“We cannot afford to be wiser than our Lord in this matter. If any one could have pled that his spiritual experience was so lofty that it did not require public worship, if any one might have felt that the consecration and communion of his personal life exempted him from what ordinary mortals needed, it was Jesus. But He made no such plea. Sabbath by Sabbath even He was found in the place of worship, side by side with God’s people, not for the mere sake of setting a good example, but for deeper reasons. Is it reasonable, then, that any of us should think we can safely afford to dispense with the pious custom of regular participation with the common worship of our locality?”

Concluding today with our review of Dr. Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield’s address, The Religious Life of Theological Students, we close with a section of his message which is highly applicable to us all.

I am not counseling you, you will observe, to make your theological studies your sole religious exercises. They are religious exercises of the most rewarding kind; and your religious life will very much depend upon your treating them as such. But there are other religious exercises demanding your punctual attention which cannot be neglected without the gravest damage to your religious life. I refer particularly now to the stated formal religious meetings of the Seminary. I wish to be perfectly explicit here, and very emphatic. No man can withdraw himself from the stated religious services of the community of which he is a member, without serious injury to his personal religious life. It is not without significance that the apostolic writer couples together the exhortations, “to hold fast the confession of our hope, that it waver not,” and “to forsake not the assembling of ourselves together.” When he commands us not to forsake “the assembling of ourselves together,” he has in mind, as the term he employs shows, the stated, formal assemblages of the community, and means to lay upon the hearts and consciences of his readers their duty to the church of which they are the supports, as well as their duty to themselves. And when he adds, “As the custom of some is,” he means to put a lash into his command. We can see his lip curl as he says it. Who are these people, who are so vastly strong, so supremely holy, that they do not need the assistance of the common worship for themselves; and who, being so strong and holy, will not give their assistance to the common worship?

Needful as common worship is, however, for men at large, the need of it for men at large is as nothing compared with its needfulness for a body of young men situated as you are. You are gathered together here for a religious purpose, in preparation for the highest religious service which can be performed by men—the guidance of others in the religious life; and shall you have everything else in common except worship? You are gathered together here, separated from your homes and all that home means; from the churches in which you have been brought up, and all that church fellowship means; from all the powerful natural influences of social religion—and shall you not yourselves form a religious community, with its own organic religious life and religious expression? I say it deliberately, that a body of young men, living apart in a community-life, as you are and must be living, cannot maintain a healthy, full, rich religious life individually, unless they are giving organic expression to their religious life as a community in frequent stated diets of common worship. Nothing can take the place of this common organic worship of the community as a community, at its stated seasons, and as a regular function of the corporate life of the community. Without it you cease to be a religious community and lack that support and stay, that incitement and spur, that comes to the individual from the organic life of the community of which he forms a part.

In my own mind, I am quite clear that in an institution like this the whole body of students should come together, both morning and evening, every day, for common prayer; and should join twice on every Sabbath in formal worship. Without at least this much common worship I do not think the institution can preserve its character as a distinctively religious institution—an institution whose institutional life is primarily a religious one. And I do not think that the individual students gathered here can, with less full expression of the organic religious life of the institution, preserve the high level of religious life on which, as students of theology they ought to live. You will observe that I am not merely exhorting you “to go to church.” “Going to church” is in any case good. But what I am exhorting you to do is go to your own church—to give your presence and active religious participation to every stated meeting for worship of the institution as an institution. Thus you will do your part to give to the institution an organic religious life, and you will draw out from the organic religious life of the institution a support and inspiration for your own personal religious life which you can get nowhere else, and which you can cannot afford to miss—if, that is, you have a care to your religious quickening and growth. To be an active member of a living religious body is the condition of healthy religious functioning.

