Worship Preparation Guide for Sunday November 15

This Sunday we will be in Isaiah chapter five.  It is the concluding passage in the opening section of Isaiah, and a disturbing closing scene it is!  The message is dark, distressing, and yet it is clear.  There is a point when God’s blessings can be so ignored and abused that only judgment remains.  We’ve heard it before, but again this reminder is necessary: Isaiah chapter 5 is not just a warning for the ancient people of Judah.  It is for us as well.  It is a word of warning to the church that has more advantages, more resources, more teaching and training than any other generation of believers.  What is the result of these blessings; where is the fruit?

As you prepare for worship read Isaiah 5 and John 15: 1-10.  What similarities do you see in God’s requirement for fruitfulness and His response to fruitlessness?  Being in Christ is not a static relationship.  Jesus declared that our fruitfulness is directly linked to our abiding in Him.  Every genuine believer will bear fruit.  The closer we stay to Christ, the more fruit we will bear.  One of the ways we draw closer to Christ is though meeting with our church family for worship. 

What was the Lord looking for from his vineyard in Isaiah 5?  In one word we can summarize the answer: obedience.  In John 15:10 Jesus gives us a picture of what it looks like to abide in Jesus.  “If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love.”  To abide in Jesus means to keep his commandments, and he tells us that keeping his commandments means to loving God with all our hearts and souls and minds and loving our neighbor as ourselves (Matthew 22:37–39).  It’s the same righteousness and justice we read about in Isaiah.  We abide in Christ through a relationship of love.  We trust His love.  We pray confidently in His love.  We obey because of His love.  We worship in His love.  Even God’s judgment and wrath flow from His love. 

Worship is one of the primary means the Holy Spirit uses to enable us to abide in the vine, to thrive in the life of Christ, to be fruitful as God desires and requires.  

Donald Whitney says that in worship we “place ourselves in the path of God’s grace and seek him as Bartimaeus and Zacchaeus placed themselves in Jesus’s path and sought him”.  Whitney also says, “There’s an element of worship and Christianity that cannot be experienced in private worship or by watching worship.  There are some graces and blessings that God gives only in ‘meeting together’ with other believers” (Spiritual Disciplines, 19 & 92). 

For those with ears to hear it, this Sunday’s passage is a fearful message from the Holy God.  May we all hear the word of the Lord, and tremble at it. 

Thus says the LORD: “Heaven is my throne, 

and the earth is my footstool;

What is the house that you would build for me, 

and what is the place of my rest?

All these things my hand has made, 

and so all these things came to be, 

declares the LORD.

But this is the one to whom I will look: 

he who is humble and contrite in spirit

and trembles at my word.  (Isaiah 66:1-2)