Thursday
Thursday
Worship
They devoted themselves … to the breaking of bread and to prayer.
Acts 2:42
We have seen that a living church is a learning and a caring church. It is also a worshiping church. “The breaking of bread” is evidently a reference to the Lord’s Supper, though probably with a fellowship meal included, and “prayer” is more literally “the prayers,” alluding to prayer services or prayer meetings. What strikes me most about the worship of the early church is its balance in two respects.
Firstly, their worship was both formal and informal; for it took place both in the temple and in their homes (v. 46). We note that the first believers did not immediately abandon the institutional church. Doubtless they were anxious to reform it according to the gospel, for they knew that its sacrifices had been fulfilled in the sacrifice of Christ. But they continued to attend the traditional prayer services that must have had a degree of formality. They also supplemented these with more informal home meetings and with their own distinctively Christian worship or Eucharist. We should not polarize between the structured and the unstructured, the liturgical and the spontaneous. The early church had both. So should we. Every congregation of any size should break itself into small groups.
Secondly, the early church’s worship was both joyful and reverent. There is no doubt about their joy. The Greek word agalliasis in verse 46 denotes an exuberant outburst of joy. For the fruit of the Spirit is joy, and sometimes a more uninhibited joy than our ecclesiastical traditions encourage. When I attend some church services, I think I have come to a funeral by mistake. Everybody is dressed in black. Nobody smiles or talks. The hymns or songs are played at the pace of a snail or a tortoise, and the whole atmosphere is lugubrious. But Christianity is a joyful religion, and every meeting or service should be a celebration of joy. At the same time, the early church’s worship was never irreverent. Yet today, if some church services are funereal, others are flippant. But if joy is a mark of authentic worship, so is reverence. “Everyone was filled with awe” (v. 43). The living God had visited Jerusalem, and they bowed down before him in that mixture of wonder and humility we call worship.
For further reading: Psalm 95