I trust you will not tell me that the stated religious exercises of the Seminary are too numerous, or are wearying. That would only be to betray the low ebb of your own religious vitality. The feet of him whose heart is warm with religious feeling turn of themselves to the sanctuary, and carry him with joyful steps to the house of prayer. I am told that there are some students who do not find themselves in a prayerful mood in the early hours of a winter morning; and are much too tired at the close of a hard day’s work to pray, and therefore do not find it profitable to attend prayers in the late afternoon: who think the preaching at the regular service on Sabbath morning dull and uninteresting, and who do not find Christ at the Sabbath afternoon conference. Such things I seem to have heard before; and yours will be an exceptional pastorate, if you do not hear something very like them, before you have been in a pastorate six months. Such things meet you every day on the street; they are the ordinary expression of the heart which is dulled or is dulling to the religious appeal. They are not hopeful symptoms among those whose life should be lived on the religious heights. No doubt, those who minister to you in spiritual things should take them to heart. And you who are ministered to must take them to heart, too. And let me tell you straight out that the preaching you find dull will no more seem dull to you if you faithfully obey the Master’s precept: “Take heed how ye hear”; that if you do not find Christ in the conference room it is because you do not take him there with you; that, if after an ordinary day’s work you are too weary to unite with your fellows in closing the day with common prayer, it is because the impulse to prayer is weak in your heart. If there is no fire in the pulpit it falls to you to kindle it in the pews. No man can fail to meet with God in the sanctuary if he takes God there with him.

How easy it is to roll the blame of our cold hearts over upon the shoulders of our religious leaders! It is refreshing to observe how Luther, with his breezy good sense, dealt with complaints of lack of attractiveness in his evangelical preachers. He had not sent them out to please people, he said, and their function was not to interest or to entertain; their function was to teach the saving truth of God, and, if they did that, it was frivolous for people in danger of perishing for want of the truth to object to the vessel in which it was offered to them. When the people of Torgau, for instance, wished to dismiss their pastors, because, they said, their voices were too weak to fill the churches, Luther simply responded, “That’s an old song: better have some difficulty in hearing the gospel than no difficulty at all in hearing what is very far from the gospel.” “People cannot have their ministers exactly as they wish,” he declares again, “they should thank God for the pure word,” and not demand St. Augustines and St. Ambroses to preach it to them. If a pastor pleases the Lord Jesus and is faithful to him,—there is none so great and mighty but he ought to be pleased with him, too. The point, you see, is that men who are hungry for the truth and get it ought not to be exigent as to the platter in which it is served to them. And they will not be.

But why should we appeal to Luther? Have we not the example of our Lord Jesus Christ? Are we better than He? Surely, if ever there was one who might justly plead that the common worship of the community had nothing to offer him it was the Lord Jesus Christ. But every Sabbath found Him seated in His place among the worshiping people, and there was no act of stated worship which He felt Himself entitled to discard. Even in His most exalted moods, and after His most elevating experiences, He quietly took His place with the rest of God’s people, sharing with them in the common worship of the community. Returning from that great baptismal scene, when the heavens themselves were rent to bear Him witness that He was well pleasing to God; from the searching trials of the wilderness, and from that first great tour in Galilee, prosecuted, as we are expressly told, “in the power of the Spirit”; He came back, as the record tells, “to Nazareth, where He had been brought up, and”—so proceeds the amazing narrative—”He entered, as His custom was, into the synagogue, on the Sabbath day.” “As His custom was!” Jesus Christ made it His habitual practice to be found in His place on the Sabbath day at the stated place of worship to which He belonged. “It is a reminder,” as Sir William Robertson Nicoll well insists, “of the truth which, in our fancied spirituality, we are apt to forget—that the holiest personal life can scarcely afford to dispense with stated forms of devotion, and that the regular public worship of the church, for all its local imperfections and dullness, is a divine provision for sustaining the individual soul.” “We cannot afford to be wiser than our Lord in this matter. If any one could have pled that his spiritual experience was so lofty that it did not require public worship, if any one might have felt that the consecration and communion of his personal life exempted him from what ordinary mortals needed, it was Jesus. But He made no such plea. Sabbath by Sabbath even He was found in the place of worship, side by side with God’s people, not for the mere sake of setting a good example, but for deeper reasons. Is it reasonable, then, that any of us should think we can safely afford to dispense with the pious custom of regular participation with the common worship of our locality?” Is it necessary for me to exhort those who would fain be like Christ, to see to it that they are imitators of Him in this?

Words to Live By:
Your brothers and sisters in Christ hope to see you gather together with them to worship our risen Lord and Savior. See you in Church this Sunday!
Not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as the manner of some is; but exhorting one another: and so much the more, as ye see the day approaching.—Hebrews 10:25.

Beware of Becoming Weary of God!

