1 Corinthians 14:26-40
Back in my childhood in the 1980s, I grew up in what are the remnants of the Jesus movement. My parents became Christians in the 60s and in the 70s and early 80s. All that Jesus movement was still taking place. In the church I largely grew up in during the decade of the 1980s, some of the, we’ll call it the best of the 1960s and the worst of the 1980s was fully on display there. My brother and my sister and I look back on it and great wonder. It is hard to explain what life was like in that church.
But here’s one little vignette. During church service, There was a time for testimonies. And just the thought of it makes the hair on my neck stand up. And these weren’t like planned testimonies. This was where anyone in the church could stand up and be called upon and give a testimony.
They were very interesting, let me just tell you. There is no telling, when you give a person a microphone, what they will say. And I can remember it vividly. Here was the rule of thumb. If you’re gonna say something and give testimony to the Lord, it better be brief, biblical, and beneficial. And I think I could say for the most part, everyone struck out. They were not brief, they were not biblical, and they were not beneficial. But nevertheless, that was a practice of the church that I grew up in for a period of time. I think of how my dad handled that. There were times where he was standing up there and his eyes were glazing over and people just kept going on and on and on and there was nothing you could do to rinse the microphone from people or to get them to hush.
But not too many years ago, watching Pride and Prejudice, many of you have seen the various versions, read the story of Pride and Prejudice and Mr., what’s his name, starts with a B, Mr. Bennett. Mr. Bennett can’t get one of his daughters, Mary, to quit singing. She’s singing with a shrill voice and her songs just go on and on. And Mr. Bennett, as you know, so eloquent, says, that will do extremely well, child.
You have delighted us long enough. let the other girls have a turn to exhibit. You remember that period of time, the girls would play the harpsichord or the piano and sing and read verses and they would show off their education. So perhaps a suitor would take over. Well, after the little stretch of, what do you call it, testimonies in church, we went through the small group era where Cut out the evening service. Let’s not let the trained preacher preach. Let’s all get in a circle and share with each other our ignorance. That was another delight.
A lot like the church at Corinth. The church at Corinth is going through a really tough time where people are taking over the service. People are taking over the church and they are saying things that are not brief or biblical or beneficial. Or as Paul says in our passage, they are not building up the church. They are not making for peace. They are causing confusion and people are not learning, nor are they encouraged. There is chaos. People are speaking up in the church. They’re out of turn and in excess.
And so how does Paul bring the church at Corinth back into order? How does he, how does he take good things that are going on? He never says any of these things are bad, but how does he stop the excess and stop the chaos? How does he take what is indecent or out of order or confusing or discouraging? And how does he make it a place of peace?
You know how it can be. Sometimes you’re in a church and there are stretches of time where things just, I don’t know, they wear on you. You know, it’s hard for a pastor to reign things in sometimes. It’s hard for them to be like Mr. Bennett and say, you have delighted us long enough Right. That is really difficult. Paul is across the water at Ephesus, where he’s having about a three year ministry with the Ephesian church. And the problems at Corinth keep persisting.
He ends up writing them four letters. There’s the first letter we don’t have where he writes about a serious run of immorality in the church. And then we have first Corinthians, which would be his second letter. And you know what’s in it because you’ve been good boys and girls and paying attention. And then there’s a third letter where it’s referred to as the tearful letter. We don’t have that one, but he sent it to them. And then there’s what we have in our Bible, second Corinthians. So in first Corinthians, we’re in a second letter. When we get the second Corinthians, one day we’ll be in his fourth letter. But he’s over at Ephesus and some of the people from the church come across the water and they tell Paul, help. They tell Paul, this is the mess we’re having. And so he writes letters, he promises to visit. He says, I wanna come in love, I wanna come in peace, but I’m probably gonna come with a stick. And I’m gonna have to correct what is out of order there.
