. It's most unfortunate, but that is the case.

And so, I'm bringing you back to Ephesians 5. Here we have, I say, a little snapshot. Not the full picture. There's more to be said.

But here is a scene of Christian people coming together who love the Lord. They're filled with the Spirit. There's something charismatic.

Understand that term biblically. There's something charismatic about them. There's not just something charismatic, there's something didactic.

That means they want teaching. That's what didactic means. There's something eucharistic about it.

That word is not just for the use of Anglo-Catholics and Roman Catholics, eucharisto. It means in the Greek to praise, to give thanks. And here are people, I argue, who are praising God.

Why are they praising God? Well, they've got a new song. Where did the new song come from? Well, it came from centering their attention on Jesus and his death on the cross and his mighty resurrection. You can't know him and not at times be elated.

And not to give expression to that elation is a terrible thing. Psychologists will tell you that the repression of the emotions can do incalculable harm to your psyche, to your personality. And that, at the spiritual level, is true.

Sometimes, my dear brothers and sisters, we could do with examining the checks that we put on our own emotion as we come before the Lord and recognize that a holy emotion is something that is pleasing to almighty God as we lift up our praise and our worship to him. Well, maybe more of this next week. Amen.

124. We have only time for one or two verses of this hymn. Let's sing the first, the third, and the fifth verses, please, of 124.

And, Father, for that final thought of singing in the hereafter with all the angelic hosts, we thank you. Let's continue now to make us a praying and a praising people, rejoicing in the goodness of God, encouraging and provoking one another to a higher quality of life, a more happy expression of worship. And be with us as we come around the table.

And may the bread and the wine be precious as more we feel the presence of the Savior. Amen.