Continuing today our mini-series in review of B.B. Warfield’s address, THE RELIGIOUS LIFE OF THEOLOGICAL STUDENTS. Regrettably, our time is short today, and without introductory comment we must simply place before you another excerpt from Dr. Warfield’s message:

There is certainly something wrong with the religious life of a theological student who does not study. But it does not quite follow that therefore everything is right with his religious life if he does study. It is possible to study—even to study theology—in an entirely secular spirit. I said a little while ago that what religion does is to send a man to his work with an added quality of devotion. In saying that, I meant the word “devotion” to be taken in both its senses—in the sense of “zealous application,” and in the sense of “a religious exercise,” as the Standard Dictionary phrases the two definitions. A truly religious man will study anything which it becomes his duty to study with “devotion” in both of these senses. That is what his religion does for him: it makes him do his duty, do it thoroughly, do it “in the Lord.” But in the case of many branches of study, there is nothing in the topics studied which tends directly to feed the religious life, or to set in movement the religious emotions, or to call out specifically religious reaction. If we study them “in the Lord,” that is only because we do it “for his sake,” on the principle which makes “sweeping a room” an act of worship. With theology it is not so. In all its branches alike, theology has as its unique end to make God known: the student of theology is brought by his daily task into the presence of God, and is kept there. Can a religious man stand in the presence of God, and not worship? It is possible, I have said, to study even theology in a purely secular spirit. But surely that is possible only for an irreligious man, or at least for an unreligious man. And here I place in your hands at once a touchstone by which you may discern your religious state, and an instrument for the quickening of your religious life. Do you prosecute your daily tasks as students of theology as “religious exercises”? If you do not, look to yourselves: it is surely not all right with the spiritual condition of that man who can busy himself daily with divine things, with a cold and impassive heart. If you do, rejoice. But in any case, see that you do! And that you do it ever more and more abundantly. Whatever you may have done in the past, for the future make all your theological studies “religious exercises.” This is the great rule for a rich and wholesome religious life in a theological student. Put your heart into your studies; do not merely occupy your mind with them, but put your heart into them. They bring you daily and hourly into the very presence of God; his ways, his dealing with men, the infinite majesty of his Being form their very subject-matter. Put the shoes from off your feet in this holy presence!

We are frequently told, indeed, that the great danger of the theological student lies precisely in his constant contact with divine things. They may come to seem common to him, because they are customary. As the average man breathes the air and basks in the sunshine without ever a thought that it is God in his goodness who makes his sun to rise on him, though he is evil, and sends rain to him, though he is unjust; so you may come to handle even the furniture of the sanctuary with never a thought above the gross early materials of which it is made. The words which tell you of God’s terrible majesty or of his glorious goodness may come to be mere words to you—Hebrew and Greek words, with etymologies, and inflections, and connections in sentences. The reasonings which establish to you the mysteries of his saving activities may come to be to you mere logical paradigms, with premises and conclusions, fitly framed, no doubt, and triumphantly cogent, but with no further significance to you than their formal logical conclusiveness. God’s stately stepping in his redemptive processes may become to you a mere series of facts of history, curiously interplaying to the production of social and religious conditions, and pointing mayhap to an issue which we may shrewdly conjecture: but much like other facts occurring in time and space, which may come to your notice. It is your great danger. But it is your great danger, only because it is your great privilege. Think of what your privilege is when your greatest danger is that the great things of religion may become common to you! Other men, oppressed by the hard conditions of life, sunk in the daily struggle for bread perhaps, distracted at any rate by the dreadful drag of the world upon them and the awful rush of the world’s work, find it hard to get time and opportunity so much as to pause and consider whether there be such things as God, and religion, and salvation from the sin that compasses them about and holds them captive. The very atmosphere of your life is these things; you breathe them in at every pore; they surround you, encompass you, press in upon you from every side. It is all in danger of becoming common to you! God forgive you, you are in danger of becoming weary of God!

Words to Live By:
Become weary of God? Weary of worshiping the One who made us, who sent His Son to save us from our sins, that we might have eternal fellowship with Him? Weary of His presence? How could that ever be? And yet, in full display of our sinful nature, all too often it can happen. May our Lord deliver us from falling in that way. The Scriptures repeatedly talk of how God has made His works to be remembered, and this is key, I think, to helping us from falling into such a weariness, as we practice a daily remembrance of His grace, His many blessings, His many mercies, both as they are recorded on the pages of the Bible and as they are displayed in the lives of His children. Remembering His works serves to keep our hearts fresh and tender before Him.

