Why we do what we do

Why do people go to a watch the Olympics live when the views and replays are so much better on TV, and there’s no inconvenience with travel? Because gathering is such a powerful thing. 

The sociologist Émile Durkheim described gathering in one place as ‘an exceptionally powerful stimulant.’ He continues, ‘Once the individuals are gathered together, a sort of electricity is generated from their closeness and quickly launches them to an extraordinary height of exaltation.’ That might seem a bit over-the-top, but anyone who has been in a stadium for the closing moments of a race knows it’s not always an exaggeration. 

God knows about– in fact, he designed – this feature of human social life. And that’s why he exhorts us in Hebrews 10:25 ‘not to give up meeting together’; why 1 Corinthians 11 talks about ‘when you come together’. It does something, even on a purely social level.

Sociology cannot grasp the most important thing about our gatherings – that we gather in the presence of God himself. Church is emphatically not just a club, a party, or a concert. It is the place where God himself has pledged specially to meet us. 

Of course, we are always seated with Christ at the right hand of God; of course, we can truly expect the transformative experience of coming before him in our private or family prayers. But, just as pagan worship truly involves participation with demons (1 Cor 10:20), so Christian worship truly involves fellowship with God. 

That is what Jesus means when he promises that ‘where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them’; that’s what Hebrews 12 is describing when it says that ‘you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering… and to Jesus.’

I hadn’t noticed before that Hebrews 12 speaks of ‘innumerable angels in festal gathering’ – in other words, that the worship we are joining in with when we gather on earth is fundamentally a joyful thing. When we look back at the gathered worship of the Old Testament, we shouldn’t be surprised. To gather is to celebrate; to gather is to feast; to feast is to rejoice. Psalm 42:4 recalls the ‘glad shouts and songs of praise’ of ‘a multitude keeping festival.’ 

At the same time, the gatherings of the Old Testament are also called ‘solemn assemblies’; they as often involve fasting and weeping as rejoicing. What are we to make of this? 

Our church gatherings truly involve both – we are cut to the heart as the word of God pierces us and strikes us down, and we rejoice with inexpressible joy as the Lord revives and welcomes us. So, our gatherings should be deeply solemn and joyful – do we come expecting that?

Our Sunday services are not thrown together at random or for convenience; they actually follow a structure which not only reflects historic Christian worship and the logic of the gospel, but more importantly the shape of gathering before God revealed in the Bible. 

Although the patterns of worship at Sinai (Exodus 19–24) or at Jerusalem (2 Chronicles 5–7) allows a certain amount of flexibility, the overall shape is fixed: we gather, God calls us before him, we are cleansed, we hear him speak, we have access to God, we are welcomed to his table, we are sent out into the world. 

Others outline it even more simply: call, confession, consecration, communion, commissioning. We do what we do, then, not to perform some elaborate historical re-enactment, but in order to meet with God on his own terms, with an expectation of being comforted, nourished and transformed by him.

People think of some churches as ‘liturgical’ and others as ‘non-liturgical’; the reality is every church has a pretty set order of play, however informal. And there is always some rationale behind that order: it’s traditional, it’s spontaneous (it’s not), it’s accessible to outsiders. 

We want our worship to be ordered by Scripture – and, as #4 explored, Scripture itself reveals an overall gospel shape and particular elements that give us that framework. Within that shape, notice how everything we do is part of a dialogue with God: he calls us to worship, we respond with praise; he convicts us of sin, we repent – and so on. 

But this back-and-forth is not a conversation between equals. On God’s part it is pure grace – he even invites us to his table. On our part it should be pure gratitude and wonder. I find it helpful to recognise where we are in the dialogue as we gather on Sundays – is this God speaking, or us responding? We should listen attentively, and respond gratefully.

The ‘call to worship’ which begins our services is not merely the calling of a courtroom to order or a concert audience to silence. It reflects our conviction that God takes the initiative in all our dealings with him – he summons us from heaven, and welcomes us into his assembly. 

Let us not forget that we are always in God’s presence objectively, and we have access to him subjectively at any moment through prayer. But he calls us into his special presence in our gathered worship. If our worship is a dialogue, it is one where God speaks first, and we respond; God invites, we receive. 

When God calls us to worship, we respond, naturally enough, with joyful songs of praise. The Hebrew word ‘hallelujah’ – literally ‘Praise the LORD’ – occurs 24 times in the Psalms, and is carried directly over into the ‘alleluias’ of Revelation 19, and we respond by praising him. Ephesians, 2 Corinthians and 1 Peter all begin with ‘Blessed be the God and Father…’, and we respond by blessing him.

