The Why Behind Our Worship: Ordinances (Week 2)

This week in Sunday Sessions, Becca Ferguson continues our series on "The Why Behind our Worship," taking a closer look at Ordinances - what are they, why do we practice them, and how do we practice them in a way that seeks to be faithful to Scripture and to the commands of Jesus to his followers.

Week 2 Handout Link

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Alright, friends, so we are gonna go ahead and jump in. Okay, so some of you I know were here last week. I see a couple familiar faces over here and some new faces too. So uh this is week two of the why behind our worship, a mini-series on liturgy and ordinances. So you may remember if you were here last week, we talked about liturgy, and this week we're looking at the two ordinances that we practice here at CVC. Why we practice them and why we practice them the way that we do. And how many of you guys were in the 8 a.m. service? Okay, cool. So I did not plan this. You might remember we actually got shifted because of the snowstorm. Um, but this week, as we talk about ordinances, we're actually practicing the Lord's Supper in the main service. So that I I was in the 8 a.m. and I was like, oh, this works so well for us that are in Sunday sessions because you get an opportunity to kind of think about the Lord's Supper a little bit in here and then practice it right after. Um, and one of the things, I'll probably come back to this, but I don't want to forget to say it. Today, when we practice the Lord's Supper, we're actually doing like the cups that you pick up yourself that are contained, so they've it's like one little thing, and you've got the wafer and the juice. And I asked Brenda, I was like, hey, why are we doing it this way today? And she said, it's because it's been such a bad flu season. And and we're gonna talk today, like we did last week, about the practical considerations that go into our practice, and that's like a perfect example because usually we pass those plates and we decided as a church, hey, we're not gonna do that right now because so many people are getting sick. We wanna kind of keep this as contained as we can to think about germs. So we'll we can come back to that, but I was like, what a perfect example of the way that our practice is shaped, not just by theology, but also by important practical considerations. Um, so yeah, just I was like, what a perfect object lesson that we all get to be a part of today. Um, so when you go into the service, you're gonna be handed your items for communion, and then we'll take communion at the end. And Dean did a beautiful job walking us through uh explanation and prayer this morning. So if you missed last week, I got a little behind, but I'm catching up. Uh this, and I'll try to put it quickly. Uh, last week's class is going to be at cvconline.org slash Sunday sessions very soon. So you can listen to that as a podcast. You can share it too with others if you like. So, jumping in, to some extent, the flow of our lesson today is gonna follow a similar pattern to last week. Uh, we have an outline we're gonna walk through, and we're gonna have some time for discussion a little bit on our own, but I'm actually trying to keep some of the discussion uh with all of us this week because I think that worked well when we did that last week too. So we're about to walk through our outline, but first let's pray. God, thank you for bringing us here this morning. I thank you for the opportunity to use our minds to worship you in a unique way in a classroom setting on a Sunday morning. And God, thanks for your sovereignty in the way that we're actually gonna get to talk about ordinances and then practice an ordinance together in the main service today as well. God, be glorified by our time together. Uh, Lord, I just ask that you will help this time be a pleasing offering to you, that it'll challenge and edify each one of us as we seek to walk with you and know you more deeply. In your name, amen. So hopefully you grabbed a handout. If not, those are right outside. But our outline today looks like this. First, we're gonna look at, okay, why does understanding the ordinances we practice and understanding why we practice them the way that we do matter? Next, we'll look at, okay, what are the ordinances as we understand them at CVC today? Why do we use this word? And then we're gonna look a little bit at the difference between ordinance and sacrament as well. Third, our practice of the ordinances is shaped by both theological and practical considerations. We talked about this with liturgy last week too, and I think it's a good idea to keep wrestling with. We're gonna look at what church history can teach us about these ordinances, and just like last week, we're gonna look at the practices of the early church and some changes that happened during the Reformation. Not because those are the only two periods of church history, right? But just because in our limited time, both of those broad time periods allow us to see some important things that influence our practice today. So that's our outline. That kind of helps you know where we're going. And then we're gonna close by considering again our practices of the ordinances today at CBC and Baptistic Protestant churches like us based on everything that we've talked about. So my hope is that you guys, like last week, are gonna be able to take the lens of understanding that you have and maybe broaden it a little bit to think about why do we do what we do here? So let's dive in. Why does understanding the ordinances we practice and understanding why we practice them the way that we do matter? We actually did a little bit of work answering this question last week when we talked about liturgy. You might remember that last week we talked about how when it comes to understanding liturgy, both the word itself and that idea of the order of service that lies behind it, we come in with some preconceived notions. And we briefly called this background noise, right? Like who we are, what we bring to the table, what our experiences have been. And we also talked last week about how we do, all of us, have thoughts about what happens here at CDC in worship, right? Some of these are conscious and some are unconscious, some might be positive and some might not be. But all of those, too, are shaped by who we are, the experiences we've had, and our own perception of the world and the worship around us. And these big broad ideas are as true of ordinances, that word, as they are of liturgy. You may have thoughts and opinions about the word ordinance. Alternatively, you might not even know what it means. We will talk about that this week, so don't worry if that's you. You may be more comfortable with the word ordinance than the word sacrament, or vice versa. You may not know how these words relate or what the difference between them is. And like with last week, here as elsewhere, it's a good thing for us to know why we do what we do. It can be beneficial for us to look back into scripture and then look into the periods of church history and see what do we see in the past that informs us about how we practice today? What do we learn from God's word? What can we learn from the early church and what can we see in the Reformation? So we start and end with God's word, absolutely. And we're you we get to see that firsthand today, where as we're practicing communion together in the main service, we are reading scripture to show us why we're doing this. But as we saw last week, church history, the story of how God has continued to work in the world and his people, even after those times of scripture ended, can equip