How do we remember God’s story, week in and week out? Short answer: The service and all the stuff we do in the service. This is where we’re going over the next several weeks.
The service itself tells a story.
The stuff that we do tells the gospel story.
When we preach, we preach from the Bible–the very Word of God, God’s revelation to us. Our preaching and receiving this revelation, our response to it, is worship.
When we sing, like the Psalmists, we recount the mighty works of God, we glory in the One who has made himself known to us by singing what we know to be true about him, and we focus our hearts and minds together on him.
When we confess our sins, we are rehearsing the Law/Gospel–we see how short we fall and we receive the mercy of God. We need to be reminded that, if we cannot be marked by perfection we must be marked by repentance. We need to be reminded that we need the righteousness of Christ.
When we confess the Creed, we remember what the Church has taught for 2000 years. We confess that we believe this to be the true story of the whole world. This is the narrative that frames all others.
When we pray, we pray with expectation, that the God who has been faithful in the past will continue to be faithful in the future, answering our prayers that we bring to him in faith.
When we take the Lord’s Supper, we remember and proclaim the death of Christ until he comes! When we eat the bread and drink the juice, we are rehearsing the story of Christ’s passion.
When we sing the doxology at the end of the service, we remind ourselves where the whole story ends – in the worship of the triune God. In this sure and steady hope, then, we send one another out into the world, an agent of reconciliation in a world of strife, an agent of peace in a world of chaos, and an agent of hope in a world of despair.
Worship remembers and rehearses God’s story. We’ll really dig in here over the next few weeks, considering the biblical commands and patterns that inform our worship services.
