This morning's reading is taken from the Psalms,
Psalm 96.
Sing to the Lord a new song.
Sing to the Lord all the earth.
Sing to the Lord, praise his name.
Proclaim his salvation day after day.
Declare his glory among the nations.
His marvelous deeds among all the peoples.
For great is the Lord and most worthy
of praise.
He is to be feared above all gods.
For all the gods of the nations are
idols.
But the Lord made the heavens.
Splendor and majesty are before him.
Strength and glory are in his sanctuary.
Ascribe to the Lord, O families of nations.
Ascribe to the Lord glory and strength.
Ascribe to the Lord the glory due to
his name.
Bring an offering and come into his courts.
Worship the Lord in the splendor of his
holiness.
Tremble before him all the earth.
Say among the nations, the Lord reigns.
The world is firmly established.
It cannot be moved.
He will judge the peoples with equity.
Let the heavens rejoice.
Let the earth be glad.
Let the sea resound and all that is
in it.
Let the fields be jubilant and everything in
them.
Then all the trees of the will sing
before the Lord for he comes.
He comes to judge the earth.
He will judge the world in righteousness and
the peoples in his truth.
Thanks be to God for his right word.
Now I'd
be grateful if you'd have your Bibles open
at Ephesians and chapter five.
I think the psalm that we heard read
so well earlier contains an illustration of what
Paul is enjoining us to do in the
19th verse of Ephesians 5, but to catch
the context I read from the 17th.
Therefore do not be foolish but understand what
the Lord's will is.
Do not get drunk on wine which leads
to debauchery.
Instead be filled with the Spirit.
Speak to one another with psalms, hymns, and
spiritual songs.
Sing and make melody in your heart to
the Lord.
Always giving thanks to God the Father for
everything in the name of our Lord Jesus
Christ.
Well last time we were together looking into
these very precious words I was speaking on
the subject of being filled with the Spirit,
and I suggested to you from these verses
that to be filled with the Spirit as
we are instructed to be by the Apostle
Paul is not so much a climax, a
climactic experience, but it is a condition.
It is something in which you and I
as Christian people ought to find ourselves in.
Therefore I went on to suggest to you
that in this matter of being filled with
the Spirit we're not passive.
We're not waiting for something to happen to
us.
We are very active.
And then I went on to show you
from this context and other scriptures certain do's
and don'ts which are very important if one
is going to know what it is to
be continually filled with the Spirit.
Now if you weren't here this last week,
I particularly think of some of our young
people who were out last Sunday morning ministering
elsewhere.
I would like you to get that tape
and play it through together, maybe discuss it
together, but I think it was an important
word that is necessary for you to understand
as we move on in Paul's teaching.
He goes on to say, having been filled
with the Spirit, or rather because we are
filled with the Spirit, certain things will follow.
It will affect, from verse 19, the way
we worship.
Would you believe him?
From verse 22, it will affect the way
that you relate to your wife or your
husband, assuming your marital state.
Verse 1 of this next chapter, it will
affect the way that you bring up your
children.
Verse 5 of the sixth chapter, it will
affect industrial relationships, the relationships between employer and
employee.
You see this, this whole business of being
filled with the Spirit, it's not something academic.
It's not something just reserved for monks in
a monastery.
It is something that is worked out in
the ordinary warp and woof of human life,
and it has some very practical implications.
However, I must resist the temptation to deal
with it in general.
We are looking specifically at the nineteenth verse,
and Paul is here dealing with our attitudes
as Christian people, how we come together in
worship, because we're filled with the Spirit.
And so that's what I want to address
you on this morning, because here I argue
in the nineteenth verse, you get a snapshot,
a picture of the early church.
I don't think it's a full picture.
I don't think there's a wide-angle lens
on the camera.
Here is part of a whole, and the
whole is important, but so also is this
part.
And so it's very important, it's very interesting
for us to look into this nineteenth verse
of Ephesians 5, and we could of course
twin it with parallel scriptures.
Let's look at one of those.
For example, in Colossians chapter 3 and verse
16, the Apostle is saying almost the same,
though the picture is slightly larger, just fractionally
bigger in size.
