Order In Worship
ORDER IN WORSHIP
1 CORINTHIANS 14:26-33
The Holy Spirit brings order to unholy disorder.
The church which meets us in the pages of the New Testament is a worshiping community of believing men and women. No one, in the light of such texts as Acts 1:14; 2:42,46; 4:31; 5:12,42; 13:1-3; 20:7-12, is likely to dispute this statement, but two caveats need to be entered. First, we know less about New Testament worship than we would like to know, and it is temptingly easy to fill in the gaps of our knowledge by reading back into the period from the later history of the church. Secondly, we are almost exclusively dependent on 1 Corinthians for the information, and it may well be an unjustifiable assumption to believe that what was true at Corinth held good for the rest of Christendom in the early period or, even, for the other Pauline churches. Where else in the New Testament do we have references to tongues, or such explicit detail about the Lord’s Supper procedure?
These verses give insight into the type of public worship which was practiced at Corinth. Clearly informality and a sharing of spiritual gifts were the chief features, with a movement to a more formal and stylized pattern of worship (which we read about in the later letters) already peeping through. This section may well represent a midway point between the spontaneity of 1 Thessalonians and the more structured developments in Ephesians.
A comparison of 1 Thessalonians 5:16-22 and Ephesians 5:19ff. with its parallel in Colossians 3:16ff. is instructive and throws some light on the verses in this study. Praise and singing (14:14-15,26) stand at the head of the list of church practices. Some reading of Scripture and its exposition is implied (as in Acts 20:7ff. and Colossians 3:16 = 1 Thessalonians 5:20-21). At Corinth there was speaking in tongues (possibly hinted at in 1 Thessalonians 5:19) and its necessary adjunct, interpretation (14:27-28). Prophecy is encouraged, for reasons which run like a thread through these Corinthian chapters (14:31b)—can you fasten a label to them? And a final cautionary word is added (corresponding to 1 Thessalonians 5:21) that prophetic utterances must be tested (14:29), and the welfare of the whole church kept to the forefront. That is why there is a need to have some understanding about speaking in turn lest a babble of voices distract from and destroy the real intention, that is, intelligible communication and responsible reception of God’s word to the congregation (14:31).