According to the 2001 Census, more than seven in ten people in England consider themselves Christian. But a recent church census by Christian Research found that fewer than one in ten of the population actually go to church.”

The Church and her ceremony are vital, even to salvation. In all the confusion about who is in the covenant and who is out, who is of God and who is not, we must not be tempted to draw a line based on our sins against man, as if people who practice a lesser kind of sin against man were in and people who practice a greater kind of sin against man were out. Regarding justification, sin is sin; all sin, no matter what the severity, separates us from God’s redemption. To determine who is in need of salvation and who is not, we must determine who or what a person is worshiping. We should not discern the need of salvation by a person’s degree of sin against man but by their degree of sin against God. The sin I’m referring to is idolatry. But is there a litmus test to determine whether or not a person is in a lifestyle of idolatry and not worshiping God?

The answer lies within the Tables of the Law and its ability to show us the importance of the church and her relation to salvation. Question number 93 in the Heidelberg Catechism briefly explains that the Decalogue (Ten Commandments) is divided into two parts. It states, “How are these commandments divided? Answer: Into two tables; the first of which teaches us how we must behave towards God; the second, what duties we owe to our neighbor.” Why bother dividing the law into these two parts? We do so because that is how God set forth the commandments. He first gives us the foundation upon which all morality lies: His glory - worshiping Him in a corporate context (fourth commandment), speaking of Him properly (third commandment), displaying Him properly (second commandment), and putting Him first above all things (first commandment).     

The gospel is about turning from our autonomy to join God and His authority (Matthew 16:24). If through faith in Christ we obey the first four commandments – the commandments that are directly asking us to give up our autonomy, then the last six will follow suit. By looking carefully at the first four commandments, we can see that the first three culminate in the fourth. In other words, living out the moral implications of having no other gods before us, displaying God properly and without worshiping Him as an image, and speaking of Him and His glory is shown and demonstrated by worshiping Him on the Sabbath day and submitting to the ordinances of the church.

One will say, “But a person can just become a member of a church, attend worship, and then go out and live like hell the rest of the week.” That is not necessarily true.  Not in an apostolic, non-apostate church. Christ speaks of the leaders retaining the “keys to the kingdom” to “loose and bind” (Matthew 16:19). They are given the authority to exercise church discipline. And anyone who tries to worship on the Lord’s day in a biblical church, while living a life of carnality, will fall in the hands of church discipline. If we skip the fourth commandment of worshiping on the Sabbath, proclaiming that obeying the last six commandments shows that we are His, we display arrogance and self-righteousness. In doing this, we are proclaiming that our efforts to obey God are in no need of the teaching and hearing of the Word, the prayers of the saints, the sacraments, and singing: all the things that God has given the elders and deacons to institute during the worship service. This also coincides with Christ’s command to “love thy neighbor as thyself,” because when we submit ourselves to the authority of the worship service, we are indeed “loving our neighbor.” It surely is not love to reject the general calling of the minister and the unification of God’s covenant community. Again, the gospel is about fleeing from autonomy and believing in God’s authority, and God shows us what submitting to His authority looks like in His law.