Let the word of Christ dwell in you
richly as you teach and admonish one another
with all wisdom, and as you sing psalms,
hymns, and spiritual songs with gratitude in your
hearts to God, and so forth.
And there's another verse which gives you perhaps
an even wider picture in Corinthians, but maybe
we'll come to that if we have time
in a moment or two.
Well, I put the question to you all
this morning, whether you're in the galleries here
or down on the ground floor, in what
attitude did you come to church?
Why did you come?
What is your reason for being here?
Well, it seems to me that these are
questions that we can put up to our
text, and from the answers that we discover,
we shall find whether our objective in coming
to worship in the twentieth century equals that
of early Christian people.
What was their intention of coming together?
What was the reason?
Well, recall that earlier on, Paul has been
speaking of the man who likes drink.
Now, you must always bear this analogy in
mind, because it has certain positive lessons as
well as certain dissimilarities.
Why does a man have drink?
Why does he go to the public house?
Now, the majority of people who go to
the public house, they are in no way
hooked on drink.
They're not alcoholics.
Some of them, many of them, are very
good ordinary citizens in our country.
Now, why do they go?
Well, what do you find in a public
house?
You find a place where you can have
fellowship.
And so, after a hard day, if you're
given to alcohol, someone comes to you and
says, come, let's have a drink.
Let's relax together over a drink.
And what do you mean by relaxing?
Well, you can talk, can't you?
You have a very convivial evening, or so
the idea has it.
And I understand in some public houses and
in some restaurants that are licensed, that I've
been into, that you find over the door
of the saloon, licensed for singing.
Well, why do they license these places for
singing?
Well, because the man who's had some drink,
he not only feels relaxed as far as
his normal vocal cords are concerned, but sometimes,
not always, sometimes he'll go into song.
And so, when you're passing some of these
places, you hear the people singing.
Now, Paul doesn't blush to say that when
you're filled with the Spirit, well, in a
similar fashion, similar in one sense, dissimilar in
another, you will react.
You will have vocal cords that are active.
You want to say something.
You want to do something.
Be filled with the Spirit.
Speak, actually, I-N-G should be on
the end of that, because it's, it brings
out the participle, the present participle, speaking to
one another with songs, singing and making music
in your heart to the Lord.
Why?
Well, because you're happy, not because of some
drug, some stimulant, but because the Blessed Spirit
has come into your heart and you're glad
as a result of that, so you speak.
And will you notice who you speak to?
Speaking to one another.
Actually, the verb speaking there really gives the
same impression as the verb singing.
It's got the idea of, of putting word
into song, even in the first part of
verse 19, speaking to one another.
I once recall reading a commentator, and how
often commentators confuse us when we're reading Scripture.
Think that one through.
I once remember a commentator passing scorn on
the idea of a solo.
What does a soloist do?
And this is a Puritan commentator, incidentally.
Well, the soloist exalts herself or himself, you
know, and now singing it to be to
the Lord.
Well, I think that he went beyond Scripture,
quite frankly.
Speaking, singing to one another.
Architects are bad theologians.
I wish that pastors, ministers, had constructed the
plans around which church buildings were erected, and
not architects alone.
Why do I say that?
Well, because they're obsessed with the rectangle.
The only person virtually that you can see
in most non-conformist churches is a man
in the pulpit.
Now, that could be unfortunate or pleasing, depending
presumably who's in the pulpit, but basically all
that you can see in the majority of
churches is people's heads, and generally we'd rather
see their faces.
Now, here in the tabernacle, the epitome of
balance, we've got a sort of compromise, because
you've got the Grecian architecture, almost of the
amphitheater, and you folks in the galleries, you
can look across at one another, I trust
you do, not to scowl.
And when you're singing, to whom are you
singing sometimes?
Well, you're not always singing to God, are
you?
You say, that's heresy.
Of course we aren't.
Seek ye first the kingdom of God and
His righteousness.
You don't need to sing that to the
Lord Jesus.
He planted the kingdom.
He's the king.
He doesn't need to seek it.
Our blessed Lord is the monarch who reigns.
So, who do you sing it to?
We're encouraging one another.
Seek ye first the kingdom of God.
Here I've had a very bad week.
