Message by Larry Thacker Jr. from June 13, “A New Testament Church”
Tradition can be a good thing. It binds us together. It can be used to teach us things that we need to remember. Yahweh established traditions to do that for His people. It can also be a bad thing. It becomes a bad thing when we forget its purpose. It becomes a bad thing when the tradition becomes the thing we worship instead of our Lord.
One of the first things children learn to ask is “why?” Somewhere there still may be an incriminating cassette tape of a very young me asking it over and over again. It’s built into us to want to know the reason for everything. We explore our physical world through science, but science can’t answer the deeper questions in life.
Somewhere into adulthood, many of us stop asking. Life gets too busy. Sometimes we’re discouraged from asking. Sometimes we stop caring. Sometimes, most dangerous of all, we think we know all the whys that matter. It’s good to stop and ask once in a while as my wife says, “what are we doing and why are we doing it?”
These are good questions in our personal lives. They are also good questions to ask ourselves as a church. We all claim the Bible as our source for the things we do. Does it have anything to say about how a church should operate? Actually, though it has a great deal to say on how we should conduct ourselves as the church, it says little about what should happen when we meet together. There’s no order of service or prescribed program to be found. What did they do? Are we obligated to model ourselves after them? Why do we do things the way we do?
I’m sure one could fill a library with books on the subject, so we will hardly be able to do it justice in 20-30 minutes. Instead, we will take one short passage, 1 Corinthians 14:26-33. and draw some conclusions from what we find there. Now if you know your Bible, you probably already have an objection. This is part of a chapter where Paul is issuing a correction to the behavior going on in the church meeting. It hardly seems a good place to get ideas on how a service should be run. Stick with me and I’ll explain.
