9-8-2024

Good Morning All,

   Psalm 122:1; “I was glad when they said unto me, Let us go into the house of the LORD.”

     Why do you go to church?  Do you go because your parents make you (even if you’re over 50)?  Do you go because it is a good place to kill some time before the ballgame starts?  Or perhaps to wait until the restaurants open?  Maybe you see it as a way to catch up with friends and neighbors, maybe you come when you are in trouble, and you “want” something from God.  Perhaps you are a little more faithful as the rains stay away.  Perhaps you come to sing the hymns and to listen to what God has to say.

    There are many reasons to come to church, to go into the house of the Lord.  Some of those reasons are pretty good reasons and some of those reasons, well; the Spirit can always work on us where the Word is preached.  But the reason we join together or assemble together is because God calls us to do so.

    God calls us together, through His Holy Spirit, to have a conversation with us.  God calls us together to talk to us.  That is why we tend to call our services “Divine Services.”  Most others don’t see this as we do; but we see this as an act of God.  This is God acting on our behalf and for our good.  When we think of worship, we tend to see it as what we do for God.  Now we do respond to God’s grace and mercy with praise and thanksgiving but even that is led by the Spirit who prays for us in a way that we cannot understand.

     God speaks to his people and tells them to remember.  We are to remember our crucified and risen Savior.  We are to remember how gracious and loving God is in creating and sustaining his creation.  We are to remember how God called us out of sin and darkness to be his people by Baptism through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.  And God reminds us that we are witnesses to his mercy, to his love and to the death and resurrection of Jesus.

    God speaks to us as His holy people, his chosen nation, his royal priests. We are God’s children, blessed by him, loved by him, protected by Him.  We live toward the reign of God inaugurated in Jesus Christ.

     Yet even as we look at what God has done; we focus on what is to be.  Every service we pray “come, Lord Jesus” return and reign over us in your glorified presence when death is conquered completely, and we can live once again with you in the new Eden. God calls, refreshes, and renews our body and soul.  We are fed with his precious body and blood and thus join with him in the Passover from death to life and receive from him the promise of eternal life.  God calls us to this and more. To these wondrous gifts we can only stare, but the Spirit prays for us in groans too deep to understand.  God calls us to be his own, listen to the call.

 Dear Father in heaven, you call us to be your own and to guard us, guide us and protect us from all the arrows that devil has.  Keep is, dear Lord, wrapped safely in your arms.  Hide us in the shadow of your wings and bring us safely home to be with you.  This we ask in the precious name of Jesus, amen.

God’s Peace,

Pastor Bret