And so in the Corinthian church, you have immorality, you have people choosing their favorite apostles, you have the Lord’s Supper problem, you have the chaos in worship issue. And so today, a little continuation of last week, he’s going to talk about tongues and he’s going to talk about prophecies. We want to think for a few moments today in light of this passage of what in the church is decent, what in the church is in order, what in the church will build up, what in the church will help one another learn and what in the church will help encourage the saints. What will display in the church, the life of the church, that there is a God of peace and not a God of confusion. So we’ll think about the life of the church at Corinth, but also the life of the modern church.
Now notice in our passage that he’s addressing brothers. That’s the men and women both. Paul frequently addresses brothers. as the whole church, brothers in the faith. Remember, we’re all adopted into God’s family through Jesus and we are called sons of God. So it’s not, you know, like some gender little, you know, snub or whatever. If you’re a girl, you’re a son of God. If you’re a girl, you’re one of the brothers in the church. So he addresses the church brothers.
When you come together, you need to think about the parts of the service, the point of the service. uh, the purpose of the service, the parameters of the service. And then we’re going to talk for just a minute about being Presbyterian. So I’ve got all these, uh, but we’ll, we’ll make our way through these. Uh, first of all, the parts of the service, uh, notice how in verse 26, Paul says, when you come together, each has a him, uh, there’s a lesson, there’s revelation, there’s tongues, there’s interpretations.
He’s listing the parts of the service in the early church. Now, I don’t want to go into the whole rigmarole I went through last week of, you know, our view were cessationist. We don’t believe that prophecies and tongues still exist. We think those were for apostolic eras.
But after the apostolic era, the early church spent quite a long time coming up with what ought to be in worship. and what it ought to look like. And so if you study church history, you look at the liturgies of the church throughout church history, you will find a very consistent pattern of churches reading the word, praying the word, preaching the word, singing the word, and also touching and tasting the word in the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s supper. So you have a word centered, word saturated service, that is very orderly.
It’s a divine dialogue. God speaks, we respond. God speaks, we respond. It’s mediated through the life of the minister. Next Sunday night, when the Heidelberg Catechism takes us through the second commandment, we will hear the commandment, you shall not have for yourselves any graven images. And historically, the church has taken the position that God himself, the maker of all things, the God who is to be worshiped, because he can and he does so in scripture, he commands all mankind to worship him. And then he tells them what is appropriate.
You’ll remember some of the stories in the Old Testament where when there was inappropriate worship, God not only rejected it, but there were severe consequences. It began with Cain and Abel. Abel’s sacrifice, because he followed God’s commandments, was received, but Cain’s was not regarded, and it brought jealousy, it brought strife, and it brought murder. Then there’s Nadab and Abihu, who offered strange fire before the Lord, and God took their lives because of that. And so you find in the scripture, God is deeply concerned with how he is worshiped. And so when we come to the parts of the service, uh, we want to be careful to read the word, preach the word, pray the word, sing the word, uh, and touch and taste the word. Now we have a little saying and kind of my pastor circles, uh, where we don’t do Hallmark church.
You know what that is? It’s the 4th of July. It’s mother’s day. It’s father’s day. It’s scout Sunday. It’s all the rest. If you’re not careful, you will push God out of church. Right? And go to other nations. Do you think the Chinese want to celebrate in the Christian church there, the government they’re under? Probably not. But you think about the whole Hallmark holidays. We have cluttered up church. Now, I’m all for Boy Scouts, all for Mother’s Day, all for Father’s Day, all for the rest of those things. But when we come to church, we are a peculiar people.
And in our service, there are parts. that have priority, that have precedent in the scriptures. And so when we come to church, our orders of service ought to match the scripture with balance and with an alternation of God speaking and the people responding start to finish.
And we love as Presbyterians, the last little phrase of our passage, all things should be done decently. And in order, you know, we are the frozen chosen. We are the stiff ones. Uh, that, that is sort of our way, but there’s a method to our madness. We start with God who greets us. Then he calls us to worship. We adore him. We confess our sins. We affirm our faith. We respond in praise. We confess our sins. He hears and he assures us of our pardon. We respond in a song. of praise for salvation. We hear the word read. We pray to God for help. We hear the word preached on occasion.
