by Michiana Covenant | Jun 2, 2013 | Pastoral Notes, Sabbath, Westminster Shorter Catechism
Dear Congregation,
This Sunday we turn to the Fourth Commandment. Since the catechism spends six questions on the Fourth Commandment, we will spend two weeks working through the biblical teaching on the Sabbath.
This Sunday we will focus on two basic principles:
1) the Sabbath as a creation ordinance — the Sabbath is not merely part of the Mosaic law, but goes all the way back to creation;
2) the Sabbath as a redemption ordinance — and therefore it plays a somewhat different role in the Mosaic economy than it does today in Christ
I grew up in a Baptist church that didn’t pay much attention to the fourth commandment. When I was a senior in high school I worked Sunday afternoon at a local grocery store and never thought twice about it.
It was only during my sophomore year in college that I first encountered a church that took the sabbath principle seriously. At first, I thought it was nuts. Sunday afternoons had always been dominated by football and studying. Taking a whole day for rest and worship would put a serious dent in my academic performance. But I saw the weight of the biblical argument for it: if God blessed the sabbath day and hallowed it, then that means that the sabbath was made for man — not man for the sabbath — and so the sabbath was a good thing (in theory).
When I started observing the sabbath the fall of my junior year of college, I discovered that the practical benefits were tremendous. Knowing that this day was set aside for worship, rest, and fellowship with God’s people meant that I could focus on the delights of this day — rather than worry about what was going to happen on Monday! I suppose some people can become legalistic about sabbath-observance, but I have noticed that when you spend the Lord’s Day doing the things that you should be doing, there is very little time left for wishing that you could do the things that you shouldn’t be doing! (and over time, even the desire to do those things starts to go away as you rejoice that God has given you a day that is set apart from the other six).
Obviously there are lots of good questions about where you draw the line. And there is need for good casuistry in thinking through those questions (I realize that “casuistry” has a bad name these days, but it simply refers to dealing with “cases of conscience” in those grey areas where good Christians may disagree about how to handle a situation). But our catechism provides a good starting point for helping us think through what duty God requires of us in the fourth commandment.
Q. 57. Which is the fourth commandment?
A. The fourth commandment is, Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shall you labor, and do all your work: but the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord your God: in it you shall not do any work, you, nor your son, nor your daughter, your manservant, nor your maidservant, nor your cattle, nor your stranger that is within your gates: for in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.
Q. 58. What is required in the fourth commandment?
A. The fourth commandment requires the keeping holy to God such set times as he has appointed in his word; expressly one whole day in seven, to be a holy sabbath to himself.
Q. 59. Which day of the seven has God appointed to be the weekly sabbath?
A. From the beginning of the world to the resurrection of Christ, God appointed the seventh day of the week to be the weekly sabbath; and the first day of the week ever since, to continue to the end of the world, which is the Christian sabbath.
Why Truth Matters
While not dealing with the fourth commandment directly, Carl Trueman offers some helpful reminders of the dangers of “going with the flow” of our culture in his article, “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.”
With an increasing number of youth activities now taking place on Sundays, Trueman’s article may suggest that Christians may need to take a different path.
by Michiana Covenant | May 19, 2013 | Pastoral Notes, Worship
Carl Trueman opens a recent article on worship with the following line:
“The problem with much Christian worship in the contemporary world, Catholic and Protestant alike, is not that it is too entertaining but that it is not entertaining enough. ”
http://www.firstthings.com/article/2013/05/tragic-worship
What is missing? Tragedy. “Tragedy as a form of art and of entertainment highlighted death, and death is central to true Christian worship. The most basic liturgical elements of the faith, baptism and the Lord’s Supper, speak of death, of burial, of a covenant made in blood, of a body broken. Even the cry “Jesus is Lord!” assumes an understanding of lordship very different than Caesar’s. Christ’s lordship is established by his sacrifice upon the cross, Caesar’s by power.”