We can respond rightly to God’s call to worship him in various ways: we can honour him in our hearts, praise him silently or vocally in our prayers, or ‘present our bodies as living sacrifices’ (Romans 12:1). But it’s striking how many of the Bible’s own ‘calls to worship’ are expressly calls to sing: ‘Serve the Lord with gladness! Come into his presence with singing!’ (Psalm 100:2); ‘Praise the Lord! For it is good to sing praises to our God’ (Psalm 147:1); ‘Oh come, let us sing to the Lord’ (Psalm 95:1); ‘singing and making melody to the Lord with your heart’ (Ephesians 5:19). 

I have argued that when Hebrews 13:15 says ‘let us continually offer up a sacrifice of praise to God’, it is calling us to offer thank offerings of song to God, just as David arranged for singers to praise God musically at the tent he set up for the Ark in Jerusalem. Our singing, then, is important, not mere padding for sermon or sacrament. It is our joyful, obedient response to God’s call to worship him, not only in our lives but with our lips.

James 5:13 says, ‘Is anyone among you suffering? Let him pray. Is anyone cheerful? Let him sing praise.’ Though the songs of the Bible itself very often express lament and anguish in trouble, the fundamental character of singing is joy and gladness: ‘come before him with joyful songs’ (Psalm 100:2); ‘let us make a joyful noise to him with songs of praise’ (Psalm 95:2); ‘play skillfully, and shout for joy’ (Psalm 33:3). In much the same way that feasting and rejoicing are inextricably bound together – though of course it’s possible to feast miserably – so singing and rejoicing are made for each other. God himself ‘rejoices over [us] with singing’ (Zephaniah 3:17).

Many of us, perhaps especially in Britain, feel a great self-consciousness about our singing; it takes quite a lot for us to disarm ourselves enough to sing with joy in our hearts. But that is what we should aspire to and aim towards, especially as we come to praise our mighty and gracious God. This is why we begin our services with songs of praise and thanksgiving – and with cheerful, upbeat tunes!

What should we sing? However we respond to the secondary questions – old or new, upbeat or meditative, thee or you – surely the most important answer is ‘biblical songs’.

 Colossians 3:16 says, 

‘Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God.’ 

That implies, I think, two kinds of biblical song: first, songs that are richly informed by the word of Christ, such that they amount to wise teaching of one another; second, songs that are the word of Christ: ‘psalms and hymns and spiritual songs’ (the three terms are probably the types of song mentioned in the superscriptions in the Psalms). 

Evangelical churches today are good at the first kind of biblical song, even to the point of sacrificing lyrical or musical accessibility in favour of rich, edifying words. But, strangely, we are not so comfortable with the actual songs of the Bible! That’s why we’re working through the Psalter both in our sermons and our singing in our evening services – because if we’re Bible people, then we should sing Bible songs.

‘Oh sing to the Lord a new song, for he has done marvellous things!’ (Psalm 98:1)

The psalms repeatedly tell us to sing ‘a new song’ (33:3; 40:3; 96:1; 144:9; 149:1). In fact, in the Bible that God’s most wonderful acts in his people’s history usually inspire new songs: the rescue from Egypt (Exodus 15), David being rescued from his enemies to become king (Psalms in general), the restoration from exile (Isaiah 12), the incarnation of Christ (Luke 1), the death and exaltation of Christ (Revelation 5:9–10). 

Though we have no further new history-shaking ‘marvellous things’ until Jesus returns, Christians have understandably and rightly been moved to write and sing more new songs in light of the salvation Christ has won for us – songs that express in every tongue and musical idiom our praise and thanks to God. That means, I think, that as the gospel progresses through the world new songs will continue to be written. Many new songs, however sincerely intended, are not really worth popularising. But we want to enjoy the best of those fresh songs to praise God and edify one another, even though most of them have a short shelf life.

C. S. Lewis gives the following advice in his essay ‘On the Reading of Old Books’:

‘if somebody must read only the new or only the old, I would advise him to read the old… precisely because he is an amateur and therefore much less protected than the expert against the dangers of an exclusive contemporary diet.’

