Worship Preparation Guide for Sunday, June 22

One of the privileges that is ours as followers of Christ is that of worship.  This is something we can do anytime, anyplace and in many ways.  In fact, scripture makes it clear that our very lives – everything we are and everything we do – is to be offered to God as our “reasonable worship”. (Rom 12: 1)  

But something unique and extraordinary occurs when we worship together.   While we are individually “the temple of the Holy Spirit”, we are corporately “God’s building” (I Cor 3:9) and a “spiritual house” made up of “living stones” (2 Pet 2:4) set apart by God “to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ”, and to “proclaim the excellencies of Him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.  (1 Pet 2:9)

Donald Whitney helps us understand the uniqueness of our corporate worship and what distinguishes it from individual private worship:

God will manifest His presence in congregational worship in ways you can never know even in the most glorious secret worship.  That’s because you are not only a temple of God as an individual, but the Bible says (and far more often) that Christians collectively are God’s temple …….God manifests Himself in different ways to the “living stones” of His temple when they are gathered than He does to them when they are apart.  (quoted by Joshua Harris in Stop Dating the Church, p. 53-54)

Our corporate worship glorifies God, and edifies and strengthens us in ways that nothing else can.  No TV worship service, no recorded sermon, no group Bible study, no private worship time out in nature, none of these can replace gathering with God’s people for corporate worship. 

For through Him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father.  So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus Himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord.  In Him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit.  (Ephesians 2:18-22)

One of the passages we will briefly examine this week is also in Ephesians.  In Ephesians 5 Paul uses the image of marriage in describing Jesus’ love for His church.  He writes: “Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave Himself up for her” (Ephesians 5:25)

Jesus loves His church, and we should love it as deeply and unconditionally as He does.  We should be leading our families to this same love and commitment.   My prayer has been that the short sermon series we begin this week will be used by God to accomplish this.  Would you join me in praying for this?  The study guide for this sermon series will be Thom Rainer’s book, I Am A Church Member.   Copies are available at the church. 

Gathering together with God’s people for corporate worship is an important part of this love relationship. 

We a privilege is ours to gather together and come into the presence of our Gracious, Holy God!

As a part of our worship we will sing this old hymn How Sweet and Aweful (Awesome) Is The Place  by the hymn writer Isaac Watts (1707)

How sweet and awesome is this place
[originally awful) 

With Christ within the doors,


While everlasting love displays


The choicest of her stores!

While all our hearts and all our songs


Join to admire the feast,


Each of us cry, with thankful tongues,


“Lord, why was I a guest?

“Why was I made to hear Thy voice,


And enter while there’s room,


When thousands make a wretched choice,


And rather starve than come?”

’Twas the same love that spread the feast


That sweetly drew us in;


Else we had still refused to taste,


And perished in our sin.

Pity the nations, O our God!


Constrain the earth to come;


Send Thy victorious Word abroad,


And bring the strangers home.

We long to see Thy churches full,


That all the chosen race


May with one voice, and heart and soul,


Sing Thy redeeming grace.