Devotional 135: The Marks of the Church: The Ministry of Word and Ordinances

The Confession Read

Unto this catholic visible church Christ hath given the ministry, oracles, and ordinances of God, for the gathering and perfecting of the saints, in this life, to the end of the world: and doth, by his own presence and Spirit, according to his promise, make them effectual thereunto.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 25, Section 3

Introduction

We have seen what the church is; now we are to learn what the church has. Two studies have passed beneath our hand. First we looked upward at the church no eye can see, the whole number of the elect gathered under Christ the Head; then we looked outward at the church every eye can see, the company of those throughout the world who profess the true religion together with their children. And now, having confessed both, we come to the question that gives the church her daily shape and her weekly rhythm: what has Christ entrusted to this catholic visible church, and what is he doing through her still? The answer the Divines give is one sentence, but it is a sentence full of motion. Unto this church Christ hath given the ministry, the oracles, and the ordinances of God; and he hath given them for a purpose, the gathering and perfecting of the saints; and he hath given them with a promise, that by his own presence and Spirit he will make them effectual thereunto. The sentence is held together by giving, and it tells us at once what the church is not. She is not a self-made society, not a company of men who have pooled their religious instincts and organised their worship as the mood takes them. She is a recipient before she is anything else. The ministry she did not invent; the Scriptures she did not compose; the sacraments she did not devise. All three are gifts laid in her hands from the throne, and a church that handles them as possessions will soon prune them to her taste, while a church that receives them as gifts will keep them with reverence, remembering that she must one day return an account of them. And yet the section does not leave the church holding gifts and wondering what to do with them, for the gifts are given with an end in view, and the end is stated in words that carry the whole gospel within them: the gathering and perfecting of the saints. The ministry is for gathering; the oracles are for gathering; the ordinances are for gathering. And all three, when the gathering has begun, are for perfecting as well. Here is the two-fold work of the church summarised in a breath: to gather the elect out of the world, and to perfect, to build up and bring to maturity, those whom grace has gathered. The one looks to the conversion of sinners; the other to the edification of believers. Both are carried on in this life, for there will be no gathering in heaven, where all are gathered already, and no perfecting beyond the grave, where all are perfect. Both are carried on to the end of the world, for the church's work is not finished until her Head returns. This is a sentence about an unfinished labour, a labour that has been going on since Pentecost and will not cease until the trumpet sounds. There is, moreover, a quiet glory at the heart of this section which it would be a great loss to miss. The means are plain: a preacher, a book, a font, a table. But the power is divine. Christ doth, by his own presence and Spirit, according to his promise, make them effectual. The minister speaks, but it is Christ who opens the heart; the water is poured, but it is the Spirit who washes; the bread is broken, but it is the Lord himself who feeds. No doctrine in the whole Confession is more pastoral than this, and none is more needed in a day that measures everything by visible results and despises plain means as though they were powerless. Let us take the sentence in hand, then, and learn what the ascended Christ is doing through the gifts he has left his church.