us to see our own worship more fully and make informed decisions together as the church as we move forward through time. Like thinking about, okay, people have been getting really sick. How do we want to wrap that into what we're doing and how we're worshiping? So when we understand these ideas well, we're able to worship more fully, which is in and of itself a high and worthy goal. But we're also able to teach others rightly, right? To answer questions well and to think critically and with conviction in a way that I believe honors God and safeguards the church. Because all of you in this room can be a part of celebrating the best of what we do here at CVC. And there may come a season or a time when you can help us as a church see something that we could be doing differently, or see where something should be explained better to everyone. You know, you might take knowledge from this class and think, hey, that hasn't been explained on a Sunday morning from the front, and maybe it should be. Or you might see where our practice that we do could be explained in a different or more meaningful way. Because at its core, this is our church and we are God's people, and we're called to worship Him together, holding fast together to the truth that God's given us in Scripture. Today, tomorrow, and every day until the day approaches, right? Until Jesus comes back. So I think sometimes in our context, this is kind of an aside, we probably not you guys in this room, but but Western Christians, we can kind of teach each other and be okay with like, I go to church and it happens to me, right? Like I sit there, I experience it, and I leave. But really, we are all called to be participants. This is our church. And we get to together both worship the Lord and think about how best to worship the Lord. And the church is healthiest when all of its members have that ownership, right? So that's part of why I get so excited about classes like these, because it helps us do that well. So, with that introduction, let's dive in. So, what are ordinances as we understand them at CVC today? So we have to answer this question before we move forward because not every church is gonna answer that in the same way. There's a great online resource called Got Questions. Um, it's Protestant, it's Rick Duncan uses it a lot. It's uh a website that has a bunch of different people who write for it that answers big theological questions in a concise way. So it's really helpful if you want to know, like, okay, why do we use this word, or what was this period of church history like? You'll get a couple paragraphs. And that resource defines ordinance as a God-ordained ceremony. Um, so that is, it's something God tells us to do, but not something that makes us right before Him. And that's an important distinction, right? Because we believe that God tells us to practice the ordinances, but they don't save us. And we'll get to that a little bit more. So why do we use this word, ordinance? In all honesty, one of the reasons we use this word, one of the reasons that Protestants use this word, that is non-Catholics, but is to differentiate ourselves from Roman Catholics who have a different set of beliefs about these things. Roman Catholics in particular use the word sacrament. They aren't the only denomination that uses that word, but but they're a well-known one that does. Their use of it is well known. And as many of you know, we talked about this last week with our backgrounds. As many of you know from your background, there are seven sacraments in the Roman Catholic Church. So those are baptism, confirmation, holy communion, confession, marriage, holy orders, and the anointing of the sick. So we're not gonna spend a ton of time on that, but it's good to know, okay, they've got seven things that they call sacraments. Many Protestant churches, not all, but many, including CVC, practice just two ordinances, baptism and the Lord's Supper or communion. And I wanna, I'm gonna use Lord's Supper and Communion interchangeably. I actually had a good conversation with my husband this morning of like, could we use the word Eucharist? Should we use the word Eucharist? And the word Eucharist means Thanksgiving. It comes from a word meaning that. I was like looking into this this morning, and um types of Protestant churches use the word Eucharist. The word itself is a great word, it means Thanksgiving, but it has so many ties to Roman Catholic theology that we don't typically use it. And a lot of Protestant churches won't use it because it can be a confusing word, especially when you have people in your congregation or context that come from a Catholic background, because we want to be clear that when we're talking about communion or the Lord's Supper at CVC, we're talking about a memorial view. We don't believe that that saves us. And we'll we'll speak to that a little bit more too. But I'll say Lord's Supper and Communion both uh this morning, interchangeably. So, in addition to having seven sacraments instead of just two ordinances, this is important. The Roman Catholic Church teaches of its sacraments that the church affirms that for believers, the sacraments of the new covenant are necessary for salvation. And that's from the Catechism of the Catholic Church, second edition, on page 292. So if you want to go see that, that's where that comes from. For Catholics, the sacraments are necessary for salvation. So, what's the difference between ordinance and sacrament? As we think about sacraments versus ordinances, it's important to remember, like we just said, that for Roman Catholics, there are seven sacraments that confer grace to those who practice them. That's the same thing as saying they're necessary for salvation. But for Protestants, there are usually two ordinances, and for most Protestant churches, including CVC, these ordinances do not convey salvation. So I said that a couple times because it's just so important as we think about this stuff. The ordinances that we practice, we do believe, are God ordained. They teach us something about Jesus, and Jesus actually told us to do them, but they do not make us right before God. They do not confer grace, they are not necessary for salvation. For CVC and other churches like us, these ordinances are done in remembrance of Jesus, but not as a way to do what only Jesus can accomplish. So we believe that salvation only comes when we invite Jesus to be our forgiver and leader, and he does all the work that is necessary for that to take place. From there, we are justified. So that's a church word that means we're made right before God by the finished work of Jesus. And then we are sanctified, which means that we become more and more like Jesus throughout our lives by the power of the Holy Spirit. And as we are being sanctified, we seek to obey the God who has saved us. And one of the ways we seek to obey him is that we practice these ordinances that he's given to us. Last week we talked about how liturgy is shaped by both theological and practical considerations, right? This is true this week too, as we think about these two ordinances, baptism and the Lord's Supper or communion. And this week, just like last week, that theological piece is the most important. So we have a lot more to cover. We're gonna think about a lot more things, but before we move on, does anybody have any questions about anything we've said so far? You don't have to. Great, so we'll keep moving. And if you do have a question, feel free to raise your hand up if something I say is confusing. So again, our practice of the ordinances is shaped by both theological and practical considerations, which are both important, but not equally