I’ve often mused on how that applies to our hymns and songs. All the old songs (many of which are not actually that old) were new once, but now they are well-worn and time-tested; only the cream of the crop from each era remains. So as a matter of prudence, not to mention gratitude and honour to our forefathers in the faith, we should treasure the old songs, which nurtured those who went before and often still serve us well today. And, as a rule of thumb, the things which have already endured a long time are most likely to endure as long again. These are the songs which our children and grandchildren will most likely inherit, which we will sing on our deathbeds, and perhaps they will too. This is not to say new classics won’t ever emerge, or that old classics won’t ever fade away – but for now we have already stored up a  rich treasury of old songs to enjoy, and with which to glorify God.

I remember finding an old home-bound book of worship songs in a previous church. Judging by the copyright notices it must have been produced in the early 1980s. Yet despite having grown up in evangelical churches since not long after that, I only recognised a handful of the songs, and even the ones I did know were throwback classics at best. And that’s fine!

If we want new songs (see #10) and accept that only a few of the new songs mature into old songs (#11), most have to fade away. Charles Wesley wrote over 6,500 hymns; we might still sing 20 of them – that’s 0.3% of the prolific output of one of the greatest hymnwriters of all time.

Recording technologies – first vinyl, then tapes, then CDs, mp3s, YouTube – accelerate the aging process. Try listening to the biggest new songs of 2014 or 2004 in 2024 – a lot of them already sound quite tired. Again, that’s fine! Often those songs come with nostalgia and gratitude for God’s faithfulness and grace to us over the years, and that’s a good thing. However, it does mean that songs come and go in church life. Some churches overwhelmingly opt for fresh songs; at All Saints we lean towards the time-tested songs. But how many even of those old classics will still be in circulation in a generation? In ten generations? Not many. And that’s fine.

The first of Martin Luther’s famous Ninety-Five Theses reads,

‘When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said “Repent,” he intended that the entire life of believers should be repentance.’

Daily we pray, ‘Forgive us our sins’. So it is right that we acknowledge our sins in prayer when we gather together, as well – in a way the whole Old Testament system of public sacrifices for sin bears witness to this.

The lovely thing about heartfelt prayers of repentance is that their answer is immediate and guaranteed – the Lord is watching for our return, that he might run to us and embrace us.

Our weekly confession of sin follows the natural and biblical pattern: first we are convicted, then we confess, and finally we are assured of pardon. So, in 2 Samuel 12, in verse 10 God says through the prophet Nathan, ‘you have despised me and have taken the wife of Uriah the Hittite to be your wife’; in verse 13 David says, ‘I have sinned against the LORD’, and immediately Nathan responds, ‘The Lord also has put away your sin’. There’s a similar pattern in Psalm 32:3–5. And so that’s our pattern, too: conviction, confession, assurance of pardon.

Christians down the ages have spoken of a ‘threefold use of the Law’ – that is, of the moral law revealed by God in various ways: especially in the Scriptures, even more particularly in the Ten Commandments. 

One use of the law is to restrain sin in the world – so, even unjust nations have somewhat just laws because of God’s kindness, even wicked people are somewhat held back from evil by the pangs of conscience. 

Another use – traditionally, the ‘third use’ – is to show us what righteous living looks like for God’s people. 

But the use of the law we’re considering here is the one described in Romans 3:20: ‘through the law comes knowledge of sin.’ It is a mirror which displays the perfect holiness of God and our utter failure to match up to it, so that, ‘feeling our weakness under the law, [we] may learn to implore the help of grace’. 

Perhaps we come to confess our sins on Sundays with certain things already burdening us, but reading God’s commands may convict us of still more. A glimpse of the holiness of God causes us to cry out with Isaiah, ‘Woe is me! For I am lost!’ (Isa 6:5), and with Peter, ‘Depart from me, for I am a sinful man’ (Luke 5:8). But – wonder of wonders – the Lord replies, ‘Do not be afraid.’

Psalm 32:3: ‘When I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long’.

It is good to confess – that is, not simply to groan under the burden of the guilt and consequences of sin, but actually to say sorry to God, out loud, for the offence of our individual sins (see Joshua 7:20–21). The tax collector prayed, ‘Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner.’

This, I think, is a much neglected part of our personal devotional lives – and our life together as people who are instructed to ‘confess… your sins one to another, and pray one for another’ (James 5:16).

We also confess our sins corporately, just as Ezra gathered those who ‘trembled at the word of the God of Israel’ to say, ‘we are before you in our guilt, for none can stand before you’ (Ezra 9).

The Bible contains many clear assurances of what happens when we confess our sin: ‘you forgave the iniquity of my sin’ (Psalm 32:5); ‘he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness’ (1 John 1:9); ‘I tell you, this man went down to his house justified’ (Luke 18:14).