I’ll let you read the article for yourselves — but I will add here his conclusion:
“Bonhoeffer once asked, “Why did it come about that the cinema really is often more interesting, more exciting, more human and gripping than the church?” Why, indeed. Maybe the situation is even worse than I have described; perhaps the churches are even more trivial than the entertainment industry. After all, in popular entertainment one does occasionally find the tragic clearly articulated, as in the movies of a Coppola or a Scorsese.”
by Michiana Covenant | May 12, 2013 | Marriage, Pastoral Notes
John Milbank always has interesting things to say on ethics and religion. Here is his latest on the gay marriage discussion in Britain.
http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2013/04/23/3743531.htm
He suggests that the push for gay marriage is really “a strategic move in the modern state’s drive to assume direct control over the reproduction of the population, bypassing our interpersonal encounters. This is not about natural justice, but the desire on the part of biopolitical tyranny to destroy marriage and the family as the most fundamental mediating social institution.”
He argues that “Heterosexual exchange and reproduction has always been the very “grammar” of social relating as such. The abandonment of this grammar would thus imply a society no longer primarily constituted by extended kinship, but rather by state control and merely monetary exchange and reproduction.”
He concludes that “a gay relationship cannot qualify as a marriage in terms of its orientation to having children, because the link between an interpersonal and a natural act is entirely crucial to the definition and character of marriage.”
by Michiana Covenant | Apr 14, 2013 | Hermeneutics, Pastoral Notes, Patristics, Westminster Shorter Catechism
“Whoever, then, thinks that he understands the Holy Scriptures, or any part of them, but puts such an interpretation upon them as does not tend to build up this twofold love of God and our neighbor, does not yet understand them as he ought.” (Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, 1.36.40)
If your interpretation of scripture does not result in love of God and love of neighbor, then you have not understood scripture correctly. Augustine is arguing that love is our primary hermeneutic. That may sound odd at first — but when you consider what Jesus says in Matthew 22:34-40, you are forced to agree with Augustine!
This Sunday we will be looking at the relationship between the moral law and the Ten Commandments.
Last Sunday we saw from Romans 1-2 how Paul tells us that the moral law includes two things:
1) everyone knows who God is — and that they are supposed to worship him;
2) everyone knows what God requires — and that disobedience deserves death.
Not surprisingly, Jesus says that the two great commandments of the law covers the same ground:
1) Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and strength
2) Love your neighbor as yourself.
Jesus says, “On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” The Law includes the whole of the first five books of Moses. The Prophets include all the historical books. So when Jesus says that the Law and the Prophets depend on these two commands, he is saying that the whole Old Testament can only be rightly interpreted by seeing what it means to love God and neighbor. If your reading of scripture does not bring you to love God and neighbor, then you need to keep reading until you get there!
by Michiana Covenant | Apr 7, 2013 | Pastoral Notes, Westminster Shorter Catechism
This week we will begin the second part of our catechetical sermon series. In part one (questions 1-38), we focused on “what man is to believe concerning God”; now in part two (questions 39-107), we will focus on “what duty God requires of man.”
We start with the law. This week we’ll think about the moral law — what does God require of everyone?
Then we’ll turn next week to Jesus’ summary of the law — “Love the Lord your God with all your heart… and love your neighbor as yourself” — and we’ll talk about how that relates to the Ten Commandments. Why does Paul sometimes speak so highly of the law and yet also insist that we are not under law?
Then we’ll go through the Ten Commandments and look at how they apply to the Christian life.
The last part of the catechism then works through the Way of Salvation: faith and repentance, together with the word, the sacraments, and prayer.
It’s worth pointing out that the Christian life is firmly grounded in the story that was told in part 1 of the catechism. I like J. Gresham Machen’s way of putting it in Christianity and Liberalism. The modernists wanted to say that “Christianity is a life, not a doctrine.” Machen replied:
“From the beginning, Christianity was certainly a way of life; the salvation that it offered was a salvation from sin, and salvation from sin appeared not merely in a blessed hope but also in an immediate moral change. The early Christians, to the astonishment of their neighbors, lived a strange new kind of life — a life of honesty, of purity and of unselfishness. And from the Christian community all other types of life were excluded in the strictest way. From the beginning Christianity was certainly a life.