so. So just like with last week, as we think about baptism in the Lord's Supper, our practice is shaped first by Scripture. In Matthew 28, 18 through 20, Jesus tells his disciples, All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I'm with you always to the end of the age. Right here we get this clear command from Jesus in Scripture that we, Christians, his followers, are to baptize new believers. So as we seek to be obedient to this by practicing the ordinance of baptism, we seek to be obedient to the explicit commands of Christ for his people. And this is true with communion too. In Matthew 26, 26 through 29, we see these verses. Now, as they were eating, Jesus took bread and after blessing it, broke it and gave it to the disciples, and said, Take, eat, this is my body. And he took a cup, and when he'd given thanks, he gave it to them, saying, Drink of it all of you, for this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins. I tell you, I will not drink again of this fruit of the vine, until that day when I drink it new with you in my father's kingdom. So this is a picture of Jesus at the last supper he had with his disciples, where he first put into practice this Lord's Supper. And it's Paul later, the Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 11, 23 through 26, who makes this experience and command of Jesus explicitly tied to ongoing church practice. So Paul writes, For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus, on the night when he was betrayed, took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, This is my body, which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me. In the same way, he also took the cup after supper, saying, This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this as often as you drink it in remembrance of me. For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes. So I think for us, sometimes we can get a little muddy on like, okay, where in scripture do we actually get this? There are a couple other places in the gospels, but then in 1 Corinthians, the apostle Paul gives us this command too, of like the churches the church should practice this together. So for both baptism and the Lord's Supper, when we do these things together as a church, we do them in obedience to Jesus' words and in obedience to the commands and expectations of Scripture for followers of Jesus. There's an expectation in Scripture that Christians do these things in order to remember what Christ has accomplished and help others do the same as we worship Him together. So we can see that all of this starts with the Bible. Baptism and the Lord's Supper did not grow out of early church practice, right? But out of obedience to God's word that he gave us. But we can learn a lot about baptism and communion from the early church. And again, from the way they changed and the ways they did not change during the Reformation. Because the church, big C, right, like all of God's people throughout all time and places, all of us who will worship Him together one day in heaven, the church has continued to practice the Lord's Supper and baptism throughout its history. When we look specifically at the early church, as we start to do that, one important thing to note here is that the early church understood its worship in ways that intertwined physical acts and spiritual significance. This is one of the things I got to think about a little bit in that paper that I wrote for my class last semester. And this understanding of the early church can be difficult for some Christians today to grasp, shaped as we are by 2,000 years of history between us and the earliest of churches. And what I mean by that is basically like when we think about church practice today, we can't do that without thinking about the 2,000 years that come before us, right? Like our decisions today are informed by everything that's happened. But one thing, and we mentioned this last week, the early church, for all of the challenges that they have, had, they were not waiting through 2,000 years of church history, right? They had the commands of Jesus, they had Jewish worship, they had Greek and Roman culture, and that's what they had to wrestle with, right? Like that was it. We actually have some advantages, right? We have the whole scripture all given to us, it's the canon is decided, boom. But we also have that 2,000 years to be like, okay, so that's gonna inform some of the decisions that we make. That can be a strength, but it can also be a point of confusion. And it can shape some of the things we do in ways we don't always think about, right? In those subconscious ways. So anyway, in the first centuries of the church, ordinances such as baptism and the Lord's Supper were seen as part and parcel with confessing Jesus as Lord initially, like with baptism, right? Baptism happens when you confess Jesus' Lord for the first time. But also continually in the case of the Lord's Supper, right? We don't just practice communion right when we become a Christian. We believe you only need to be baptized once. But then we take communion regularly, so that's an ongoing act of obedience. The physical act of baptism in particular flowed from initial confession as Jesus as Lord. And both confession and baptism were intertwined in the early church as obedience to the commands of Jesus Himself. For some early church fathers and writers, baptism was so important that it was a necessary aspect of salvation along with faith, which we would not believe. But if you were to read the early church fathers, some of them thought that. For some of them, it was inconceivable to come to faith in Christ and not be baptized, because without baptism, one's profession of faith was incomplete and one's obedience to Jesus was in question. If one's obedience was in question, then so was one's status before God. In a similar way, obedience to Christ in general was seen as part of what it meant to worship him. For the ancient church, there could be no trusting in Jesus without complete obedience and surrender to him in all aspects of life. So these strong ideas and teachings in the early church, especially surrounding the ordinances, grew up out of and found their roots in Jesus' teaching in the Gospels, which we looked at earlier. Jesus speaks explicitly about baptism when he tells his disciples what he wants them to do after he's gone. In the same way, in the early church, taking the Lord's Supper accompanied other acts of sanctification that were a necessary part of the good works a Christian did after baptism. So we looked at some of those passages too. And this is what I'm really trying to get at. There was no need in the minds of many early church fathers and leaders to delineate between confessing Jesus' Lord, initially or in an ongoing way, right? Because we all keep doing that, and practicing embodied obedience, either generally or specifically in these ordinances, because physical obedience would flow from heart change. And to think otherwise to them didn't make any sense. We're like, of course you're baptized once you become a Christian, because Jesus told you to. Like, duh. If not, why not? At certain times in certain places, early church leaders would say, if you don't do that, you're not saved because they communicate salvation. That's what we don't believe. But at other times, church leaders would say, okay, those acts aren't actually communicating salvation, right? No salvation here, only through Jesus. But the truly saved person would be unable to resist obedience to Jesus. So you see baptism and the Lord's Supper in the life of a faithful believer. In either belief system of the early church, the functional