Paul was conscious that in everything he did, he was delivering a pattern which God had given to him for the church. His manner of worship, for example, which is reflected in the epistles, the way in which he constructs them and goes about giving the word, and he begins so often with praise, objective praise, and then subjective thanksgiving, and we follow that pattern. We open the service of worship with objective praise. We then move on to thanking God for the personal blessings of salvation and temporal blessings that he has given to us. Then in the preaching of the word: the apostle Paul, even though he was inspired, roots everything in the Old Testament Scriptures, and he constantly quotes them, sometimes slightly adapting them for the purpose of his argument. Everything is so scriptural. We don't preach our own good ideas or novel structures; we preach from the word. We expound and explain what is here, and the Corinthians copied the apostle in that. The very balance of his preaching is a model for us. He explained the doctrines and then he applied them, and there was exhortation, application. Then too they largely followed the apostle’s lifestyle, his simplicity of life, and his avoidance of excess, and all preachers of the New Testament adopted simplicity of life. They turned aside from being wealthy men. Paul wasn’t like some people today who cash in even on the truth of God and the gospel of God. They followed him in his manner of gospel reasoning, persuading people to come to Christ. They followed him in faith, in reliance upon God. Today there is a tendency for people, even in Bible believing churches, to endlessly manufacture human gimmicks and ideas to help things along. The apostles never did that. They preached the word and they prayed. He taught how the church is to be governed. There are to be elders and deacons appointed, and pastors, preachers, but no prophets. There is no instruction in the New Testament for appointing apostles or prophets, because they were a temporary ministry. Why was that? Because the Scripture was complete.
What do we do in our lives for Jesus Christ? Do we focus too much on this life? Do we focus too much on our well-being, perhaps on our career, on our possessions, on our home, on our recreations? Are our aims too high for ourselves and for our children, instead of focusing on souls and on Christ? We live in privileged days. We read about Elizabethan times, when the vast majority of the population lived in houses without windows. Well, they had windows, but they didn’t have any glass in them. So right through the long days of winter, you chose to have either light or heat, and you preferred heat. So you lived in a one-room house with a dirt floor, with the shutters tightly closed throughout six months of the year.
Can we not live for the Lord and put Christ first, and his cause and his witness, in our giving, in our serving, in our worship? Are you a once-only worshipper – one service of worship only on the Lord’s Day? Unless you are someone for whom this is unavoidable and inevitable, that is not enough. The whole day belongs to the Lord. We can see humanism and Islamism taking over the world. We can see unbelief and growing chaos. The full penalties are yet to be paid by our society for the utter rejection of God and faith and worship. What people we should be, gathering out the last harvest in these days! May God move us and help us all.