You don't know what they did to me
at the sixth form college, but my Derby
and Joan club, to put it the other
end of the spectrum.
Very difficult, and here I am, I'm flabby
in the Christian life.
I need encouragement.
Seek ye first the kingdom of God, brother,
sister.
What a friend we have in Jesus.
To who are you singing that?
To the Lord.
You're not singing it to heaven.
They're, they're perfectly aware that you've got the
best friend in the universe.
We're singing it to one another.
What a friend we have in Jesus.
I remember in a park in Zagreb, Yugoslavia,
years ago being so encouraged, listening to Yugoslav
Christians persecuted before their faith, going out and
risking an open air.
The local police had said that they couldn't
speak in the open air, that nobody said
anything about singing.
So we went and we sang.
What a friend we have in Jesus.
That was testimony, provocative testimony, encouraging one another.
Speak to one another.
Sing to one another.
You know the word antiphony, antiphonal singing?
That's when one part of the congregation takes
up a melody, and another part, and another
part, and in a period of time the
whole congregation are involved in singing.
Now I believe that that was part of
the practice.
I don't want to make too much from
this comment, but I think that I can
demonstrate to you that this was part of
the way that the early Christians used to
go about praising the Lord.
It's horizontal, you see, provoking one another, encouraging
one another, but of course the whole idea
was a vertical, bringing praise to the Lord.
It's not always easy, is it, to praise
the Lord at the beginning of a service,
particularly if it's at night, if it's an
evening service, maybe the prayer meeting on a
Monday.
There you are, you had a difficult job
during the day just to keep going, and
it took a lot of energy and initiative
just to come to the prayer meeting.
You felt that you'd rather be in your
garden, and you'd rather be watching the television,
or what have you.
You came along and you felt absolutely flaked,
did you not?
And then you waited upon the Lord, and
somebody got going in prayer and praise, and
they touched your heart, and by nine o
'clock you weren't the same person as you
were at 7 30.
They that wait upon the Lord renew their
strength, and ere long in a prayer meeting,
it happens so often here in the town,
it becomes electric towards the end.
I use the word because I don't know
what other word to use.
What has happened?
Well, you see, our hearts have been warmed,
enlarged, and together now we're in a condition
where we can bring a cacophony of sound,
of praise, of melody to the Lord, singing
in our hearts, and making melody to the
Lord God, giving thanks to the Lord in
everything.
Do you know, I wish they didn't call
this place the tabernacle.
I say that because very few people know
what the tabernacle is.
Of course, we've been here a long time,
some longer than others, and some of the
people in the town have now worked out
that we're not a Jewish synagogue, but I
have had letters to the chief rabbi.
I'm being quite serious.
I think I'd like to call this place
the Melody Land Fellowship.
In my heart there rings a melody.
Song is the language of heaven.
Jesus has come that our joy might be
full.
I was talking to a young teenage girl
this week, lovely lass if ever there was
one, came into my office, had never met
her before.
She was about to be pulled into one
of the sects in the town, and I
said, well, what is it that puts you
off about Christianity?
She hadn't been in the town very long.
She said, it's a joylessness.
Within the sect I found joy.
You smile when I say Melody Land, and
maybe I want to put my suggestion in
inverted commas, but the principle is there, and
I don't apologize, neither do I qualify it.
One moment, Him serve with mirth His praise
foretell.
Our Lord Jesus has done so much for
us, and He inhabits the praises of His
people.
That's what the psalmist says of God of
Jehovah, Psalm 22 and verse 3.
Well, what was the intention of these people
when they came together?
They came to worship God, and worship means
giving full value to an ocean, thanking God
for His greatness, for His goodness.
How did they go about it?
Well, look at the latter part of the
19th verse.
Indeed, it's not the latter part, it's right
in the middle.
Speak to one another with psalms, hymns, and
spiritual songs.
There are those who say that this is
really just repetition, psalm equals hymns equals spiritual
songs.
This, in grammatical terms, is tautology.
Paul is emphasizing to make a point.
Well, I'm not so sure.
Let's try and define what he's talking about.
I don't have a great amount of time
to go into this, so I can't give
you all my reasoning, though I'd be very
glad to give it in private.
Speak to one another with psalms.