result was the same. Obedience with someone's body in baptism and the Lord's Supper would necessarily flow from confession of Jesus' Lord with one's heart and mind and mouth. So this same thing could be said about the way the early church thought about liturgy holistically. Because baptism and the Lord's Supper were seen as important acts of obedience to Jesus, these and other practices of worship were really important parts of church liturgy. So this felt natural and intuitive to early churches in the first centuries following the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, the fruit of a heart changed by Christ flowed into action in one's everyday life. Similarly, there was space made in the liturgy of the church itself for heart posture to be followed by action. So the ordinances were practiced together as a way for heart change to flow into action. So I think as we think about this idea and this posture of the early church, it can be easy to think, even if we don't want to consciously admit it, like we might not want to say this out loud because it sounds bad, but we might be thinking, these guys were taking this stuff way too seriously, right? Like there is freedom in Christ. If Christ alone saves, why does it matter so much what we do after he saves us? Why do practicing baptism in the Lord's Supper mean so much if it's ultimately Christ alone who grants salvation? Right? Like I was kind of taught to believe that in the Baptist church I grew up in. Like these things are important, but like we want to make sure that we we communicate they don't save, so we're gonna kind of downplay them. Like they're not that important. They're important, but not not that important. Um and that comes, I think, from a good impulse of wanting to make sure we know that the ordinances are not saving us. But I think we can kind of unintentionally, because of our place in church history and because of our context, we end up kind of having this muddled sense of why we even do them to begin with. So that doesn't always happen, but I think that's a risk in Protestantism today that flows from church history. But as we think about these things, I think it's helpful for us today to look at James chapter two, because some of what the early church believed about practicing the ordinances flowed from James' idea of faith without works being dead. And it was like a really clear application of that in the ordinances. So this is what James writes in chapter two, verses 14 through 26. And normally I wouldn't read a passage this long, but I think it's actually really helpful for us to hear it together today. So James in Scripture writes, What good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can that faith save him? If a brother or a sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, and one of you says to them, Go in peace, be warm and be filled, without giving them the things they need for the body, what good is that? So also faith by itself, if it doesn't have any works, is dead. But someone will say, You have faith and I have works. Show me your faith apart from your works, and I will show you my faith by my works. You believe that God is one. You do well, even the demons believe and shudder. Do you want to be shown, you foolish person, that faith apart from works is useless? Was not Abraham our father justified by works when he offered up his son Isaac on the altar? You see that faith was active along with his works, and faith was completed by his works, and the scripture was fulfilled that says, Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness, and he was called a friend of God. You see that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone. And in the same way was not also Rahab the prostitute justified by works when she received the messengers and sent them out by another way? For as the body apart from the spirit is dead, so also faith apart from works is dead. Now it's confusing because he uses the word justified here, and I just said you're only justified through Christ. That word can be used in Scripture to sometimes mean the proof of justification. So I won't use a ton of time on that, but it's saying like the proof of their justification was in the fact that their actions changed. So we we can't actually see someone's heart. I can't look at Claire's heart and be like, look, there it is, she's saved. It'd be great if we could do that, it would solve a lot of our problems. Um, but God has not given us that ability, right? So I look at Claire's life and I see the fruit of her relationship with Jesus, and I go, oh wow, I can just see in knowing Claire. Claire's like, why did you pick me to be your example? I'm like, I can just see in the fruit of knowing Claire a love for Jesus and a heart changed by him that flows out of her. And we can all think of people like that, right? Where I'm not looking at Claire and going, good things, she's doing what she should, because that's gonna save her. You know, like that's not what we think. But we see how God has changed her heart in the actions that flow out of it. So I think this passage in James shows something that the early church really leaned into, a lot of the early church, right? This is a generalization, but a lot of the early church. If someone claimed to be a follower of Jesus but did not walk in obedience to him, that lack of obedience revealed a lack of faith very clearly to them. It's not that the obedience was the saving factor for a lot of the early church, but obedience revealed something on the inside. This is what James is writing about. So practicing the ordinances which were commanded by Christ was a clear step in obedience for Christians that revealed where their hearts really were. A new believer was baptized, of course, Jesus said to do it. All believers would take communion, of course, it's a way that Jesus asked us to worship him. And then that kind of helps set the stage for what I said earlier. I think sometimes some Protestants today we can unintentionally downplay the practices of the ordinances, especially in some areas, because we've seen what we would call, from our perspective, a misuse on the other end of the spectrum, right, in the Roman Catholic Church and other churches like it. And so sometimes I think our practices can become unintentionally reactionary. We don't want people to think that the ordinances save them, which is a good impulse, right? We actually don't want people to think that, but then we won't emphasize them as much as we maybe should when we look at scripture. And I think we lose something when we do that. That's not my primary point. But my point here is that when we look at the early church, they don't have all of that in the back of their minds, right? They're not thinking about those practical considerations of Catholic influence, right? Because they're just the early church. They have the history they have and not the history that we have. So this is one of those moments where we see our practice is shaped by some practical things about our context, right? We we can't forget what is true. Some people here at CVC might walk in today and still think, oh good, we're doing communion, because I kind of think that saves me. Like that might happen. So we need to take that into consideration as we practice. We need to teach about the ordinances and what we believe. But we should still take them seriously because they're commands of Jesus. They help us remember together what he has accomplished. And that's a good important thing. So we'll we'll take a break. This is like a ton of information. Any questions about any of this? We'll do the we'll do the full room first. Yes, Rich.