We have the sacraments and then we respond to God with song and then we leave with the benediction. And so from start to finish, our service is ordered to edify. Our service is ordered so that all may learn. Our service is ordered so that God is displayed as a God of peace and not a God of chaos. And so those are the parts of the service.
What about the purpose? Man’s chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever. So when we come to church, we want to worship God for who he is, We want to glorify God for what he’s done. We want to enjoy his presence. And remember, that’s what we will be doing forever in heaven. So there’s the saying, if you don’t like church, guess what? You won’t like heaven. We live in a world that loves to glorify itself. We live in a world that loves to say, look at me.
And there’s been a shift, hasn’t there, in the purpose of worship, not from God, but from men. If you go to various places, you will find the church of what’s happening now, and the content of the worship is not God-centered, it’s me-centered. One of my family members, a grammarian, says the church in America is too full of reflexive pronouns, I, me, my. That’s not God-centered, that’s me-centered.
And so when Paul looks in on the church at Corinth with a letter and then later a visit, he wants to bring order. He wants to bring peace. Uh, he wants to, to bring, uh, the place to a outpost of heaven where the order of God is on display. So there we got the parts of the service. Uh, we got the purpose of the service. What about the parameters now in Corinth where we’re in the early church, where they have tongues and prophecy, you know, we, believe our confession of faith teaches, we believe the scripture teaches that tongues and prophecy have ceased.
Tongues would be ecstatic prayers in a foreign language that only God would understand unless there was an interpretation. And remember last week, Paul says, tongues are fine, but it doesn’t edify people. I’d rather you prophesy. Prophecy would be what people today call application here. you know, maybe talking about the sermon after lunch and, you know, some of you say it’s horrible or it was boring or I fell asleep. Others of you might say, you know, the preacher said this and here’s, here’s what the Holy spirit was pricking me or prodding me to do. We call that the application. And so prophecy probably in Paul’s, uh, language here is they chit chatted in the house church at Corinth about what did the scriptures mean for our everyday living.
And so Paul says, if, You come together and there’s a hymn, a lesson, a revelation, a tongue, an interpretation. It can’t be chaotic. If there’s tongues, let there only be two or three. If there’s prophecies, take turns. Now you can picture the church at Corinth. It’s probably meeting in a house and there’s somewhere between 30 and 60 people. And what would it be like if everybody talked at once? What would it be like if there were so many languages, nothing was understood. It was a service of chaos and it was a service of gibberish that would be difficult.
And so Paul is not saying tongues are forbidden in this case. In fact, at the end of our passage, he says, I don’t forbid it. You should, you should practice it. But what he’s saying here is the church service with its parts can get very chaotic. So we need to take our turns.
And with tongues, he says, if there’s not going to be anyone to interpret, let the tongue speakers keep silent. What they have to say can be said to God at a private time and it won’t edify the saints. But when it comes to prophets or those that will speak the application of God’s word, let them take their turns.
Maybe you’ve been to a Bible study before. And there’s always the person that has to put their oar in the water and say something, right? Y’all know, it’s kind of painful. Their hand is going to be up before the teacher asks for responses, right? And they’ve always got to say something. And then what does the second person usually do?
They got to outdo them. Right. That’s cynical me. Right. But they got to outdo them. And then it can get on and on. And the preacher, the teachers just sitting there like a, you know, a hang dog. How do I stop the madness? You know, he needs to take a little lesson from Mr. Bennett. Right. That will do quite well. But it’s difficult. But what is Paul saying to bring order? There’s got to be parameters with the tongues. There’s got to be parameters with the prophets. Now, I know the emotional noise that’s going on in your head right now. Is he going to say something about the women thing? We’re just going to move on. OK, here’s here’s how I’m going to explain this. All right.
We live in a world that is what we call egalitarian. So egalitarian would be equality. Whatever a man can do, a woman can do. And what has happened is creation gender distinctions that God set apart in creation have been erased, eroded, and said they don’t matter. Now you see where this has gotten us, the madness of men and women’s sports and all the rest. But I wanna take it back to the big picture.
