The object of their worship, then, was known by the people among whom
they lived. Singing hymns to Christus as a god is nearly all that the
Roman proconsul in his well-known letter could find to tell his
master of their worship. They were the worshippers--not merely the
disciples--of one Christ. That was their peculiar distinction. Among
the worshippers of the false gods they stood erect; before Him, and
Him only, they bowed. In Corinth there was the polluted worship of
Aphrodite and of Zeus. These men called not on the name of these
lustful and stained deities, but on the name of the Lord Jesus
Christ. And everybody knew whom they worshipped, and understood whose
men they were. Is that true about us? Do we Christian men so
habitually cultivate the remembrance of Jesus Christ, and are we so
continually in the habit of invoking His aid, and of contemplating
His blessed perfections and sufficiency, that every one who knew us
would recognise us as meant by those who call on the name of the Lord
Jesus Christ?
If this be the proper designation of Christian people, alas! alas!
for so many of the professing Christians of this day, whom neither
bystanders nor themselves would think of as included in such a name!
Further, the connection here shows that the divine worship of Christ
was universal among the churches. There was no 'place' where it was
not practised, no community calling itself a church to whom He was
not the Lord to be invoked and adored. This witness to the early and
universal recognition in the Christian communities of the divinity of
our Lord is borne by an undisputedly genuine epistle of Paul's. It is
one of the four which the most thorough-going destructive criticism
accepts as genuine. It was written before the Gospels, and is a voice
from the earlier period of Paul's apostleship. Hence the importance
of its attestation to this fact that all Christians everywhere, both
Jewish, who had been trained in strict monotheism, and Gentile, who
had burned incense at many a foul shrine, were perfectly joined
together in this, that in all their need they called on the name of
Jesus Christ as Lord and brought to Him, as divine, adoration not to
be rendered to any creatures. From the day of Pentecost onwards, a
Christian was not merely a disciple, a follower, or an admirer, but a
worshipper of Christ, the Lord.
II. We may see here an unfolding of the all-sufficiency of Jesus
Christ.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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