SPEAKER_01 30:01

Do you think that because of the event for the key? Do you think that they have more?

SPEAKER_00 30:18

Yeah, I think there's probably so many threads you could pull on. I do think like the the cultural um, the fact that Christianity is so embedded in our culture in some sense, you know, like how many people do you know who are like, I should probably go to church at Christmas? You know, just like because it seems like a good thing to do. I think that that, like, you could follow so many rabbit trails of how that affects our practice. Whereas a lot of the years of the early church, if we looked at those first three, four hundred years, like there's a lot of persecution. So I think it does, and nothing about what the early church was doing was like culturally accepted until much later, until it, you know, became the empire's religion and they had new problems, you know. But so I do think there was this clear, like, if I'm becoming a Christian, I'm stepping out of what is normal. I'm stepping out of the pagan religion or of the Jewish religion I grew up in that everybody expects for me to have. I'm stepping out of prosperity in some ways, because you would be stepping outside of the community. And so then I think you would say, okay, what am I stepping into? Whatever it is, I'm gonna take it super seriously. And you came from a place and a time where, oof, like I you could you could say so many things about this, but I think for many reasons, including technology, we tend to bifurcate ourselves today. So we're like, here's my mind or my soul, and here's my body. And I don't think like in that time period, they did that in different ways. They had different struggles with that, but I think we can kind of be like, oh, well, I'll just believe some true things about Jesus, and that's all I need to do. That doesn't need to affect what I do with my body, because my body's in the physical world. These are just thoughts I have, and I just worship him with my emotions and thoughts, and then I can do whatever I want over here. And I think that is a challenge that we face in a unique way. I think technology has exacerbated it. I think the enlightenment contributed to it. But that's kind of what I mean when I'm thinking about context. Like there's stuff we can't even get away from. I can think about what it would be like to be someone in the early church, and I can learn from thinking about that, but there are some things I'm never gonna be able to totally grasp. Just like if the Apostle Paul was sitting right here and I was like, okay, Paul, so technology has really influenced the way, you know what I mean? He would be like, what are you talking about? You know, like it's hard to get in somebody's shoes. We can learn a lot from the past, but then it's also helpful to be like, man, there's some things we might not ever be able to really grasp as we think about the early church. Yes, Jan. I love that. And that's why we build all this on scripture, right? Like we can learn from history, and I think we should. Um, but we're building this on the foundation of God's word to us because God is not surprised by cultural change, right? God is not surprised by the twists and turns of church history. And I think it's responsible to learn from those twists and changes, but we do not believe in the Protestant church that tradition is up here with scripture. We say, here's scripture, here's what we're called to do faithfully, and we are gonna we are going to walk in the truth of God's word to the best of our ability. Um and then we're gonna learn from tradition and history too, but we're never gonna hold them up there with revelation that comes directly from God. Great questions. Any other questions as we wrestle with these things? To what because I think we have a tendency as fallen humans to just add stuff. And like we see the Lord graciously continually to tell us in our own lives and in the scope of the church too. Hey, Becca, your good works are not what save you. You know, being baptized is not what has saved you. You don't get grace from practicing communion or from any of the things you do for me. Grace comes from Christ alone. And man, we just like have such a hard time actually believing that. You can see it in history, and I can see it in my own heart. Um, so thank goodness for the God who never gives up on us. Yeah, you can dive into this. I mean, people do, right? People have like HP work and just like a couple hazards of crazy. Sorry, what was your question? That's a really good question. So for a while some of them were. Like, even if you read the book of Acts, for a while the Christians, some of them were still going to the synagogue, but then they were also practicing in homes. And over time, Christian practice developed. Some of those, and I'm not an expert on this, like somebody could give you a better answer. Some of those practices they stopped doing over time. There's probably so many reasons. Like more and more Gentiles were coming into the church. And so you've got some New Testament passages that are reminding Jewish Christians, hey, those things that you do are not normative for, like, you don't have to make all the Gentile Christians do all those things. You can, there's freedom to do them, but they don't have to. And you see this especially, Paul writes about this with circumcision, right? Of like, that's not necessary for salvation, and it's kind of confusing the Gentile Christians when you're putting all this Jewish practice on them. Um, so that's that's one piece of it. There are some Christians who still do some of those things. Yeah. Um, and I think that can be really beautiful. You kind of come into that same thing of like, it's not necessary. We don't want people to think it's necessary. Um, and so as we as we think about practice in different places, that's one of the considerations. There's there's probably, like with that other question, a lot more threads you could pull on of like um at one at one point with Emperor Constantine, like you start to see Christianity, you actually see this time period where Christianity kind of changed from being like the thing that was not allowed by the Empire to being the thing that was like very encouraged, strongly encouraged by the Empire, and you saw this huge influx of people going to church who like weren't concerned with heart change, but they were like, I think it's a politically good decision to come here. And then churches were wrestling with like, we have all of like our church size just doubled, and half the people here have no idea why they're here, and we want to preach the gospel to them. So, like, how can we just like really give them the essentials because they're here, not for the right reason, but God can still do work in their hearts. And so I think that time period shows a lot of change because it's like that's just crazy to think about. What if CBC doubled in size tomorrow with a bunch of people who didn't actually want to be here to know about Jesus? Like it'd just be like it changes a lot of the way that you think about church. So more threads, but those are a couple of them. So we gotta keep going, but I love these questions. So looking at the Reformation, this will be a little shorter. During the Reformation, this is where some of that uh the theology and the practice, I guess the theology was sharpened, we would say, right? And then the practice was sometimes changed. Both the development of a sacramental theology in the Catholic Church, because that was something that developed over time. And when I say sacramental theology, I'm talking about the Roman Catholic Church teaching that the sacraments can convey grace. So, and that and the Reformation, which came about as a response to that, and some other teachings of the Roman Catholic Church, they've those both contributed to Protestant de-emphasis on the ordinances. So some of that started and was strengthened in the Reformation, where from the beginning some of the reformers were saying, like the church, the official church has been teaching that these things save. And like Martin Luther wrote a lot about this. Only Jesus saves. So he especially was really sensitive to like what other things are people getting confused, and how can we like move those out of their confusion? Like, how can we move that away so that they're not confused about what conveys grace? The major players in the Reformation, we talked about Martin Luther and John Calvin, we even mentioned Ulrich Zwingli last week. They all agreed that practicing the ordinances did not convey saving grace. But they actually differed in the details of what they believed baptism and the Lord's Supper did or did not accomplish. So Martin Luther believed that it was at baptism that God begins to make you a new person. So he would not say, you have to be baptized because that's when God starts working. We would not believe that today, here in this church. John Calvin said, I don't believe the sacraments or ordinances give grace, but I do believe that in being baptized, a Christian is accepting and receiving in a significant manner the promise of God to save. So you can see how all of these things are like a little bit different. So we would say Martin Luther's placing a lot of emphasis, John Calvin might be kind of in the middle here, and then Ulrich Zwingli, he said the ordinances cannot be anything more than a public inauguration or initiation. So he was probably the most intense proponent of the memorial view, where he was saying, like, hey, this is done in remembrance, it's not doing anything. It's not, it's not accomplishing something spiritual in your heart because Jesus does that alone. So Zwingli actually said when he was talking about church liturgy, he was like, you should only practice communion a couple times a year because people are so prone to wanting to think that it's saving them. And like, we want to be so careful about that that you should like not do it very often so that people have to remember it's not saving them. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 40:56