Optimally, I Think We Can Say He Was a Transformer.

The Rev. Ebenezer Prime was born at Milford, Connecticut on July 21 of the year 1700. He graduated from Yale College in 1718, the same year that the school was first so named. Following graduation, he became the assistant to the Rev. Mr. Eliphalet Jones, the Pastor of the Church at Huntington, and was later ordained collegiate pastor of this Church on June 5, 1723. Rev. Prime continued in this charge until his death, on October 3, 1779.

Rev. Prime carefully kept a record book for the next fifty-six years of his ministry. He began with a full account of his ordination. After that, he wrote out in full his own confession of faith, and it strikes this writer that this sort of thing would be a good exercise for any new pastor. For one, in later years a review of his own confession would display how he had matured, or perhaps would evidence where he had changed his views. A sample paragraph from Rev. Prime’s confession of faith:

“I believe that the Saints of God shall persevere in Holiness, and never totally or finally fall away from Grace; he who hath begun a good Work in them will carry it on until the Day of Jesus Christ. All that were given to the Son in the eternal Covenant of Redemption shall come to him & none shall be able to pluck them out of his Hands. But he will keep them By his mighty Power thro Faith unto Salvation.”

The remainder of Rev. Prime’s Record consists of membership rolls, baptisms, marriages, and miscellanea, including records of meetings. In sum, it is a remarkable display of diligent record keeping over a protracted period of time, and as such it reveals a great strength of character. Moreover,  Prime’s Recordtells the story of a pastor and his congregation, though admittedly we have to do some reading between the lines. Prime was also careful to make a record of the sermons he preached before his congregation, recording the sermon texts and the date of delivery, though for whatever reason, this record of his sermons was not included in the printed edition of his Record.

A few interesting observations drawn from Prime’s Record by the editor, Moses L. Scudder:

After noting that the First Church of Huntington was organized at about the same time as the town itself, namely, about 1660, and that originally the church was Independent, or Congregational, but became Presbyterian in 1748, Mr. Scudder then says:–

“At Mr. Prime’s ordination the membership of the Church was only 15 men and 27 women, although the assessment lists of earlier time show more than a hundred resident tax payers. It is plain that only a small proportion of the citizens formally professed religion and belonged to the church. Of the fourteen persons chosen at the town meeting in May of 1724, as is shown on the town records, as trustees, assessors, collector, constable and other town officers, only two appear by Mr. Prime’s Record to have been members of the Church; and one of these, Jeremiah Wood, a Trustee of the Town, and consequently a person of good repute among his neighbors, appears in Mr. Prime’s Record to have been ‘Under Censure of Admonition.’ “

“Another curious fact may be observed. Nearly all the male members of the Church at [the time of] Mr. Prime’s ordination have “senr.” opposite their names. This indicates that they were old men, probably the sons of the original settlers. It may be inferred that the third generation were not generally members of the Church. Whether these facts tell of a low state of religious interest and a reaction form the strictness of the primitive Puritans I will not attempt to inquire.”

“Nevertheless this was during nearly all of Mr. Prime’s pastorate the only church in Huntington, and it is probable that all the respectable inhabitants were regular attendants at its services and contributors to its support. Consequently, the record of the marriages solemnized by its pastor comprises practically all the marriages of the residents of the town during those years.”

“It was the practice to have infants baptized a few days after birth, apparently whether the parents were members of the church or not. Hence the pastor’s record of baptisms is approximately a record of births in the families resident in the town. Unfortunately in this record the names of the parents of the children baptized are rarely set down.”

Words to Live By:
A long, faithful pastorate in the same church is unusual enough. What the long-term effects of that pastorate on the congregation and on succeeding generations, might be, is perhaps impossible to tell. But that God did bless the pastor with such tenure, is it then too much to hope, or even expect that the Lord will also bless that congregation commensurately? Someone has said that a people get the pastor they deserve. What greater motivation to pray for your pastor, to encourage and assist him where you can, and to yourself live as a Christian, walking humbly and faithfully each day before your Lord.

To read the whole of Records of the First Church in Huntington, Long Island, 1723-1779, by Rev. Ebenezer Prime, click here.