So we should take confessing our sins seriously – because they are serious, and because restoration leads to rejoicing, both for us, and in heaven itself (Luke 15:7).

Jesus once told a man, ‘Take heart, my son; your sins are forgiven’ (Matthew 9:2). Okay, so the paralysed man in question was probably hoping for, even expecting, something rather different – he wanted to be healed. But think, once he had been healed, how precious those words from Jesus must have been. The healing itself was just to prove the point: Jesus has authority to forgive sins, to tell people beyond a shadow of a doubt that their sins are forgiven.

Or, to return to an Old Testament example, think of the comfort it was to David to hear, immediately after he’d admitted his wrongdoing, the prophet Nathan say, ‘The Lord has put away your sin’ (2 Samuel 12:13).

Of course, we can confess our sins to God in the silence of our own hearts and be assured of his forgiveness when we’re entirely alone. But God has set things up so that we are greatly encouraged by hearing from the lips of another person that God loves us, that God welcomes us back. As one writer put it, ‘The Christ in his own heart is weaker than the Christ in the word of his brother; his own heart is uncertain, his brother’s is sure’.

This is part of what it is to ‘speak the truth in love’ to one another (Eph 4:15). And this is why, in our services at All Saints, when we confess our sins we hear the reassuring reminder: ‘God forgives you.’

You may have noticed that we use the same words to confess our sins every week. The dangers of this are obvious: we rattle through the familiar lines without a second thought, thus taking the Lord’s name in vain through our insincerity. On top of this, some might feel these words are too stern, or too complicated for outsiders or for children, or too Anglican. 

But I want to suggest that these downsides are outweighed by the benefits of repeating these excellent prayers: 

1. First, the words themselves are richly biblical – someone has put together an annotated version of them (see is.gd/scripturalbcp) which shows just how densely scriptural they are. 
2. Second, the theology they contain is solid and helpful – so, for example, when we confess ‘there is no health in us’ we admit that sin has stained us all the way down; our very ‘devices and desires’ are corrupt. 
3. Third, the repetition is, I think, actually helpful to our children – as they come to church week after week they don’t have to struggle through reading a new prayer they don’t get; instead the old familiar words are there for them, even if they don’t fully understand them yet. 
4. Fourth, the repetition helps us all in our own prayers. We are wearing down a channel for our regular response to our own sin, and it begins, ‘Almighty and most merciful Father.’

I have a friend who is a traffic warden – it’s (almost) always nice to bump into him working around town. Imagine I wasn’t sure if a particular spot was permitted for parking. I could ask anyone and they might give me the right answer: someone whose house is on that road, someone who’s been living in the city for decades, just someone who’d spotted a sign I’d not noticed. If I asked my friend the traffic warden, he’d give me the right answer, too, but somehow his – identical! – right answer would give me more confidence to park in that spot.

That’s the best image I can come up with to explain why Christ’s commissioned ministers of the gospel – those recognised and ordained as elders of the church – are the best people to declare God’s forgiveness when we confess our sins together. Don’t get me wrong, your own Bible-informed conscience can reassure you of God’s favour. And any Christian, as we confess our sins to each other, can and should remind you of God’s forgiveness. But the identical ‘right answer’ from the men whom Jesus has charged with speaking on his behalf should give us great confidence, not because they have special magical powers, but because that’s what they’ve been appointed for.

‘Until I come, devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture, to exhortation, to teaching’, the Apostle Paul instructed Timothy. Because of this, among other biblical grounds, the Westminster Assembly affirmed that

‘the Spirit of God makes the reading, but especially the preaching of the Word, an effectual means of enlightening, convincing, and humbling sinners; of driving them out of themselves, and drawing them unto Christ; of conforming them to his image, and subduing them to his will; of strengthening them against temptations and corruptions; of building them up in grace, and establishing their hearts in holiness and comfort through faith unto salvation’ (Larger Catechism Q155).

Notice all it does! Yes, it is especially the unfolding of the Word in preaching that does this, but the reading of the Word is foundational; the mere reading aloud of the Bible, even without explanation, in the gathering of God’s people can be a powerful means of his grace to us. When King Josiah unearthed the book of the Law in 2 Kings 22–23 and had it read aloud to the people, they repented and the nation was revived. So let us devote ourselves to the reading – and attentive, expectant hearing – of Scripture.

What’s more important, the reading or the sermon?

Perhaps it’s the wrong question, but I suspect we are more inclined to think we come to church to hear the sermon than to hear the reading. After all, reading is easy, isn’t it?