So if I understand you correctly, in the way I think in the Reformation and Down change of everything, it was a process of getting that in scripture. The process of doing it right now because we have the technology between the Bible and history.

SPEAKER_00 41:12

Yeah, that's a good way to think about it. Sometimes as Protestants, we can think like, here's the Roman Catholic Church, here's the Reformation, and it just like it was super unified, and they all went in the same direction. But really, the beginning of the Reformation was the beginning of the questioning of the church, right? Like that was root that had never been done in like a systematic fundamental way. Um, but not all of the reformers agreed on what it should look like. Like they agreed on what they didn't want to see a lot of times, but they didn't always agree on what should happen. And we can still see that in churches today, like a Lutheran church versus a Baptistic church versus a Methodist church. Like this kept on happening. And like we talked about last week, those early reformers actually all wanted their version of church to become the new state religion, because religious liberty wasn't like really a thing, which is also so hard for us to imagine that because we're like, what do you mean the state should have control of what everyone believes? So anyway, but yes, it became so this all happened not only because the reformers and those after them wanted to make sure that Christians knew that the physical acts of worship didn't save them, but this also happened because steadily more time in the liturgy of the church was given to the sermon. So that's like a fascinating thing to think about too. One of the things in the Reformation was that the big reformers, like the names you know about, they wanted to make sure that people in church knew what was happening in church. We talked about this a little bit in liturgy last week. They wanted to make sure that the gospel, like the gospel needed to be preached in the language the people knew. And they felt like, you know, we need to spend time correcting wrong belief and also helping people understand what their Bibles are saying, especially in a context where less people were literate than they are today, right? Like we tend to, even the way we talk about Bible study, right? We're like Bible study is like you need to be reading your Bible on your own. And man, we should be, right? That's a really good thing. But for most of human history, like most people have not been able to do that because it's it's a relatively recent phenomenon that that most of us can read, and not even everybody in this country today can read. You know, and people can know Jesus without reading. Uh so I think these are like some important cultural things to keep in mind. And this was the environment the reformers were thinking about. We need to read scripture for people so that they hear it. Also, you know, everybody didn't have books in their home either. So just crazy. We need to read scripture in the language the people know. We need to explain it so that they know what's going on. And then we need to let them know what they need to do in light of what scripture says and what God has given us in His Word. And all of that is something we still do in sermons today. And all of that is important work. Uh, but the our context is really different. So, because more time was given to the sermon, other things in the service were being scaled back. The sake of time. So that's one of those practical realities that was influencing the way that church practice looked. Yes, Jan. That is what the reformers wanted it to be, and and sometimes it was. If that's the case, at the core, the reformers said there is so much in the way of people meeting Jesus. And Martin Luther had a conversion experience while he was a professor of theology, basically, where he was like, I finally understand Romans. Like I've never felt like I was good enough for God, and I'm not, but Jesus makes me. Like, whoa. So then Martin Luther's like, why are we doing all this other stuff? Why is the church telling people they need to pay for salvation? That is like, not only is that not right, it's also keeping people from knowing Jesus in a saving way. So we have got to strip that away and we've got to get back to the gospel. And most of the reformers would say that. Then they just disagreed on how we do it, right? Like, do we take this out? Do we take that out? Like all of them were like, we do not like indulgences. People should not be told that they need to pay to get rid of their sins. But then there was differing like belief on some of the details, and you would still encounter that in church today. But ultimately, like the best impulse of the reformers was all this stuff is keeping people from knowing Jesus in a saving way. They didn't have the three circles, right? They weren't using that language. But some of what we do is is tied to that same impulse of like, man, if if like I can communicate one thing when I share the gospel, it's that Christ alone saves. That Jesus needs to be your forgiver and leader. And it's crazy to think about how all of church history people have wrestled with how to do that. Well, yes, what's your question, Amanda?