When God made the world and everything in it, In the midst of this creation, he planted a garden and he put Adam in the midst of that garden. And Adam’s task was to work the garden, make it productive. His task was to keep the garden that is protected. And his job was to spread the glory of God, the knowledge of God, the garden of God, the beauty of God across the face of the earth so that the whole earth, as Isaiah says, would be full of the glory and the knowledge of God. Well, Adam is bumping along doing his work of taxonomy, naming the animals.
And God says it is not good. for man to live alone. He needs a helper. And so he put Adam into a deep sleep. He took from Adam a rib and he made Eve. And when Adam woke up from that deep sleep, he saw Eve and said at last, bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh, she shall be called woman. And God said to them, be fruitful, multiply and fill the earth. And so you’ve got creation mandates in Genesis.
It’s male, it’s female. It’s remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy. It’s work and make things productive. It’s keep and protect. It’s to have dominion over the earth. It’s to have families, to have children and for the glory of God through generations to go across the face of the earth.
Well, Satan is going to have none of that. He’s already fallen in heaven because he rebelled against God. And so what does he come to earth to do? He comes to deceive man and he comes to destroy what God has set up on earth to display his glory. And so chapter three of Genesis begins with now the serpent. was more crafty than any other beast of the earth.
Now, let me pause here for a minute and say, why is he saying all of this? I wanna remind you that Paul, first and foremost, was an Old Testament scholar. Before his Damascus Road experience, he knew the Old Testament, the stories, the laws, the prophecies, he knew them backwards, forwards, inside and out. And so in his mind, When the New Testament is being written, when the churches are being built or corrected, he has all the structures in his mind and heart of the covenant, all the structures in his mind and heart of the Old Testament realities of world and life view. And so when we come to the church and he says, what is the dastardly passage?
Verse 34, the women should keep silent in the churches. First of all, he’s relating it to prophecies. And just in general, prophecy would fall under what we call authoritative ministry of the word. So we’re in a conservative Presbyterian denomination. We believe that there should be ministers and elders and beacons. Our confession of faith, our former government holds that the ministers, elders, and deacons, based on the writings of Paul to Timothy and other places, we believe those offices should be held by men because of what Paul teaches of a creation order.
Adam was the leader. Who did God hold responsible for eating the forbidden fruit? Did he say, Eve, you know, you took it, you deceived your husband, you’re in hot water, lady. No, he held Adam responsible And who does Jesus, the Redeemer, come as? He comes as the new Adam, the better Adam, the second Adam. So what Adam failed to do in the garden, Jesus comes and fulfills in the wilderness. And the disobedient Adam who plunged us all into sin and misery is outmatched by the new Adam who plunges us into righteousness. because of the cleansing fountain of his own blood. And so one of the things Paul is doing is he’s putting the church in order and he’s going back to the, the pecking order of the garden of Adam was made first and Eve, uh, Adam was the head of his wife, just as Christ is the head of the church. And so we, we, we have this belief it’s way far gone in many other churches and denominations. Uh, but, but the, the, the men are the leaders. of the church, especially when it relates to authoritative matters.
I’ll just give you a couple of practical examples. We have a church in our Presbytery where they’re trying to get a new pastor and their church service has had a lot of the members of the congregation doing all sorts of things that really the minister should be doing. Why have a minister if he’s not gonna do his job? Well, churches over the years have said, let’s let the laity do the work of the service.
And so we’ve had to say, hey, look, you’re gonna get a new minister And it’s 100% likely, that’s a good weather forecast, that the new minister you get is not going to go along with this because it’s not what our book of order says. It’s not what our doctrine says. It’s not what our stated worship is. So we’ve had to, sort of like Paul, fix that. And we’ve had all kinds of people say, well, What in the world can people do in church if they can’t read the scriptures? And like, well, they can sing hymns. They can, you know, take, you know, you go through the list. There’s, there’s the congregation that gets to do lots of stuff. But it’s a, it’s a highly misunderstood thing.
