Worship Preparation Guide for Sunday, May 8

As you prepare for worship this week please take some time to read Isaiah 25.  Read it multiple times.  Take in the vision of the “mountain of the LORD of Hosts”.  It will be a place where an amazing banquet awaits, well prepared and more extravagant than anything we could imagine.  Hymn writer Isaac Watts described it this way:

The hill of Zion yields

A thousand sacred sweets

Before we reach the heavenly fields,

Or walk the golden streets.

(We Are Marching to Zion, pub. 1707)

It is also a place where death is swallowed up forever; a place where the Sovereign Lord of the Universe will personally wipe away every tear from every face.  

He will swallow up death forever;

and the Lord GOD will wipe away tears from all faces,

and the reproach of his people

he will take away from all the earth,

for the LORD has spoken. (Isaiah 25:8)

Death has lost its sting and the grave has been robbed of its victory (1 Cor. 15: 55).  God the Father has defeated death forever in the death and resurrection of his Son, Jesus Christ.  

As we gather for worship we await the day when the promise of Isaiah 25 will be fulfilled.  We will see this place through the lens of God’s Word.  We will hear it described and applied through the preaching of the biblical text.  We will sing about it.  And we will participate in it through believer’s baptism and the Lord’s Supper. 

Through baptism we testify to our assurance in this promise.  We will witness the picture and hear the testimony of the death, burial and resurrection that belongs to those who have trusted in Jesus.   As you witness this baptism I encourage you to reflect back on your conversion and baptism.   Recall the joy and thankfulness that was yours when you first trusted in Christ and received your salvation.  Isaiah 25 begins with an individual’s song of praise.  Come prepared to testify and sing, “O LORD, you are my God, I will exalt you….”

Through Communion (the Lord’s Supper) we will participate in the celebration of our deliverance from death, our adoption into the eternal family of God and the assurance of our place at the table on the mountain of the LORD of Hosts.  This deliverance and meal of remembrance is first pictured God’s rescue of his people from slavery in Egypt (Exodus 12).  Jesus announced the fulfillment of this deliverance on the night before he accomplished it through his death and resurrection (Matt 26, Mk 14, Lk 22, Jn 13). 

What is foreseen in Isaiah 25 is clarified for us in Revelation 19:

Let us rejoice and exult

and give him the glory,

for the marriage of the Lamb has come,

and his Bride has made herself ready;

it was granted her to clothe herself

with fine linen, bright and pure”—

for the fine linen is the righteous deeds of the saints.

And the angel said to me, “Write this:

Blessed are those who are invited to

the marriage supper of the Lamb.” And he said to me,

“These are the true words of God.”   (Rev 19:7-9)

Through our singing, praying, listening; through believer’s baptism and the Lord’s Supper we will be proclaiming,

“Behold, this is our God;

we have waited for him, that he might save us.

This is the LORD; we have waited for him;

let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation.” (Isaiah 25:9)

I’m praying for you and I look forward to seeing you this Sunday.