SPEAKER_04 46:54

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 47:10

Yeah. Well, and that's a great example. Thank you for sharing because you were still saved before you were baptized, right? Um, but I think we can sometimes, even today, even in Protestant churches, like put a lot of stuff on that. Like, you need to be baptized when you're ready. Well, really, you're ready when Jesus is your forgiver and leader. Boom, that's all that needs to happen. Jesus has justified you, go get baptized. We can celebrate this. But we we like tend to, without thinking about it, just like put more stuff on ourselves of like, well, I came to know Christ, but I'm really struggling with some big sins, and I want to be able to resolve those before I get baptized. That comes from a good impulse, but it's not necessary. Jesus has justified you, go get baptized. See, and I uh the Lord's Supper, like there is a clear call in scripture to prepare our hearts, but we can even take that too far and be like, I don't know, like I just, I just know that I'm struggling with some different sins. Like, if if you are um walking in repentance, have people praying with you about your sin, you can take communion, you know, like we can tend to put extra things on ourselves because the Holy Spirit is sanctifying us and we're invited into this thing that Jesus has made possible for us, and it helps us to remember what he's done and celebrate it together. So, yeah, that I'm sorry. I get I do get excited about it because it's important. And and some of these things, basically the church will never be done trying to come back to scripture, right? Like and trying to come back because we have so many tendencies corporately and individually to add stuff onto the gospel. It's just the way that we are. Um, and it's the good news is that then we can almost go in the other direction and be like, well, I have to get to right belief about all of these tangential things for Jesus to save me. And it's like, no, that's not true either, right? Jesus already saved you. It's good to pursue right knowledge about this stuff, but that's not what saves us either. Which is why some people can kind of downplay theology, because they're like, oh, even studying theology can become that stumbling block, right? And it can. We should still study theology and be reminding ourselves, it's great we went to Sunday sessions, awesome, we know more stuff, we're equipped, but that doesn't save us. Only Jesus did that. I love that. This is a fun conversation. So, thinking about CVC, and then I think, yeah, we're coming to the end of our time. A couple things I wanted to talk about. I've got my books up here again, if you want to look at them. I took some out, I added one. Um, I kept liturgies of the Western Church, ancient Christian worship, this big book by baptism in the first five centuries, where Everett Ferguson did all his own translations, and then um Calvin's Institutes. So if you want to look at any of those, you can. Um so next week we're gonna think a little bit about some of these cultural things we've talked about. We're gonna look specifically at the idea of, I mentioned it earlier, like how does our culture specifically struggle to think about the way that our bodies participate in worship? Like, how do we think of ourselves as a whole person? Body and mind, soul and spirit. Like, how do we hold that in a society today that is always, I would say, bifurcating, right? Like we you can be this person online that nobody knows. Like, I think the internet alone has confused us, where we're like, my body's not that important, right? Like, Facebook matters. Or I can have this like online persona that's disconnected from what I actually look like. Not that like you guys are doing that, but these things bleed into society and they cause us to think about our bodies in in different ways, maybe, than God has called us to, and then that can affect the way we think about worshiping and what we do in worship. So we're gonna, that's kind of nebulous. A lot of it's gonna come from you too. Like, we're gonna start off with these big ideas and then we're gonna wrestle with these things together. How does our culture equip us to share the gospel today? Like, right, where are people's hearts open to hearing about Jesus? And then where does our culture specifically like close people off to the gospel? We could talk about self-reliance. We like there's so many. So we're gonna do some of that work of like leaning into okay, we've looked at liturgy, we've looked at ordinance, now how are we wrestling with these things today as a society? One of the things that helps us do is share the gospel, right? So in my paper for Emmaus, I talked about embodiment and I talked about some of the things flowing out of the transgender movement and how like we as a society are confused about are are our bodies good? Are they good? Are they bad? Are they trapping us? Are they like are we really just minds trapped inside bodies? What does God have to say? And and how does the truth of scripture uniquely speak to the brokenness of our culture? So we'll talk about some of those things. And then how does that play into the way that we worship in the church? Um, yeah, it's gonna be a lot of fun. So, here at CBC, some cool things to know. We're talking as a staff about how to celebrate baptism more often together, uh, how to teach on baptism more clearly, and how to create pathways so that right when people come to invite Jesus to be their forgiver and leader, the clear next step is to be baptized, right? Um, we do think about logistics when we think about the Lord's Supper. Honestly, I was just talking about it, right? With even flu season, of being like, hey, we this is really important for us to do. How do we do it in a way that is practically protective in flu season, right? There's so many things, like that's not a theological consideration, but it's a legitimate practical one. Uh, and churches have always had to do that, right? Like church, we talked about that last week. Churches are always thinking about how do we practice our worship in theologically right and robust ways within the confines of today, right? Like it wouldn't really make sense for us to bake a bunch of loaves of bread with uh we had 1,100 people total in services last week. Like that, like the logistics of that, you're like, I don't know. But a thousand years ago, they wouldn't have had cups of grape juice wrapped with like bread, right? Like it's just those things wouldn't have happened. So the important thing is that we practice baptism in the Lord's Supper with intentionality, that we teach about it clearly and rightly and regularly, and that we're ultimately obedient to the Lord and to his word. So that's the foundation. And then finally, while CBC has practiced these two ordinances, I would say rightly and faithfully throughout its existence, this conversation is never over, right? COVID was like a time period where it was like, whoa, how do we do this? How do we do this well in the midst of something unprecedented? The church had never walked through that in quite that way. In new seasons, we may have new opportunities to practice in new or renewed ways. We may have new challenges, and we will hopefully always have new people in our church who need to be taught about these things, who need to be taught about the ordinances, about liturgy, and need to be taught how to participate in them in the way that is theologically right as we believe it and practically faithful. So that alone is a reason to keep on teaching about these things. Our hearts constantly need reminders of what is true, and we pray that new people will be in that room all the time, thinking, what are we doing today? You know, like we want to be able to have to be teaching the people in the room, and we pray and hope that people who just met Jesus or about to meet him are in our services. So that's another reason that we keep coming back to these things. We don't want to assume that people walking into CVC all have right knowledge all the time, right? We're constantly all growing and we hope we're always inviting people to new life in Christ. Any last questions? We have like maybe five minutes. Yes, Pat?