Now, some of you have come from the mainline denomination. My family left one in the 1980s. The slippery slope is when you put aside scripture and say, well, gender stuff doesn’t matter. This is the 21st century, right? But look at where it’s got us. The denomination of my youth, not only put aside the scripture, they inched into women’s ordination, then homosexual ordination. And now, you know what’s up for discussion in the coming years? polyamory, you can look that up if you don’t know what it is. But that’s what happens when you walk away from the scripture. So Paul is trying to make a correction. Okay, so this is not the main part of the passage. What’s the main part?
We want the service to edify, we want the service to teach people something, we want the service to help people learn and grow. So related to tongues, only if there’s an interpretation, related to prophecy, let a couple do it. Because of headship and creation order, the women are not allowed to speak. They should ask their husbands at home if they desire to learn.
There’s a couple places, by the way, in Timothy and other where Paul affirms these sorts of things. And you say, well, this is strange. This just pops up for the first time. No, remember in 1 Corinthians 11, Is it 1 Corinthians 11 or wherever where some of the men are not covering their heads or are covering their heads, some of the women are and aren’t, that was a creation order appeal. Okay, that’s enough of that. That’s a whole bunch of explanation for something that’s not the main part of the passage.
Okay, so let’s think about us as Presbyterians today. There’s parts of the service. There’s purposes of the service. There’s parameters to the service. Presbyterians, we are the product of the Reformation. We are the product of the scriptures. We are a product of back to the Bible.
Remember when the Protestant Reformation was taking place, what were they attempting to do? They wanted to not abolish the Roman Catholic Church, but they wanted to reform it. They wanted it to go back to the Bible, back to the fountain, ad fontes. They wanted to go back to what was good, right, and true. In a thousand years of dark ages, A thousand years of sort of imperial or magisterial or top down papal control had gotten the church in a big old bind. And so the Protestants wanted to reform the worship. They wanted it to be biblical. They wanted to remove ceremonies and rites that were not commanded by God.
I think what happened is they began to realize the Roman Catholic Church can’t be reformed or it won’t be reformed. And so we have the Protestant Church. We are part of the Protestant Reformation. And so basically we’ve scrapped Roman Catholic worship and we have started over.
And so if you read Reformation history, Reformation theology, the question will be asked, what does God want in his worship service? What are the parts, what are its purposes? what are its parameters, and in light of apostolic change, you know, the gift of tongues, prophecy, all the rest. And so our order of worship, if you follow it, is God-centered, it’s biblical, and it’s a divine dialogue between God and his people. There are variations, other Presbyterians may do things a little differently than we do, but you should be able to go, in general, to another church of like mind and find the same thing. We’re gonna read the Bible, pray the Bible, sing the Bible, preach the Bible, touch and taste the Bible.
Why we do what we do The way we do it matters. We believe that God has commanded it, and we would be falling short of his commands if we didn’t do it. But how do we know what we do? I mean, why are we more formal? Why do we sing hymns not off a screen? All those sorts of things. Why we do what we do the way we do it. The things God wants done, we believe are commanded. How they get done is up to wisdom and prudence.
If you go to sub-Sahara Africa, You are not going to worship in a building with air conditioning. You’re probably going to worship in a tent that has animals swinging by to visit the church service. There won’t be air conditioning. There won’t be hymn books. And so the circumstances of worship across the ages and in various parts of the world may be different.
And so we wanna think through for just a moment, what does all this mean for us today? And I wanna remind you of the highlights of this passage. Paul says, let all things be done for building up so that all may learn and be encouraged. And we want to point out in how we do, what we do, why we do it, the way we do it, that God is not a God of confusion. He’s a God of peace. All things should be done decently in order so that God is glorified and people are edified.
Let’s pray that it may be so. Lord, we stop to reflect on worship. It’s such a privilege to be in your presence. We know it’s by the blood. We know it’s because of Jesus. We know it’s because you’ve saved us and redeemed us to worship. Let our hearts Be melted around the truth so that we worship you the way you prescribe the way you command But do let worship encourage us. Let it teach us. Let it build us up and let it encourage us So that when we are filled full we can go in the world and tell others of your goodness. That’s ours now Through Jesus Christ this we pray in his name. Amen. I