God’s Word for You
Acts 20:6-7 Worship, Word and Sacrament
by Pastor Timothy Smith on Tuesday, December 1, 2020
6 But we sailed from Philippi after the Feast of Unleavened Bread, and five days after that we joined the others at Troas, where we stayed for seven days. 7 On the first day of the week, when we gathered together to break bread, Paul spoke to the people and, because he planned to leave the next day, he kept on talking until midnight.
These verses tell us quite a bit about worship in the 50s. First, they were still celebrating the Feast of Unleavened Bread (Passover), but there is no doubt that they also remembered what had taken place just over twenty years before, since Paul includes the words so vividly in his (recent) First Letter to the Corinthians: “The Lord Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, ‘This is my body, which is for you; do this in remembrance of me.’ In the same way, after supper he took the cup, saying, ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood; do this, whenever you drink it, in remembrance of me.’ For whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes” (1 Corinthians 11:23-26). So their worship would include a memorial of the suffering and death of Jesus, of course, but also the triumph of the resurrection following his burial three days before. And there would be a recitation of some of the things Jesus said, especially the beautiful words of the consecration of the elements of the Lord’s Supper with the Lord’s own explanation.
After this Easter celebration in Philippi, Paul and Luke joined the others across the Aegean Sea in Troas, which was where Paul and Luke had first met. The sea voyage that had taken two days with a favorable wind (Acts 16:11) now took five; a reminder of the challenges of sea travel in the days of sail.
The second piece of information about worship is given to us: It was “On the first day of the week.” We might ask which day Luke means. If he is using Jewish time, then this would have been Saturday night. But if he is using Roman time, then this would be Sunday night. The matter is settled in verse 11 when the “first day” is carried through to sunrise the next morning. Jewish time reckoned from sunset to sunset. He must be using Roman time, and therefore we see that the Christians of Troas were already at this early date worshiping God on Sunday and not on Saturday. Sunday is a celebration of Easter, all through the church year. We see John the Apostle call Sunday “the Lord’s Day” later, in Revelation 1:10. Christians are not commanded to set aside Sunday as our particular day of worship. There is no law that governs us about a certain day as Sabbath day. The Third Commandment shows us that God wants us to thank him for his goodness by regarding his Word as holy and gladly hearing and learning it. “The law from your mouth is more precious to me than thousands of pieces of silver or gold” (Psalm 119:72). Jesus said, “Everyone who listens to the Father and learns from him comes to me” (John 6:45).
Third, we see that the worship in Troas involved the Lord’s Supper, since they came together to break bread. The Lord instituted Holy Communion so that we would receive forgiveness by means of his gospel, individually by eating his body with the bread and drinking his blood with the wine, on a regular basis.
Finally, worship regularly involves the preaching of the Word of God. Sometimes this might simply be reading or reciting the text itself, as Moses does in Moab before the Israelites entered the Promised Land (Deuteronomy 1:6, 5:5, etc.). Or it might explain the Word of God, as Ezra did for the people of Jerusalem, “making it clear and giving the meaning so that the people could understand what was being read” (Nehemiah 8:1,8). Paul had a lot to say to the Trojans. Luke tells us that Paul planned to leave the next day, and so the sermon went on into the small hours of the night.
When we worship, we have the opportunity to hear the Word of God itself. We sing, we pray together, we hear a sermon prepared for us for that day, that occasion. We should remember to thank God for those blessings, for the ones, those “watchmen on the walls” (Ezekiel 33:7) called to lead worship and to proclaim God’s Word for us. But Jesus spoke to us all when he said, “Blessed are those who hear the Word of God and obey it” (Luke 11:28).
In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith
Pastor Smith serves St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in New Ulm, Minnesota. To receive God’s Word for You via e-mail, please visit the St. Paul’s Lutheran Church website.