Well, psalms, that's quite easy, isn't it?
We have the psaltery, the book of psalms
in the Old Testament.
We read that when our Lord took His
leave from the upper room with His disciples,
He sang a psalm.
One of the Hallel psalms, the second part
of the Hallel, Jewish collection of psalms incorporated
in the book of psalms.
Full of joy, I will keep my vows
in the presence of the Lord, sang our
Lord Jesus Christ.
The psalms, so often they're the jubilati, so
often there is worship, so often there is
emotion, and the Hebrews were not afraid to
release emotion.
Sometimes I think that we harm ourselves spiritually
because of our fear in this area.
Nobody wants a false emotionalism, but there is
a blessed religious emotion that is part of
worship, without which worship cannot proceed.
The psalms.
Well, the early church, they used to sing
the psalms, but let's remember we're talking about
Gentiles here.
Paul is writing to the Ephesians.
They didn't have the Old Testament, at least
not many of them, only the Jewish part
of the church.
They wouldn't have known many of the psalms,
doubtless they were learning them as we learn
them and sing them.
But because Christianity is in effect an entry
into melody land, then they became vocal themselves.
Again, you know, we can be very pious
sometimes, can't we?
In our evangelicalism, we're intellectuals, we're academic.
A curse on intellectualism, a curse on being
academic, if it strips you from the simplicity
as it is in Christ and causes you
not to enjoy emotionally your faith.
Why do I say that?
Well, come to this business of choruses.
I've known people sort of turn up their
nose at a chorus.
They're so theologically erudite, they cannot sing choruses,
even when these are chock-a-block full
of Scripture.
I admit, they're not all, and some are
quite banal, but some of the hymns are.
Let's face it.
But what did these early Christians do?
Well, I put it to you, they composed
their own hymns, not lengthy hymns.
They didn't have hymn books like we have.
They didn't have the printing press as we
have.
They had to memorize.
Do you want an example of an early
Christian song?
Then go to the fourteenth verse of this
chapter.
In fact, it may be very appropriate to
you at this point.
Wake up, O sleeper, rise from the dead,
and Christ will shine on you.
That's an early Christian song.
The man who taught me historical theology, Professor
Ralph Martin, has almost given up a major
part of his life into the researching in
the Bible of ancient hymns, of early church
hymns, and he translates this one as such,
and his translation is, Awake, O sleeper, from
the grave arise, the light of Christ upon
you shines.
And the idea is the baptismal service, you
see.
The candidate's gone in, and he's being immersed,
and the brothers, the elders, they're lifting him
out of the water, and the congregation, to
a man, to a woman, they start to
sing, perhaps antiphonally, one section singing one line,
another section the other line, and so forth.
Wake up, O sleeper, arise from the grave,
the light of Christ upon you shines.
Do you want another example?
I could give you several.
Let me settle for one more.
Here's Paul writing to Timothy, the end of
the sixteenth, the end of the third chapter,
the sixteenth verse of the first epistle.
Here are words you find nowhere else in
Scripture, but it's a quotation.
Those of you who follow the NIV will
see it.
Set out, as such, speaks of our Lord
Jesus, tells us several things about Him.
He appeared in a body, was vindicated by
the Spirit, was seen by angels, was preached
among the nations, was believed on in the
world, and taken up into glory.
What is that?
Well, it's none other than a New Testament
song, praising the Lord Jesus Christ, bringing Him
honor and glory, a New Testament hymn.
Augustine said that a hymn, to be a
Christian hymn, must be praised.
It must be praised to God, and it
must be sung.
But then the Apostle Paul interestingly makes reference
to spiritual songs.
He doesn't need the word spiritual to define
psalms, because there isn't anything else apart from
a spiritual psalm, and despite the quotation from
Augustine that there's nothing else in a hymn
apart from a spiritual hymn.
You never talk of a secular hymn.
Well, if you do, then you use the
word wrongly, the word hymn wrongly.
But a song, that's different.
You have secular songs, don't you?
Comic songs, and so forth, folk songs.
But Paul is here saying spiritual songs.
What does he mean by spiritual songs?
Well, remember we're in the language of the
Spirit.
We're talking about the experience of the Spirit.