In a sense our instincts are right – it is ‘especially the preaching’ of the word of God that is a fruitful means of God’s grace to us. But the sixteenth-century Anglican writer Richard Hooker observed:

‘…when we read or recite the Scripture, we then deliver to the people properly the word of God. As for our sermons, be they never so sound and perfect, his word they are not as the sermons of the prophets were; no, they are but ambiguously termed his word, because his word is commonly the subject whereof they treat, and must be the rule whereby they are framed.’

Hooker is not saying that preaching, when it is an accurate and legitimate unfolding and application of the Bible, has less authoritative force than the Scripture itself – the ‘whole counsel of God’ includes what can be deduced from Scripture. Rather, he is reminding us that sermons can get things wrong. Even if we basically trust a preacher, we still must weigh and sift what he says. Not so with the reading of the word of God.

Jesus had a birthday.

We might not know precisely when it was – though the Gospel accounts do actually give quite a lot of information about timings – but we know that he had a birthday. Having ‘become flesh’ (John 1:14) in the womb of Mary (Luke 1:31), he was ‘born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those under the law, that we might receive adoption to sonship’ (Galatians 4:4).

Do you think Jesus celebrated his own birthday? Although the candles-on-a-cake tradition goes all the way back to Ancient Greece, other cultures in the past generally made less of birthdays than we do today. And yet the Bible assumes that people at least knew how old they were: Jesus was ‘twelve years old’ when his parents left him behind in Jerusalem by mistake (Luke 2:42).

So, did Jesus mark his own birthday? Did his disciples know when it was? Did they pass that information on orally to those who came after them? We don’t know. But the fact that Jesus had a birthday at all is of the utmost importance to the Christian faith. Actually, both of the central Christian festivals are birthdays – Christmas celebrating Christ’s birth from the womb, Easter his rebirth from the tomb. These two ‘birthdays’ are the most wondrous and remarkable things that have ever happened – and so we rejoice.

Christmas keeps getting cancelled. 

While first generation of Reformers in the sixteenth century happily observed Christmas alongside other ‘evangelical feast days’, their Puritan descendants in the British Isles and New England infamously banned Christmas celebrations. In the twentieth century, the Soviet Union outlawed Christmas, replacing it with a secular New Year festival complete with its own bearded ‘Father Frost’ (Ded Moroz) and New Year trees. In our own day public figures bid you ‘Season’s Greetings’ or ‘Happy Holidays’ instead of ‘Merry Christmas’. 

Of these, the Puritan objections to Christmas feel closest to home: they considered it a Roman Catholic adaptation of pagan winter festivals which disrupted honest work and encouraged drunkenness and debauchery. Most importantly, they found no direct warrant for it in the Bible, so it was not something the church or the authorities could legitimately impose. They were right about that, I think – nobody can require you to celebrate Christmas; it doesn’t matter at all if you do; you’re free. But for most of us, being at liberty to feast and celebrate with thanks in our hearts to God, we very happily do. So, merry Christmas to you all!

How many readings should we have, and how long should the readings be? 

The Bible itself contains examples of lengthy public readings – Moses read the whole ‘Book of the Covenant’ aloud in Exodus 24:7; Joshua read ‘the Book of the Law’ to the assembly of Israel (Joshua 8:34–35); in Nehemiah 8 we discover that the Scriptures were read aloud ‘from early morning until midday’! In the New Testament, too, Paul instructs the Colossians and Thessalonians to read his letters aloud – presumably the whole letters at one sitting (Col 4:16; 1 Thess 5:27). 

In the second century, the Christian writer Justin Martyr records that, ‘And on the day called Sunday, all who live in the cities or in the country gather together in one place, and the memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read, as long as time permits’. 

At All Saints, by contrast, we usually only have one reading, and often it’s quite a short one – is this enough? While we have evidence of longer readings in the Bible, we don’t have a plain requirement that our worship services include multiple or lengthy readings – I’m content to work slowly through the richness of one book at a time. 

But we should be challenged by our forebears in the faith, who listened to and delighted in God’s word as it was  read aloud to his people.

The Bible is for everyone, and everyone may and should read the Bible. What, then, does the Westminster Larger Catechism mean when it says – in the same breath as affirming this – that not all are ‘permitted to read the word publicly to the congregation’? 

To answer this question we have to dig a little deeper to understand the nature of authority in the church. As Protestants, we believe the church’s authority is ministerial and declarative – i.e. it simply applies Scripture – rather than magisterial and legislative, as the Roman Catholic Church believes. We are all under the supreme authority of the Bible. The public reading of Scripture is an obvious exercise of church authority: the simplest form, in a way, declaring ‘thus says the Lord’. 

