Served by Him

We are all familiar with the tendency in modern American Christianity to treat the worship of the Lord’s Day as though it were a shopping mall, to which we come to pick and choose what we think will most benefit us, to purchase what we desire for ourselves. We worship here the way we worship partly to counteract that trend. We insist that worship must be in accordance with God’s Word, and that the whims of self-absorbed evangelicals are not a good reason to do anything.But every error always produces an equal and opposite reaction, and the common response to the consumer mentality in American evangelical worship is to say something like “We come to give—give praise to God, give him worship, give him service, give him glory—and we do not come to receive anything.” This approach to worship could not be more wrong, and it has the added danger of cultivating a mindset that supposes that God actually needs us—needs us to praise him, to serve him, to worship him.

In contrast to both of these tendencies, we insist that we come in worship each Lord’s day with hands wide open and arms outstretched to God to receive the blessing he has for us—but we come not looking for what we think we want, but what he has decided to give us. We glorify God not by presenting ourselves as worthy to be in his court, but we present ourselves nonetheless, and he shows forth his glory by making unworthy servants glorious. On the cover of our bulletin what we are doing is described as “the Divine Service of Covenant Renewal”. That means not that we have come to serve him (though we do so as his household servants), but especially that he has called us into his house in order that he may serve us. In worship on the Lord’s Day, we do nothing less than glorify God by completely giving ourselves to him, to do with as he pleases. But take note that it is the Lord’s good pleasure to give himself back to you, and in so doing, to bless you, to glorify you, to transform you, to care for you, to heal you.

This is nowhere more apparent than in the Lord’s Table, the goal and climax of our worship. We saw in the book of Ruth this morning that the fact that the holy and good God wisely rules and governs all his creatures and all their actions is cause for us to be ready to place ourselves, even and especially in our suffering, in his hands and completely to entrust ourselves and our loved ones into his care. We must do this all the time, of course, but the model for what we do every other day is again what we do right here at the Holy Supper. We entrust ourselves entirely to him, and demonstrate our complete dependence upon him for all our sustenance, for all our nourishment, for our every breath. For to come to the Lord’s Table—to come and feast with the creator of the heavens and the earth, is to give yourself to him entirely, and to receive nothing less than his own gift of himself back to you. And if we are his, and he is ours, we can endure everything for his sake and in accordance with his purposes.

This is the Lord’s table…