unknown 54:42

I might be aware of that.

SPEAKER_00 54:45

Like in the New Testament, they refer to breaking bread.

unknown 54:52

Or are they talking about remembering the Lord's supper?

SPEAKER_00 54:56

That is such a good question. Okay, ancient Christian worship kind of goes into that. One of the things he says is that Jesus' last supper implies that there were lots of suppers before that, right? So, in a sense, it's both. Um, like the early church, both because of the commands of Jesus, because of practice that his disciples had with him, because of Greek and Roman culture and the symposiums they had, which were basically like fancy talking dinners, and Jewish synagogue practice, all of those things flowed into the way that communion was practiced in the early church. And probably at the beginning, it was in the context of a meal, of a gathering of believers who a lot of them like only ate bread most of the time. So that's like a fascinating consideration. Like there was a lot of poverty, there was not a lot of food availability. So one of the things that the church did was they gathered together like Jesus told them to do. They baptized new believers. There was teaching. I talked about this last week. Like, even from the beginning, we see in the New Testament epistles and Acts, we see the church teaching, we see elders teaching, we see baptisms, we see the Lord's Supper, and we see like we see some singing, we see fellowship, they came together. But at the beginning, it probably was tied with a full meal. And that changed over time because initially, like because of some practical considerations, if we're the church, the people in this room, we could have a whole meal, and we could have a time in that meal where we're practicing the Lord's Supper. But if your church is 200 people, you already won't fit at the table. Or 50 people. Like, so there was this practical tension of like, oh my goodness, like I had 10 people meeting in my home, and we could do this in the context of a meal with the wine and bread that we were having. Okay, but now we have 50 people. We can't do that anymore. Like, we can't all sit at the same table, so what do we do? Okay, now we have a hundred people. So we're continuing to flesh out how are we obedient to what Jesus has asked us to do in light of the growth that we might not have even expected in the church. So, how do we remain faithful to scripture in the light of practical considerations? Yes.

SPEAKER_04 57:04

But that the intent is to love Christians that always meet in small groups at the moment.

SPEAKER_00 57:10

Yeah, I think we we still try to do that because there's benefit in it. We say at CDC, like you shouldn't, okay, hmm. It is a really good and wonderful thing to come on Sunday morning and worship together. But if you never are more deeply connected, you're missing out. You know, like we there is an aspect of walking through life with other believers that's really important. Some of the like the um, I would say like the early church flowing into medieval church, like they would actually have a church service where they practice communion, and then they would have like a dinner that night for people to come together and have fellowship. So it's like those things were separated, but still both happening. And then in some churches, it seems like over time the fellowship dinner, the churches were getting too big, so then it was just for people who needed food assistance. Like the church, it's so crazy when we think about like the things we're wrestling with, and then we think like, okay, even 2,000 years ago it was different stuff, but still, you know, somebody was coming into the office on Monday going, I don't know if we can keep doing the fellowship dinner. You know, like 60 people came to my house and there's not that much room. Like, and it's like funny because those are the things we still have to think about. Like, you know, we we did a night of prayer and and for the sick, and so many people came and it was amazing. And at 10:30, we had to be like, okay, we have to go home. Like, that happened in November. Like, we have to go home. We can't be here till midnight. Like, what a good practical thing to have to wrestle with that we didn't prepare for. So I don't know if that helps answer that question. Any one more question, maybe. Great. Thank you guys for being here and wrestling with these things. I'm having so much fun. I hope you are too. And if you think about things and you're like, hey, Becca said something that I actually don't understand, or even that I don't think I agree with, come chat with me. I'd love to wrestle through those things with you.