Therefore, it's reasonable to suppose that he's talking
about songs which the Spirit inspires.
When a great and glad thing happens to
one, what do they do?
In the Christian realm, in the religious realm,
they sing.
Hannah is without child.
She takes her need to God, and God
says, Hannah, you'll have a child.
She bursts out into song, the Magnificat of
the Old Testament.
Here is Mary corresponding to Hannah in the
New Testament.
She hears that she will be with child.
She goes to see cousin Elizabeth, and together
they praise the Lord.
And that glorious poem, that glorious song, the
Magnificat, falls from her lips.
It's not prepared.
She hasn't premeditated upon it.
It's what naturally comes into her heart as
the Spirit moves upon her, and prophetically and
winsomely she sings about the greatness of her
God.
You find exactly the same, I say, as
you move into Revelation.
You smiled at me.
I'm getting my own back now.
You smiled when I said I'd call this
place Melodyland.
But how, how would you describe heaven?
A land of song.
Look at Revelation in chapter five, verse nine,
and they sang a new song.
Who were these people?
Well, those who have been redeemed by the
precious blood of Jesus, and they sing to
Him.
And you've got to have a new song
if you're a new singer, as Cliff Richard
will tell you in a book that carries
part of his autobiography.
You are worthy to take the scroll, to
open the seals, because you were slain and
with your blood you purchased men from God,
for God from every tribe and language and
people and nation, and so forth.
You go on in the book of Revelation.
You come to the fourteenth chapter in the,
and the third verse there, and you get
another comment about people.
One hundred and forty-four thousand.
The number of perfection.
Twelve times twelve.
One hundred times one hundred.
People coming to the Lord.
All the redeemed.
And what are they doing?
They're singing.
What is a song?
It's a new song.
It has to be new.
It's not Old Testament.
Inasmuch as now, what was hidden in the
Old Testament is revealed.
The lambs that were slain in the Old
Testament, they pointed to the Lamb of God,
the Son of God, who takes away the
sin of the world.
Who knows about these things?
The Christian knows.
On earth and in heaven.
And what does the Christian church do in
response?
They sing.
They sing a new song before the throne
and before the four living creatures and elders.
No one could learn the song, except the
one hundred and forty-four thousand.
You can't learn to sing spiritually, you see.
You can't learn it.
It's something that's given you, because you have
the experience.
There's a new song in my heart.
Even praise unto our God.
Once as David the psalmist, I was in
the mire.
I was in the clay.
I was deep down there, but God lifted
me from the mire and he put me
in the choir.
From the rubbish to the glory.
The new song.
And these Christians in New Testament times, they
experience the winsomeness, the inspiration of the Spirit,
and it gives vent to song, sometimes unpremeditated,
as they come together and as they rejoice
before the Lord.
The immediacy of praise is how I would
describe it.
Well, let's hasten on.
What about the application of all this?
The application of all this.
Well, go back to my thought that this
is a snapshot.
It's not the whole of worship.
I make that point because some people get
worship in their understanding completely wrong these days.
I read of meetings where they have the
worship and then the preaching, or the preaching
and then the worship.
You get it in some evangelical circles.
You even get it in a more sacramental
fashion in the high church circles.
They have the liturgy, then the preaching.
Not a bit.
If you were to read Acts 17, where
Paul speaks of, or where there's a description
of Paul's activity in Ephesus when he was
there for two years plus, you'll find that
day after day he expounded the Scriptures.
That's why I say this is just a
snapshot.
There's more to be added, but what is
there in the snapshot is important.
It doesn't speak of preaching.
It doesn't speak of prophesying.
Many things, several things, it doesn't touch on,
but what it does touch on, I argue,
is important.
This whole business of praising, praising the Lord.
Now I can demonstrate that this is something
that was historically applied to the church.
Take a great man of God by the
name of Tertullian.
He lived between 150 and 220 AD.
I was reading some of his writings just
last week.
Tertullian was a man who reacted against the
dullness and drabness that soon set into Christian
worship when it became liturgical and formal, and
he says that to counter this, he describes
one of the love feasts of the early
vibrant Christians, and he says they rejoiced together
after water for their hands and lights had
been brought in.