Scripture Foundation

The doctrine of this section rests first upon the commission which the risen Christ gave his apostles, for it is here that the ministry, and the ordinances, and the promise of his presence are all joined in a single charge. Matthew 28:18-20: "And Jesus came and spake unto them, saying, All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth. Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world. Amen." Every element of the Confession's sentence is here. The authority is Christ's alone, "all power in heaven and in earth," and the ministry he sends is therefore a ministry under authority, never an authority of its own. The charge is to make disciples, which is the gathering of the saints, and to teach them to observe all things, which is their perfecting. The ordinances are named, baptizing and teaching, and the promise is attached: "lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world." The phrase "to the end of the world" is lifted by the Divines almost word for word, for they saw that the church's commission is co-extensive with the church's pilgrimage. As long as the world lasts, the ministry lasts; as long as sinners are to be gathered, the oracles are to be preached; as long as saints are to be perfected, the ordinances are to be administered. And through it all the risen Lord is present, not far off but "with you," not fitfully but "alway." The second foundation names the purpose of the gifts with precision, and it comes from Paul's letter to the Ephesians. Ephesians 4:11-13: "And he gave some, apostles; and some, prophets; and some, evangelists; and some, pastors and teachers; For the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ: Till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ." Here the ministry is traced, not to the choice of the church, but to the gift of the ascended Christ, who when he rose on high gave gifts unto men. The list of offices is not arbitrary; it is a descending order, from the apostles and prophets who laid the foundation once for all, to the evangelists and pastors and teachers who labour upon that foundation still. And the end of it all is the perfecting of the saints. The Greek word Paul uses for "perfecting" is katartismos, a word drawn from the workman's shop, meaning to set a thing in order, to mend what is broken, to equip a vessel for its use. It is the word a surgeon would use of setting a bone, or a fisherman of mending a net. The saints, then, are not perfected by being left alone but by being worked upon: mended where they are broken, fitted where they are rough, equipped for the service to which they are called. And this is the work of the ministry, not of an hour or a season, but of a lifetime, until we all come to the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ. The third foundation explains why the ministry and the oracles are indispensable, and it is Paul's chain of reasoning to the Romans. Romans 10:14-15,17: "How then shall they call on him in whom they have not believed? and how shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard? and how shall they hear without a preacher? And how shall they preach, except they be sent? ... So then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God." Here is the logic of the means of grace laid bare. Salvation is by faith; faith is in Christ; Christ is known through hearing; hearing requires a preacher; and the preacher must be sent. Take away any link in the chain and the whole gospel transaction is broken. The Confession's insistence that the ministry and oracles are given "for the gathering of the saints" is simply Paul's argument set down as doctrine: God has ordained that the elect should be gathered, not by angels, not by visions, not by private impressions, but by the preached word, borne to them by men whom Christ has sent. Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God. The sermon is not an ornament upon the church's life; it is the appointed instrument of her gathering, and there is no ordinary conversion where there is no preaching. The fourth foundation concerns the oracles themselves, and the tender reverence with which the New Testament speaks of them. Romans 3:2: "Much every way: chiefly, because that unto them were committed the oracles of God." The word the apostle uses, and which the Confession borrows, is logia, the utterances of God; and the honour Paul counts as Israel's chief honour is simply this, that to them were committed the oracles of God. These are not the reflections of devout men, nor the records of a people's religious experience, however precious; they are the very speech of the Almighty committed to the keeping of his people. What was committed to Israel under the old covenant is committed to the church under the new, for the church is now the keeper of the lively oracles. The church did not give herself the Scriptures; she received them as an inheritance, and her first duty toward them is the duty of a steward, to keep them whole and to hand them on unimpaired. The word logia carries within it the reason why the Divines placed the oracles between the ministry and the ordinances: the minister is nothing without the oracles, and the ordinances are empty without them; the Scriptures are the living word through which both preaching and sacrament draw their life. To these may be added the seal of the ordinances themselves, for the Confession joins to the ministry and the oracles the sacraments and public worship which Christ has appointed. Acts 2:42: "And they continued stedfastly in the apostles' doctrine and fellowship, and in breaking of bread, and in prayers." Here, on the very day the church was born, we see the full round of her appointed worship already in place: the doctrine of the apostles, which is the oracles preached; the fellowship of the saints; the breaking of bread, which is the Lord's Supper; and the prayers. And of the Supper Paul writes, in 1 Corinthians 11:26: "For as often as ye eat this bread, and drink this cup, ye do shew the Lord's death till he come." The ordinance is a proclamation, a visible preaching, a showing forth of the death of Christ; and it is to be observed "till he come," that is, to the end of the world. The bread and the cup are the gospel set before the eye as the sermon sets it before the ear, and both are means by which Christ, through his Spirit, gathers and perfects his people. These passages stand in a line and bear the weight of the section between them. The risen Christ commissions the ministry and promises his presence; Paul names the ministry's end and traces the chain of hearing; the Romans declare the oracles to be the very speech of God; and Luke and Paul together show the ordinances to be the appointed worship of the church until the Lord returns. Upon this foundation the Divines raised their sentence, and it has stood because the foundation is the word of God.

