This article considers how the Sunday worship service is to impact the rest of our week, such that there is much continuity between corporate worship and our daily affairs, including personal worship, listening to God’s Word, and prayer.

Source: De Reformatie. 3 pages. Translated by Bert Stulp.

Worship Service

Church inside

Searching for God🔗

We believe in God, who created this world and who through Christ is our Father. That is the most essential thing in our lives. But at the same time that faith is placed under heavy pressure. For we stand in a world that lives as if God does not exist. That creates a tension that we cannot ignore. The world is not far away, and in many ways its influence is present in our lives. That can greatly obscure our view of God. As a Christian you are constantly faced with the question, “Where is God?”

Now we know the answer to that question. God made himself known to us. But at the same time we have to realize that it is of great importance to search for him there where he lets himself be found. For we have to observe in all sobriety that many people can get entangled in questions that this world imposes upon them. There are many believers for whom the question “Where is God?” gradually changes into the question, “Is God actually there?”

Therefore, it is so fundamental that we keep on searching for God. If we want to have a real defence against the secularization that is washing over us, then the decision here will be: the worship service of God is of primary importance.

The Church Service🔗

Using the term “worship service” makes us think almost automatically of the Sunday church service. That is also very obvious. We engage there in the worship of God. We seek him there, because it is exactly there that he comes to us. He gives himself in his gospel; he speaks in the reading of Scripture; we hear his voice in the preaching and, don’t forget, in the blessing we receive when we go home. That is how he leads us to give ourselves to him. We can give ourselves completely in the confession of our guilt, in our prayer, in our singing and playing with which we praise him and in the gifts we bring to give him thanks.

In this way the entire church service carries the mark of a real meeting with God. The worship service is a real proof that God is there and that you will find him when you search for him.

Still, in daily life it is not that simple for everyone. There are enough people for whom the worship service causes problems. Often that is caused by the vast difference they taste between those church services and their everyday lives. That can be a world of difference.

When throughout the week you are in the midst of life, with all that is attached to it, and on Sundays you come to church and suddenly it is about completely different matters that in everyday life are actually out of sight, it causes considerable problems. You wonder whether what you hear in church refers to your life. Then sometimes you conclude that you actually cannot deal with the church service. Not a few who left the church lost their motivation to go to church in this way.

Not Two Worlds🔗

It is vital that the church service and our regular lives do not begin to form two worlds. Sooner or later that means that the space for our service to God is determined by how much is left over for it from the rest of our lives in this world. That cannot be much. It is therefore very important that in the church it will become very clear what the church service means for our entire lives. Prayer and preaching may not be out of touch with daily life, for when the impression is given that all important matters of this world can be untouched by the church service, then it is ultimately not clear what is so decisive in our Sunday church attendance. That places a heavy responsibility upon the leaders in the church. (We should think of that in our prayers.)

Still, it is not fair to look at the role of the leaders only, because the distance between church service and daily life can grow too in a different way: when the Sunday worship service does not rest upon daily worship in your personal life.

Personal Worship🔗

Together we acknowledge that on Sundays in church we are at the source. Yet there are enough people who do not experience that in daily life. The Sunday is then not nearly so much of a feast as we say that it should be. (Not to mention the celebration of the Lord’s Supper!)

But a feast that you celebrate together only gets its meaning against the background of your further association with one another! Anyone who is going to celebrate a feast with people whom he does not care about will be disappointed. It will become a forced affair. When in daily life you cannot get along, the joy during the feast will be equally low, but that will be even more the case of our meeting with God. For the church is after all not the only place where you can hear him speak. Throughout the week you also read your Bible and you pray to him. But when your encounters with him in regular life are scarce and have little content, your entire intercourse with him will become meager. And then the church service will of course soon become a foreign element in your life. You may still feel that attending church is something you ought to do. But it will lack cohesion. It will have little to do with the rest of your life. But that is when the likelihood is greatest that it will disappoint you. You can of course not expect that in a single hour you recover what you left out the entire week yourself.

church on island

Then the church service has indeed become a world apart, an island that lies like a boulder in the channel of your further life. The current of your daily existence collides with it as if it does not belong to it.

What matters is that our personal worship service to God is alive. Actually, it is the root. That is where the decision is made about how we stand in the world.

There are signs that indicate that personal worship is under pressure. It is therefore important that we work at that and encourage one another not to slacken off.

Listening🔗

A worship service to God is a meeting that God organizes himself. He comes to us. To meet God therefore begins with listening. That seems to be self-evident.

Still, it is not redundant to draw attention to that attitude of listening, because not only do we tend to talk too easily (about what keeps us busy), but we are also so deaf to what we do not immediately recognize as important for our lives. Especially on this point one can observe a certain “reading-blindness.” That is because we tend so quickly to approach the Bible from the viewpoint of our questions. But whoever does so will rarely find the answers he expects. After all, the Bible has not been written from our perspective on this world. Whoever forgets that can easily end up in a crisis of faith. If you read from your own perspective, there is so much in the Bible that does not look relevant. You will soon read selectively. Your Bible becomes irrevocably thinner and it will certainly be opened less frequently, and even then just ajar. Ultimately, it will not have much of a message to you.

That is how you continue to be locked up in a vicious circle. For you think only from your own experience, you remain locked up in your own world. You don’t find God anymore because you only searched for him where you yourself saw room for him. But the characteristic for listening to God is that he places you in his room. To really listen is to be open for what the Other has to say.

He who speaks is the God who created this world and still maintains and rules it. He is the God who makes life free and works on a new world. If there is anyone who knows what is relevant in the world we live in, it is he. For he shows us the meaning of his creation and exposes the distress of this world. He declares his plan of salvation and directs our lives to his future.

Reading from that expectation, you realize how much God’s Word is a revelation. You learn that this world and your place in it are not even the first questions of your life: you learn to see them in his light.

Praying🔗

He who has learned how to listen to God, will begin to ask for Him. In prayer you hold on to what he promises.

But if you have difficulties listening, that will also work through in your prayer. It shows that a crisis of faith is most of the times also a crisis of prayer.

We must not ignore that crisis. There are many questions and difficulties about the sense of our praying, but almost always they are connected to the question of God’s nearness in our lives. When you don’t notice that God is there, your prayer can fizzle out like a candle flame.

Candle

It is striking how the Lord Christ brought up this crisis of prayer on different occasions and then always exhorted to persevere and not to slacken off. He knows where we are vulnerable!

And we have a Bible full of prayers from which we can learn, and exactly there we very often find the complaint that a psalmist does not notice anymore that God is there. We are not the first ones in whom the sight of God has been obscured. In all ages the children of God have wrestled with it, that sometimes God seemed to hide himself. But it is remarkable that especially in those situations their prayer did not grow silent, but often even got more urgent. That they did not give up was because they knew God, because they knew they could count on him. That is an important indication for us, not to slack off in our personal worship of him.

Complete Worship Service🔗

He who listens to what God is promising will hold on to that and will continue to ask for that. Then it is no question anymore whether he exists. But then you will not live as if he does not exist either. A worship service can grow so that it rules your entire life. For a worship service in the church or in your personal life cannot be separate from the rest of your life. When “worship service” means that you give yourself to him who gave himself first, then there is nothing in your life that is beyond that. That is how Paul describes it in Romans 12:1. He who lives out of Christ’s atoning sacrifice knows himself to be called to offer his life in thanksgiving. That is the fundamental answer to all secularism. It often remains a struggle not to divide your life between church and world, but life becomes integrated by true worship service.

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