Each one, each believer is invited to sing
to God in the presence of the others
from what he knows of the Holy Scriptures
or from his own heart.
You have it again.
You see this unpremeditated praise.
They come in, they're warm, they're enlivened by
the Christian people as they speak to one
another, as they sing to one another, and
then suddenly a man gets up, a woman
gets up, and she, she speaks out.
She, he sings forth what God is revealing,
the kiss of God upon the soul with
great spontaneity.
And now it seems that I could demonstrate
this to you, not only in New Testament
times, not only in the second century A
.D., I would take you to some of
the great revivals.
Go to the, the class meetings of John
and Charles Wesley.
You remember these great brothers ministered in this
country at the same time as George Whitefield
and Marshall, they're converts into an organization which
had a method about it.
Thus the method is church.
Well, part of the method was bringing together
people in classes, and in these classes they
would share together, and they would praise God
together.
There would be an element of spontaneity.
You get it also in the experienced meetings
in the, in the Welsh hills when revival
touched that land, and people would come together
and they would say what God had done.
It wouldn't just be a case of the
preacher.
There was no threat between the laity and
the clergy, so to speak.
That distinction evaporates in revival.
It must do, because it's a false distinction.
They all have things to say.
They all have things to testify.
There were men who were given specific gifts.
That is so.
It is always so, because God gives the
gifts.
As Ephesians 4 tells us, the Lord Jesus
gives certain gifts to his church in terms
of ministry, of teaching, and so forth.
But these people, their hearts are overjoyed.
And I go so far as to argue
that if there is no opportunity for spontaneity
in the structure of any church program, then
in effect you are squeezing out, you're cancelling
out what is one of the most beneficial
and one of the most blessed means of
enjoying the presence of God together.
Well then, here we are.
My time is nigh on gone.
We're looking into these teachings of Scripture, and
we're seeing that the early Christians, when they
came together, there was a sort of equivalent
to, but an improvement on, the jollification of
the people who are drunk, of the people
who are intoxicated.
In a drunken orgy, everyone has something to
say.
Now, it's never like that.
It's not an orgy.
There's not confusion.
Where there is confusion, then it has to
be controlled.
But the opposite to control is not to
cancel everything out, it's to have order.
That's why Paul, when he writes to the
Corinthians, puts up several controls.
He'd never have to control the majority of
evangelical communities in these days.
Why not?
Well, you see, the spontaneous element, it's almost
eliminated.
It's most unfortunate, but that is the case.
And so, I'm bringing you back to Ephesians
5.
Here we have, I say, a little snapshot.
Not the full picture.
There's more to be said.
But here is a scene of Christian people
coming together who love the Lord.
They're filled with the Spirit.
There's something charismatic.
Understand that term biblically.
There's something charismatic about them.
There's not just something charismatic, there's something didactic.
That means they want teaching.
That's what didactic means.
There's something eucharistic about it.
That word is not just for the use
of Anglo-Catholics and Roman Catholics, eucharisto.
It means in the Greek to praise, to
give thanks.
And here are people, I argue, who are
praising God.
Why are they praising God?
Well, they've got a new song.
Where did the new song come from?
Well, it came from centering their attention on
Jesus and his death on the cross and
his mighty resurrection.
You can't know him and not at times
be elated.
And not to give expression to that elation
is a terrible thing.
Psychologists will tell you that the repression of
the emotions can do incalculable harm to your
psyche, to your personality.
And that, at the spiritual level, is true.
Sometimes, my dear brothers and sisters, we could
do with examining the checks that we put
on our own emotion as we come before
the Lord and recognize that a holy emotion
is something that is pleasing to almighty God
as we lift up our praise and our
worship to him.
Well, maybe more of this next week.
Amen.
124.
We have only time for one or two
verses of this hymn.
Let's sing the first, the third, and the
fifth verses, please, of 124.
And, Father,
for that final thought of singing in the
hereafter with all the angelic hosts, we thank
you.
Let's continue now to make us a praying
and a praising people, rejoicing in the goodness
of God, encouraging and provoking one another to
a higher quality of life, a more happy
expression of worship.
And be with us as we come around
the table.
And may the bread and the wine be
precious as more we feel the presence of
the Savior.
Amen.