Travis Fentiman
Puritan Board Sophomore
Anyone who reads the book of Acts will be struck with how simple that standard of apostolic worship was. The more simple the worship is, the more spiritual it will be shown to be, when persons have nothing else to cling to in it but the Word of God laid bare, in the praying, the singing, the reading and the preaching of the Word.
The simplicity and spirituality of Christian worship, in contradistinction to much Christian worship today, used to be a well-known doctrine of the Reformation and of presbyterians. I have compiled a number of resources from the Post-Reformation era on this topic, and hope it will inspire your heart unto a love for this principle.
George Gillespie:
The simplicity and spirituality of Christian worship, in contradistinction to much Christian worship today, used to be a well-known doctrine of the Reformation and of presbyterians. I have compiled a number of resources from the Post-Reformation era on this topic, and hope it will inspire your heart unto a love for this principle.
George Gillespie:
“That the [Anglican] Ceremonies [being imposed on the Church of Scotland] are a great hinderance to edification appears, first, in that they obscure the substance of religion and weaken the life of godliness by outward glory and splendor, which draws away the minds of people so after it that they forget the substance of the service which they are about… departing from the apostolical and most ancient simplicity, and for adding ceremonies unto ceremonies in a worldly splendor and spectability, whereas the worship of God ought to be pure and simple…
Secondly, the Ceremonies are impediments to the inward and spiritual worship, because they are fleshly and external…” – English Popish Ceremonies (1637), pp. 19-20