New Morning Mercies #338

Corporate worship is a regular, gracious reminder that it’s not about you. You’ve been born into a life that is a celebration of another.

Corporate worship is a celebration that serves as a very important reminder for us all. We gather together to celebrate the One who created, controls, and sits at the center of all things. Every biblical worship service is guided and shaped by the words of Romans 11:33–36:

Oh, the depths of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!

“For who has known the mind of the Lord,

or who has been his counselor?”

“Or who has given a gift to him

that he might be repaid?”

For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen.

The final verse says it all. It is not only a prescription for every worship service, but also a powerful statement about what life is all about. Life is not about us. It is not about our wants, our needs, or our feelings. It is not about our comfort, pleasure, and ease. It is not about us getting our personal definition of happiness. It’s not about our satisfaction and contentment. It’s not about how many of our dreams we actually get to experience. It’s not about our successes and achievements. It’s not about how successfully we avoid difficulty and suffering. It’s not about how well our relationships are working.

It’s not wrong to desire personal happiness, peace, a healthy body, and healthy relationships. The issue is this—these things must not rule our hearts, because when they do, they place us at the center of our world and make it all about us. It is sad that many people, even professing Christians, live in a way that is God-forgetting and God-replacing. We put ourselves in the center, we decide for ourselves what we want life to be like, and we reduce God to little more than the delivery system for our catalog of self-oriented dreams.

So corporate worship calls us back again and again to remember and to celebrate. It calls us to remember that all that exists, including us, is from God, exists through him, and points to him. He is the beginning, the center, and the end of all things. His will is preeminent and will be done. His kingdom will come. Grace decimates our lordship and causes us to bow to the one true Lord. It is only by grace that we celebrate a lordship other than our own. Corporate worship points us to our need for and the availability of that grace.

For further study and encouragement: Romans 11