As Was His Custom

Today in worship, we saw among other things that every Sabbath, Jesus "went to the synagogue," "as was his custom" (Luke 4:16).

If anyone had the right to think that he didn’t need to go to worship it was Jesus. Think how often he had to sit through subpar teaching. It would’ve been easy to say: “I don’t need to go to synagogue. I can commune better with the Father without the distraction of bad preaching and people I don't have a lot in common with."

Yet it was his custom. Weekly worship attendance is the fixed point for any life and any family that seeks to glorify God.

B.B. Warfield has some insightful words on Jesus' weekly discipline of corporate worship: If ever there was one who might justly plead that the common worship of the community had nothing to offer him it was the Lord Jesus Christ. But every Sabbath found him seated in his place among the worshipping people…. It is a reminder,” as Sir William Robertson Nicoll well insists, “of the truth which…we are apt to forget — that the holiest personal life can scarcely afford to dispense with stated forms of devotion, and that the regular public worship of the church, for all its local imperfections and dullness, is a divine provision for sustaining the individual soul.”“We cannot afford to be wiser than our Lord in this matter. If any one could have pled that his spiritual experience was so lofty that it did not require public worship, if any one might have felt that the consecration and communion of his personal life exempted him from what ordinary mortals needed, it was Jesus. But he made no such plea. Sabbath after Sabbath even he was found in the place of worship, side by side with God’s people…. Is it reasonable, then, that any of us should think we can safely afford to dispense with the pious custom of regular participation with the common worship of our locality? (Selected Shorter Writings, 1:421–422:).