What the Divines Meant

To understand what the Divines meant, we must first see what they were doing in the architecture of the chapter. Section 1 had defined the invisible church, Section 2 the visible; Section 3 now furnishes the visible church with her furniture, as it were, and sets her to work. The movement of the three sections is from being to having to doing, and it is a movement with a deliberate pastoral design. The Divines knew that a church which knows what she is but does not know what she has been given will soon drift into one of two errors: she will either despise the ordinary means as unnecessary, trusting to a private and unmediated spirituality, or she will idolise them as though they worked by their own virtue, apart from Christ. Against the first error the section insists that the ministry, oracles, and ordinances are given, appointed, and necessary; against the second it insists that they are effectual only by Christ's presence and Spirit. The whole sentence is a careful walking of that narrow path. Consider, first, the threefold gift. The ministry, the oracles, and the ordinances are named in an order that is itself instructive. The ministry stands first, for it is the living voice: men set apart to preach the word and administer the ordinances, the successors in office of the apostles' ordinary function, though not of their extraordinary gifts. The oracles stand next, for they are the standard by which the ministry is tested and the substance upon which it feeds: the minister is a minister of the word, and a wordless minister is no minister at all. The ordinances stand last, for they are the appointed forms in which the word is sealed and the church's worship is ordered: the preaching of the word, the administration of the sacraments, prayer, praise, discipline, and the fellowship of the saints. The Divines were not here setting out an exhaustive list of everything a church may lawfully do; they were naming the essential endowment without which no society can claim to be a church of Christ at all. A company of people may sing and meet and exhort one another, but if it has no ministry, no oracles, and no ordinances, it is not the visible church of this chapter, whatever else it may be. The word "oracles" deserves a longer pause, for it is the hinge of the three. In the usage of the day, and in the usage of the King James Version from which the Divines drew, the oracles of God are the Holy Scriptures, the written word. To call them oracles is to say that they are not merely a record of revelation but revelation itself, the speech of God still sounding. The Divines chose the word deliberately, for it answers at once the enthusiast who would set his own supposed revelations above the written word, and the sceptic who would reduce the word to the fallible record of fallible men. The oracles of God are the voice of God, and the ministry which preaches them and the ordinances which seal them are both, in their several ways, channels through which that voice is heard. This is why the section binds the three so tightly together: take away the oracles and the ministry becomes the mere opinions of a man, and the ordinances become empty ceremonies; but let the oracles stand, and the ministry becomes the herald of God and the ordinances become seals of his covenant. Then comes the purpose, expressed in two words that are really one work: gathering and perfecting. The gathering is the bringing in of the elect, the conversion of sinners, the making of disciples; the perfecting is the building up of those who are gathered, the nourishing of the saints to maturity. The Divines were careful to say that both are carried on "in this life," for they would have no one dream that the work of grace is finished at conversion. A man is gathered in an hour; he is perfected over a lifetime. And they were careful to say "to the end of the world," for they would have no one imagine that the church's task has a terminus this side of glory. As long as there is one elect soul unconverted, the gathering goes on; as long as there is one believer imperfect, the perfecting goes on. The church is never in this world a society of the already-finished, but always a hospital of the healing and a school of the learning, and her work is done only when her Head comes to make all things new. There remains the most searching clause of all, and the one most easily forgotten. Christ doth, by his own presence and Spirit, according to his promise, make them effectual. The means do not work of themselves. The sermon does not convert by its eloquence, the water does not wash by its wetness, the bread does not nourish by its substance. Left to themselves they are as powerless as the staff in Moses' hand. But Christ has promised to be with his church, and where Christ is present by his Spirit, the means become effectual: the word is the power of God unto salvation, the sacraments are seals and means of grace, and the whole ministry is made to prosper. The Divines set down the means and the power side by side precisely so that neither might be divorced from the other. To separate the power from the means is enthusiasm; to separate the means from the power is formalism. The one waits for God apart from his appointed channels; the other handles the channels as though God were not needed in them at all. The Confession will have neither. Christ hath given the means, and Christ maketh them effectual: the gift and the Giver, the channel and the fountain, held together in a single breath.