This is why Timothy’s charge to ‘devote himself to public reading… to exhortation, to teaching’ (1 Tim 4:13) is immediately related to ‘the gift he has’ through the laying on of hands (1 Tim 4:14). Timothy had, as a recognised, qualified minister of the gospel, a tightly limited but real authority to speak on behalf of God. And this is why not all are ‘permitted to read the word publicly’. Exactly how that plays out in churches may vary. But taking Bible reading seriously also means taking Bible readers seriously – not because of competence, but because of authority.

‘…whoever speaks, as one who speaks oracles of God’ (1 Peter 4:10–11). 

The most important thing to understand about sermons is we are not primarily interested in listening to the preacher. He is a mere messenger, an emissary from God, and it is his life-giving words that we gather to hear. Hebrews 12:25 warns us not to refuse ‘him who speaks’ – clarifying later in the same verse that this means ‘him who warns from heaven.’ 

This has a number of important implications for both preacher and hearers. 

First, preachers must be careful only to declare what God has declared – what ‘is either expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture’ (Westminster Confession 1.6).

Second, in doing this preachers must preach confidently, not relying on their own ability or persuasiveness but in God’s authority and power.

Third, reliant on that, preachers must seek to proclaim the truth clearly and convincingly.

As hearers, we should come to the reading and preaching of the Word humbly, recognising that God speaks through weak men.

We should come warily, knowing that, while the Scriptures do not err, preachers do.

But we should come expectantly, expecting to hear God speak to us.

Why has God given us preaching as the means by which his voice is heard? After all, he could just as easily revealed himself to us directly, beaming straight into our minds, or by angels or some other reliable means. But instead he has given us fallible, weak human beings to speak on his behalf.

The sixteenth-century theologian John Calvin gives three reasons.

1. First, by entrusting the task of acting as his ambassadors and representatives to some men, he proves the preciousness of humanity to him in general.
2. Second, he is teaching us to be humble. Calvin writes that preaching is ‘a most excellent and beneficial method to train us to humility, since he accustoms us to obey his word, though it is preached to us by men like ourselves, and sometimes even of inferior rank’; we show our reverence to God himself when we submit to be instructed by a ‘contemptible mortal’ (Institutes 4.3.1).
3. Third, preaching promotes brotherly love by giving a clear example to  every member of the church that no Christian can be self-sufficient; we are all to use our various gifts to build one another up.

Perhaps you find this frustrating – I have certainly wrestled with these things over the years, especially the second reason. But that’s the point: to teach us not to rely on our human strength or wisdom, but on God alone.

Vows are solemn, voluntary pledges to and before God to do, or not do, a particular thing. Perhaps the idea of making a vow feels rather archaic – ‘You don’t see that much nowadays!’ 

In fact, people make important vows all the time: to tell the truth in court, to serve faithfully in a particular public role, to be faithful to a spouse ‘as long as we both shall live.’ 

The Bible takes vows or oaths very seriously. God  himself is our model: he ‘swore by himself, for there was no one greater by whom he could swear’ (Hebrews 6:13), and he always comes through on what he promises, no matter the cost. 

Of course, Jesus teaches that our yes should be yes and our no should be no whether a vow is involved or not; nevertheless we are free to make – or not to make – vows, and realising the sacredness of such promises and what is at stake should be an encouragement and warning to us. We are generally free not to make vows, as well: ‘It is better not to make a vow than to make one and not fulfil it’ (Ecclesiastes 5:5). 

Certain vows are important in the life of the church: elders vow to shepherd a particular congregation on Christ’s behalf; members commit to belong to a particular church; parents pledge to raise their children in the Lord. These are solemn, serious things, and only possible by God’s grace: ‘with the help of God, I will.’

I can highly recommend a little booklet on how to listen to sermons: Listen Up by Christopher Ash. It’s theologically rich and practical and pastoral. Here are his seven key ingredients for healthy sermon listening:

1. Expect God to speak – look up the coming Sunday’s passage and ask God beforehand to bless you, your family and others through the preaching
2. Admit God knows better than you – search especially for the things in the Bible passage which are uncomfortable and challenge your belief or life
3. Check the preacher says what the passage says – while we shouldn’t come with suspicion of the preacher, we should consider whether the main thrust of the sermon matches that of the passage
4. Hear the sermon in church – preaching is actually not reducible to a transcript or audio recording!
5. Be there week by week – how many Sundays are you not there?
6. Do what the Bible says – consider how you wish its message would change other people, then disregard this and consider how it should change you.
7. Do what the Bible says today, and rejoice! – preaching is food for today; don’t let the word be snatched away without changing you.

