Does It Not Get Old

Yonatan has been going to the same place for six years and he has started counting the ceiling tiles.

Not out of contempt. That is what he would want you to know first. These are his people. His children are known there by name and somebody brought them food for three weeks when his wife was ill and nobody made a thing of it.

But the hour has gone hollow on him.

It does the same thing every week. The same order, in the same sequence, with a good number of the same words in it, and he has reached the point where he knows what is coming next and can hear himself saying a line before he says it.

And what has crept in behind that, and this is the part that worries him, is a suspicion.

He looks around and thinks: does anybody here mean this? Or is it just what we do?

He said something to his wife in the car and she said, fairly, "You are the one who is bored, not them."

So one week, out of pure irritation, he counted.

He decided to work out how much of that hour is actually in the New Testament and how much is a habit somebody picked up two hundred years ago and nobody has questioned since. He was expecting a result. He was expecting to find that the answer was almost none of it and to be quietly and sadly proved right.

He used the sentence in Acts where Luke describes what the very first church did, because it is the earliest description we have of a group of Christians doing anything on a repeated basis.

Four things.

And all four were in the hour. Every one, plainly, and he had been standing in them for six years.

There were also two things that are not in that verse and are somebody's later practice, and he had assumed the whole hour was made of those.

He sat in the car with that for a while.

Then he asked his father in law, who has been going to the same building for fifty-one years, and asked it slightly rudely because he was still irritated. He said, "Does it not get old?"

And the old man said, "It got old about fifty years ago."

Which was not what Yonatan expected.

And then he said the thing Yonatan has not stopped thinking about since: "It is not there to stay new. It is there so that I get all four whether or not I came in wanting them."

Now let me ask what you expected to find.

Because if this is you, you have been running a suspicion for a while without ever testing it, and the suspicion has cost you something, and you have never once sat down and counted.

Four things, continually

Luke tells us what the first church did, three thousand people in, days old, with no buildings and no order of service and nothing that anybody had got into a rut about yet.

They were continually devoting themselves to the apostles' teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer.Acts 2:42

Look at what that sentence is.

It is a list. Four items, and Luke wrote them down because they were repeatable and repeated, and that is the whole reason a thing can be described at all.

Continually devoting themselves. The word carries persistence, sticking at something. Not: they did these when it seemed right. They kept at these four.

And notice what is not in the verse. There is no mood in it. Luke does not say they felt a particular way, and he is not shy about atmosphere elsewhere in the same chapter. Here he lists practices.

Now, I want to be careful, because people fight about what an hour should contain and how, and those are long and serious arguments among serious people, and I am not going to settle any of them in a paragraph and it would be dishonest to pretend I could.

What Acts 2:42 gives us is not an order of service. It is the observation that there was something to observe. From the first week, there was a shape.

So hear this said over you, sitting in a car park having just counted. The shape you have been standing inside is not somebody's dead habit, and the four things that reach you through it are the same four that reached the first three thousand. That is written in Luke's own description of the earliest church there was, and it is the Holy Spirit who was poured out on that same day and has never left the room since, and He works through ordinary means in ordinary rooms.

Now let me guard you, because there are two ways to lose this.

The first is to conclude that because the shape is good, your boredom is a sin.

It is not. Your father in law told you it got old fifty years ago, and he is not in trouble either. Familiarity is what happens to a human being with anything they do weekly, and the Bible nowhere requires you to feel fresh. A man who tells you your flatness is disobedience is adding a weight nobody put on you.

And the second is where you have been heading, which is to conclude that because you feel nothing, nothing is happening.

That is the one that will actually cost you, and it does not follow. You have been treating your own experience of the hour as a measurement of the hour, and it is not one. It is a measurement of you, in that week, in the state you arrived in.

Here is what a shape is for, and it is your father in law's whole sentence.

It is so that the four things reach you on the weeks you arrive with nothing.

If the hour depended on the room being moved, then on a week when nobody was moved, nothing would happen. Teaching would be skipped because nobody felt taught. Prayer would be brief because nobody felt prayerful. And the person who most needed all four, who is nearly always the person who came in emptiest, would go home with none of them.

The shape is aimed at that person. It is aimed at you in eleven weeks' time on a bad Sunday.

The word says faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God, which is a mechanism and not a mood, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes what is God's and makes it known, and He is not restricted to weeks in which the hearer arrived hungry.

This tradition wrote its shape down and got mocked for it for centuries. But the argument was never that a form makes a person holy. It was that the four things are too important to be left to whoever is present and however they happen to feel, and that a church which improvises them will, over a long enough run, quietly stop doing the hardest ones.