But how was the life produced? It might conceivably have been produced by exhortation. That method had often been tried in the ancient world; in the Hellenistic age there were many wandering preachers who told men how they ought to live. But such exhortation proved to be powerless. Although the ideals of the Cynic and Stoic preachers were high, these preachers never succeeded in transforming society. The strange thing about Christianity was that it adopted an entirely different method. It transformed the lives of men not by appealing to the human will, but by telling a story; not by exhortation, but by the narration of an event. It is no wonder that such a method seemed strange. Could anything be more impractical than the attempt to influence conduct by rehearsing events concerning the death of a religious teacher? That is what Paul called ‘the foolishness of the message.’ It seemed foolish to the ancient world, and it seems foolish to liberal preachers to-day. But the strange thing is that it works. The effects of it appear even in this world. Where the most eloquent exhortation fails, the simple story of an event succeeds; the lives of men are transformed by a piece of news.” (pages 47-48)
by Michiana Covenant | Feb 17, 2013 | Catechesis, Pastor Peter Wallace, Pastoral Notes, Pastoral Practice, Psalmody, Sabbath
Jamie Stoltzfus linked to this article on Facebook (though it was Jacob’s comment, “Trying to picture Peter Wallace in plaid and skinny jeans” that called my attention to it and convinced me to read it!):
http://marc5solas.wordpress.com/2013/02/08/top-10-reasons-our-kids-leave-church/
It is a good reminder of why we are doing what we do — and a challenge to work on doing it even better!
1) Why do the catechism quiz every week (10:10 a.m.)? Because we are working on instilling within ourselves (and our children) the basic grammar of Christian doctrine. Don’t assume that this is only for children. I never memorized the catechism until we started doing it at MCPC, but I find that the repetition is really helping me to get it stuck in my head and heart (especially as we have added the scripture memory verses). And for those who may say, “Yeah, I did that once,” — I would ask, “Do you still know it?” If not, come back, let’s do it again — and again — and again! Is it perfect? No, but if we wait for perfection we’ll never do anything!
2) Sing. Paul 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.” (Colossians 3:16). Notice that in Colossians 3, Paul isn’t talking about what we do in public worship — he’s talking about what we do in daily life! Do you know these songs well enough to sing them in your daily life? Do you incorporate them into your daily life? These are the sorts of customs and practices that sink deep into a person’s soul. If the only place you ever encounter this is on Sunday morning, then don’t expect it to get any further than one day a week in your life!
But Sunday morning is still a good place to start. Come and sing at 10 a.m. We generally sing through the most challenging piece of music that we’ll be singing in the morning service and work on it part by part. And as your children get older, bring them along to work on parts as well (and for those without kids, find a kid — or an adult who wants to learn how to sing — and take them under your wing to help them along). If you want to know how to sing better, stand next to [or in front of] someone who sings well.
And yes, we are planning on making sure that we have enough copies of the new psalter that you can have copies at home!
3) Talk with others about the sermon. Go deeper. Think together about what the scripture says about who Jesus is and what he has done. Let his story become the center of your conversation (it is, after all, the center of everything else!). Use the order of service throughout the week to encourage your daily prayers at home and with others. I include it here in the pastoral notes so that you can make use of it. Obviously, if you already have a thriving family worship time, then there is no need to alter it for this — but if you are looking for a place to start, it may help.
4) Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. The point of the Sabbath has to do with how we think about time. God said to work for six days and rest on the seventh. Do we set aside our labors for a whole day? God did. This was the pattern of creation. No, we don’t keep the same Sabbath as Israel (and we shouldn’t think about the Sabbath in terms of the whole Mosaic code — any more than we should think about theft in the same way as the whole Mosaic code!), but how do we use time? In the same way that we give to God the first of our produce, we should give to God the first of our time. Are we calling the Sabbath a delight? Or are we so focused on our own agendas that we squeeze God’s time out? Again — these sorts of practices and customs are crucial for shaping our life together before God.
Obviously, if these practices and customs do not really touch the core of our lives, then the children will see it — and will decry it as the hypocrisy that it is. But if they see the joy of the Spirit in us — if they see our thankful obedience reflected in our grace-filled walk, then perhaps by God’s grace they, too, will walk with us in the way of Christ.