Some people don’t like reciting creeds and confessions in the gathering of the church, but I’m afraid the case against it is the same as the case against singing ‘man-made’ hymns and songs as opposed to just psalms and scriptural songs! And the reasons for saying the creeds – in our case, the (so-called) Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed, though we might equally use sections from the Westminster Standards or the Heidelberg Catechism – are very similar to the good reasons for singing songs.

First, we glorify God by proclaiming the truth about him.

Second, we confirm and strengthen our own faith by reminding ourselves of the gospel.

Third, we encourage the brothers and sisters around us, demonstrating that we stand together on the same truths.

Fourth, we join with the wider church by using the very same words they use.

The creeds are very ancient and very catholic – incidentally, when we say ‘one, holy, catholic and apostolic church’, the word ‘catholic’ means something like ‘global, universal’. These are wise, time-tested pithy summaries of the Christian faith accepted by, really, every Christian church – and while it should grieve us that the global church is splinted into many tiny shards, when we say the creeds we are saying nevertheless: ‘one faith, one Lord, one baptism’ (Ephesians 4:5).

I think, out of all the different parts in our Sunday services, corporate prayer is the hardest for the congregation to engage in well. But there can be no doubt that prayer is an appropriate and necessary thing for us to do when we gather – the first Christians ‘devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer’, or, literally, ‘the prayers’ (Acts 2:42). 

When you think about it, we pray in our services quite a few times: when we address our songs to God, praise and adore him, confess our sins, ask for his illumination before the reading and sermon, pray in response to the sermon, come before him in humility and thanks before and after communion. But we also have a time specifically for bringing our requests and petitions to God – our intercessions. 

Jesus encourages us many times to ask ‘in his name’ with a real expectation that God will answer us. So as we pray for matters big and small, global and local, we are engaging in something quite extraordinary: boldly approaching the throne of grace to ask for grace in our time of need and for the Lord to fulfil all his promises and purposes for the whole world. But while we are able to approach with confidence and freedom, we must also come with reverence, seeking to hallow the Lord’s name and not to take it in vain.  So we follow along as much as we can and join in ‘Amen’ – ‘may it be so!’.

‘Amen’ is an ancient Hebrew word which was adopted without translation into New Testament Greek and, later, pretty much every other language. 

In Hebrew the root word from which amen comes means something like ‘belief, faithful’. In the Old Testament the word appears in 24 verses, including 12x in Deut 27 and 5 ‘double Amens’. In the New Testament it appears in 105 verses. Most of these are Jesus saying ‘Truly (amen) I say to you’ (‘Truly, truly’ in John); many of the others are at the end of a declaration of praise to God in the letters. 

Essentially, when we say ‘Amen’ we are formally agreeing with the praise or prayer and expressing our trust in God to hear us and answer. The Heidelberg Catechism puts it beautifully: 

‘Amen means: so shall it truly and surely be. For my prayer is much more certainly heard of God than I feel in my heart that I desire these things of him.’ (Q&A 129)

More trivially, why do some people say ‘Ay-men’ and others ‘Ah-men’? It comes down to the shift over several centuries in how English-speakers pronounced various vowels. Notice how we pronounce ‘Abraham, Isaac and Jacob’ compared to other European languages! Churches which retained some connection with Latin tended to stick with ‘Ah-men’; non-conformists – and, later, Americans – tended to shift to ‘Ay-men’. But the bottom line is: it matters that we say Amen with expectant faith, not how we say it!

Some of our esteemed puritan forebears—Thomas Cartwright in the sixteenth century, John Owen in the seventeenth, Charles Spurgeon in the nineteenth—were wary of the use of the Lord’s Prayer in public worship, considering it a general form for prayer rather than exact words to be repeated. They were rightly concerned that people did not take the Lord’s name in vain by praying mindlessly; as Spurgeon said, ‘it is not given to be a form repeated without thought… repetition without feeling is a mockery.’ 

This is a helpful caution, but I think the Lord’s Prayer in its simple form is too precious a gem to be set aside. Despite his warnings about ‘vain repetitions’ and ‘prayers for show’, when his disciples asked for instruction in prayer Jesus replied, ‘When you pray, say, “Our Father…”’. By saying it together at the end of our intercessions we draw all the threads of everything else we have prayed for together into their simplest and most profound form. 