Theological Depth

The doctrine of the means of grace drew the ablest pens of the Reformed tradition, and it did so because here the whole question of the church's daily life hangs in the balance: how can a thing so plain as preaching and bread and water carry a grace so divine? The theologians who expounded this section did not shrink from the mystery; they knelt before it, and their reflections reward the closest attention. Calvin's treatment of the means is the fountain from which the tradition drinks, and its keynote is his insistence that the church is the mother of the faithful because she is the channel of the Spirit. He did not confine his thought to the moment of conversion but pressed it to the whole course of the Christian life, and he saw with a clarity all but unique that the ordinances of the church are not mere memorials but genuine means by which the Spirit works. When he speaks of preaching, he calls it the scepter by which Christ rules his church and the very instrument of the Spirit's regenerating power; when he speaks of the sacraments, he teaches that they are seals by which the promise is confirmed and vehicles by which the believer is drawn into closer union with Christ. And behind it all stands his governing conviction, that Christ is not absent from his church but present in it, acting through the word and the sacraments by the power of the Spirit. The minister is nothing, Calvin insists, except an instrument; the efficacy is wholly Christ's. Yet the instrument is appointed, and the man who despises the instrument because it is weak despises, in that weakness, the very wisdom of God, who hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the mighty. This is Calvin's answer to every fanatic who would have the Spirit without the word, and to every formalist who would have the word without the Spirit: Christ hath joined them, and what God hath joined let no man put asunder. Turretin takes up the same doctrine with his characteristic precision and reduces it to its elements in his Institutes of Elenctic Theology. He asks whether the word and the sacraments have any intrinsic efficacy, and answers with a distinction that has never been bettered: the means of grace are not effective by any power residing in themselves, as though the water or the bread or the sound of a man's voice could save; nor are they merely bare and indifferent signs, as though God were not truly present and active in them. They are moral instruments, efficacious in virtue of the divine institution and the accompanying operation of the Spirit. Turretin is ruthless in rejecting both errors. Against Rome he denies that the sacraments confer grace ex opere operato, by the mere doing of the deed; against the enthusiasts he denies that the Spirit ordinarily works apart from the word and the sacraments. The doctrine he leaves us with is the doctrine of the Confession exactly: the means are real means, and the Spirit really works through them, but the power is the Spirit's and the means are his channels. It is a doctrine that keeps the church from both the superstition that trusts the instrument and the presumption that dispenses with it, and it is Turretin's enduring gift to this section. Watson, whose gift was always to turn the driest doctrine into devotion, takes the means of grace and presses them upon the heart. He loves to speak of the word and the sacraments as the golden pipes through which the oil of grace is conveyed to the lamp of the soul, and he will not let the believer pass by the means without asking what use he has made of them. The word, Watson teaches, is the soul's food, and he that would grow must feed; the sacrament is the soul's seal, and he that would be assured must come and set his seal to the covenant; prayer is the soul's breath, and he that would live must breathe. He would have the believer come to the means not out of custom but out of hunger, expecting to meet Christ in them, for Christ is never nearer to his people than when he meets them in his own appointments. And he would have the believer tremble at the thought of neglecting them, for to neglect the means is to despise the channel of grace and, in the ordinary way of God's dealing, to cut oneself off from the very food of the soul. It is Watson's gift to make us ashamed of our coldness at the very table where Christ feeds us, and eager to be where grace is to be found. A. A. Hodge and Robert Shaw, in their commentaries on the Confession, state the same doctrine with complementary clarity. Hodge supplies the analytic backbone: the church is endowed with the ministry, the oracles, and the ordinances for a two-fold purpose, the ingathering and the upbuilding of the saints, and the efficacy of these means lies not in themselves but in the present Christ, who works by his Spirit according to his promise. The word "effectual" is his key, for the same Spirit who makes the effectual call effectual in the heart of the elect makes the means effectual in the church's life. Shaw presses the promise home: the efficacy of the means is not a matter of the eloquence or piety of the minister, but of a promise made by One who cannot lie. The minister may be weak, the congregation small, the ordinances plain; but the promise is sure, and where the promise is, the power is. This is the ground of all encouragement in the ministry. To these voices we may add the later Princeton witness of B. B. Warfield, who saw that the doctrine of the means of grace is the doctrine of the incarnation applied to the church. As Christ in the days of his flesh veiled his glory under a body of humiliation, so Christ in the days of his church veils his power under means of humiliation: a preached word, a little water, a morsel of bread. This is the very manner of God's working, who delights to hide his strength in weakness and to convey his grace through things the world counts foolish. The man who will not stoop to the means will not find the grace, not because the means contain it, but because the God who gives it has appointed to give it through them. The plainness of the means is the very signature of the God who came to us in a manger.