Notice how the prayer is constructed: an address, three petitions for the Lord’s glory, four petitions for our own welfare, concluding with praise. Here are two hints to help us pray this glorious prayer. First, we can use it to help us focus on the rest of our intercessions. As you listen to the other prayers in our service, keep thinking: what petition in the Lord’s Prayer does this fit into? Second, we should just accept that we can’t possibly consider everything each potent phrase contains as we pray it. Just think of one thing if you can, and approach the Lord with a humble and confident heart, saying, ‘Our Father…’

I must start by saying very clearly that there is no biblically required posture for prayer! We see people addressing God while standing (Mark 11:25; Luke 18:11), sitting (2 Samuel 7:18), lying down (Psalm 6:6; 63:6), kneeling (Daniel 6:10; Ezra 9:5), prostrated on the ground (Numbers 16:22; Matthew 26:39), with hands raised to heaven (Psalm 141:2; 1 Timothy 2:8), with eyes lifted to heaven (Ezra 9:6; John 17:1), with eyes lowered (Luke 18:13). Again, none of these is required – they each embody different attitudes and emotions in different circumstances. But I’ll comment on two of them in particular that may be a help to us as we pray. 

First, kneeling: Daniel prays and gives thanks to the God in private on his knees three times each day (Daniel 6:10); Ezra ‘fell upon his knees and spread out his hands to the LORD’ to confess his sins. Kneeling seems to represent our humility before God and his rule over us (Philippians 2:10), so perhaps it is especially appropriate for confessing our sins – and it may be a particular help to young children in learning what it is to say sorry to God. 

Second, lifting hands to God – it is striking how often this occurs in biblical prayers. Perhaps, like me, you feel far too self-conscious to lift hands to God in public worship – though you are entirely free to! – but I have found this a helpful practice in my private prayers, at least, signifying that I am bringing something up to the heavenly throne room of our Almighty Father.

It’s a real privilege to be baptising two people this Sunday morning at All Saints. Not only is baptism a great encouragement and help to those individuals, but it should be to those of us who have already been baptised as well, whether recently or long ago, as children or as adults. Our Presbyterian forefathers left us some lovely instructions on how we can make the most of our baptism:

‘The needful but much-neglected duty of making the most of our baptism is to be performed by us all our life long, especially in the time of temptation, and when we are present at the administration of it to others;

• by serious and thankful consideration of the nature of it, and of the ends for which Christ instituted it, the privileges and benefits conferred and sealed thereby, and our solemn vow made in it;
• by being humbled for our sinful defilement of, falling short of, and walking contrary to, the grace of baptism and our commitments in it;
• by growing in assurance of pardon of sin, and of all other blessings sealed to us in baptism;
• by drawing strength from the death and resurrection of Christ, into whom we are baptized, for the mortifying of sin, and quickening of grace;
• and by endeavouring to live by faith, to practise holiness and righteousness, as those that have given up their names to Christ in baptism, and to walk in brotherly love, since we are baptized by the same Spirit into one body.’

(Larger Catechism Q167 modernised)

Everyone can pray – no matter who you are, you can approach your Creator and bring your requests; every Christian, young or old, has God as his or her Father in heaven and has the right to approach his throne of grace boldly in prayer. That said, it is clear that in the Bible when God’s people gathered, one person at a time actually prayed aloud (1 Chr 16:36; 1 Kings 8:22). 

So, if anyone can pray, can anyone lead the public prayers in our Sunday gatherings? Let us first grant that the answer is not obviously yes, just as the fact that anyone can proclaim the gospel does not imply that anyone can preach in church. The Bible speaks quite directly to the question of public prayer in 1 Timothy 2. Paul writes,  ‘I want the men everywhere to pray, lifting up holy hands without anger or disputing’, immediately contrasting this with the women in the church who are to ‘remain quiet’.  

Remember – everyone can pray, any time, anywhere, so this insistence on the men praying must be limited to particular gatherings of the church (this is also the most obvious way to untangle the apparent difference between 1 Corinthians 11 and 14, on a similar topic). And it is clear that all people, young and old, male and female, are to pray in church by joining in ‘Amen’, and to ‘address one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs’ (Ephesians 5:19). Nevertheless, Paul is keen to encourage the men of the church to take a lead in public prayer, and I am keen to do the same at All Saints. Why the Bible says this requires a much longer explanation – but hopefully this is at least a start.