Puritan Application

First, prize the ministry as the gift of the ascended Christ, and hear the preached word as though Christ himself addressed you. The sermon is not a man's performance to be critiqued, nor a weekly lecture to be endured, but the appointed means by which the Lord gathers and perfects his people. When the minister opens the oracles of God, Christ stands behind the word, and the voice you hear is, in the deep sense of the text, the voice of the Shepherd calling his own sheep by name. Come to the preaching, then, not as a critic but as a beggar, hungering for the bread of life, and pray before you come that the Spirit would make the word effectual in your own heart. Lay aside the habit of weighing the preacher's gifts while missing the Lord's voice, for it is a dreadful thing to come week after week within the sound of the gospel and to go away unaltered. The ministry was given for your gathering and your perfecting; see to it that you are not one of those who sit under the means of grace all their lives and yet are never gathered, never changed, never made perfect. Second, honour the oracles of God as the very speech of heaven, and let them rule your whole life. The Scriptures are not a human record to be sifted and corrected, but the oracles of God committed to the church, and the man who owns them as such will treat them very differently from the man who owns them as a book among books. Read them daily, and read them not to be informed only but to be transformed. Judge every opinion, every desire, every plan by this standard: what saith the Scripture? Bring your sorrows to its promises and your sins to its threatenings; let its commands be the rule of your walk and its gospel the ground of your hope. And resist with all your might the temper of the age which would set the living word of God on a level with the words of men, for where the oracles are dishonoured, the ministry becomes opinion and the ordinances become ceremony, and the church is left with nothing but the shifting sand of human wisdom. The church that keeps the oracles keeps everything; the church that loses them has lost, whatever else she keeps, the very voice of God. Third, use the ordinances with reverence and faith, as means of grace and not as empty forms. The preaching, the sacraments, prayer, and the worship of the Lord's house are not things to be observed out of mere custom but to be embraced as the channels through which Christ feeds and strengthens his people. Come to the Lord's Table expecting to meet the Lord at his table; come to the waters of baptism and to the worship of the saints expecting the blessing of the promise, for Christ is never nearer to his people than in his own appointments. But beware of both errors that lie in wait on either hand. Do not trust the ordinance as though it could save by the mere doing of it, for the bread does not nourish the soul, and the water does not wash the heart, apart from the Spirit's blessing. And do not despise the ordinance as though it were of no account, for God has appointed it, and the man who neglects the means God has blessed is cutting himself off from the very channel of the grace he seeks. Use the means as a beggar uses the door of a generous house, not trusting the door but not passing it by. Fourth, look to Christ alone for the efficacy of every means, and be delivered from both the pride and the despair of the ministry. There is pride in the heart of the man who imagines that the success of the word depends upon his own gifts, and there is despair in the heart of the man who concludes that because his gifts are small the word must fail. Both are wrong, and the Confession corrects both at once. Christ doth make the means effectual by his own presence and Spirit; the power is his, and the promise is his, and therefore the weakest instrument in the hand of a present Christ is stronger than the most gifted instrument without him. Rest in this, whether you are a preacher who trembles at his own insufficiency or a hearer who doubts whether any good can come of so plain a ministry. The treasure is in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God and not of us. God hath chosen the weak things of the world, and he will not let his own appointments fail, for his honour is bound up with them. Pray, then, not for more eloquent ministers but for more of Christ's presence in the means, for where the Spirit is, the plainest word is mighty. Fifth, and finally, let the unfinished character of this work make you patient and diligent, for the gathering and perfecting of the saints is to the end of the world, and it is not yet done. Be patient with the church, for she is still a hospital of the healing and a school of the learning, and her members are not yet perfect; bear with their infirmities as God bears with yours, and do not expect of this life what belongs to the next. Be patient with yourself, for your own perfecting is not the work of a day but of a lifetime, and he that has begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ. And be diligent, for the end of the world is not yet come, and while it tarries there are still elect souls to be gathered and saints to be built up, and the means are committed to you that you may be an instrument in the great work. Live every day, then, as one who is himself being perfected and who is called to labour in the perfecting of others, until that day when the gathering is complete and the perfecting is finished, and faith shall give place to sight in the presence of the Lord himself.

Prayer

Almighty and everlasting God, who hast not left Thy church orphaned, but hast furnished her with the ministry, the oracles, and the ordinances of Thine own grace, we bless Thee for these gifts, and we confess that we have too often received them with cold and careless hands. Forgive us our despising of the preached word, our neglect of the sacraments, our coldness in prayer, and our proud measuring of the means by the gifts of men rather than by the promise of God. Teach us to prize what Thou hast given, and to wait upon Thee in Thine own appointed ways. O Lord Jesus Christ, who art ascended far above all heavens, and yet art with Thy church alway, even unto the end of the world, be present with us, we beseech Thee, in the ministry of Thy word and in the administration of Thy sacraments, and make them effectual by Thine own Spirit to the gathering of the elect and the perfecting of the saints. Let not Thy word return unto Thee void, but accomplish that whereto Thou hast sent it; and let every ordinance of Thine house be to us a means of grace and a seal of Thy covenant. Grant, we pray Thee, that we may come to the means as beggars to a door of mercy, hungering for the bread of life and thirsting for the water of the Spirit. Mended what is broken in us, fitted what is rough, and equipped us for every good work, till we all come in the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ. And when the work of gathering and perfecting is done, and the end of the world is come, receive us, with the whole company of the redeemed, into Thine everlasting kingdom, where the means shall cease because the presence shall be full. We ask it in the name and for the sake of Jesus Christ, our only Head, who liveth and reigneth with Thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end. Amen.