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Dear Friends of Covenant Fellowship, Greetings on a warm and beautiful fall afternoon. As always I look forward to our worship this Sunday. As we think of gathering together, let us prepare our hearts and minds for coming into God’s presence as His people. Below are a few suggestions for preparing for corporate worship. They are written with Sunday worship in mind, but many of the principles can be applied to cell group worship preparation. Please know I am a realist about these things. A friend of mine didn't refer to Sunday morning as the arsenic hour for nothing. Perhaps you can find something useful here. 1. Have a low key Saturday night, which would include praying and reading hymns, and a reasonably early bed. Try to avoid a frantic or commercial spirit just prior to worship….I think the idea of beginning Sabbath on Saturday sundown is right on target, and have spoken of this many times in the past. This also allows us opportunity to see Sunday evening as a preparatory time for the week ahead without feeling we are violating the point of Sabbath. 2. Pray for the corporate worship. Pray for the Spirit to move in our midst, to inform and quicken the preaching, the sharing, the singing. Pray for others to be able to prepare for worship….We cast ourselves upon the mercy of God and say, as the psalmist did in Psalm 27, do not hide Thy face from me! Praying for others allows us to remember that we worship as a body, as a group, out of our shared life together in Christ. 3. Prepare Sunday meals on Saturday, to decrease the Sunday morning “panic.”….I think this is a very good idea, and have often suggested it in the past in my talks on Sabbath. Even if we go right home after corporate worship, it is easy to be in a panic about preparing lunch if we haven’t planned ahead, but then we’re panicky on top of being hungry! I guess lots of Christians have managed to have a good conscience about going out to restaurants on Sunday so as not to have to cook, letting others work on Sunday to serve them. I find this ironic to say the least! For home schooling families there can be more pressure to get lots done on Saturday. I tend to spend Saturdays at home while Susan goes out and catches up on errands, shopping, etc. Somehow we have managed to find a way to prepare the meal without it being oppressive, and the tradeoff of not having to come home Sunday and prepare a meal is worth it for us. 4. If you know what’s being sung, go over the songs and hymns ahead of time. Discuss them with your children. Sing them as family worship….By starting Sabbath at sundown Saturday we can get our entire families in tune with corporate worship. In this way we see family worship in it’s right context, as part of that overall worship of the local assembly. 5. Read over the sermon text ahead of time. Pray that God would speak to you in the Word, regardless of how wonderful the sermon delivery is or isn't. Pray for the sermon preparation, that the Spirit would reveal insights and applications. Listening to a sermon takes effort and work, no matter how good (or bad) the speaker. We help ourselves by in tune with the passage ahead of time. 6. Leave for corporate worship early enough on Sunday morning to be calm and to greet people with a spirit of leisure. Try to arrive by 9:45 so that you can get your car parked, food delivered, your things situated in a seat before we begin. We really want to start by 10:00….I would change the times to 9:55 and 10:10. This may be easy for me to say, right, this “leave …early enough” thing? There is a period of time when our children are young when this process is harder. It gets easier, believe me! With preparations and pep talks the prior evening it can be made easier, but even then it’s never perfect. Sometimes our expectations increase our anxiety. Again, this should be a husband/wife team effort. Too seldom do husbands pull their weight on Sunday mornings. 7. Think about other people you can minister to, ask how they are doing, greet them with a “holy hug,” etc. Think ahead of time about the ways you might give of yourself to others….There are many exhortations in Scripture about how we are to encourage, love, and give of ourselves to others in the corporate assembly. If we have in our minds arriving not in some hoped for internal state of peace but with a resolve to love others, with a desire to genuinely greet them in Christ, then our frustrations are diminished a lot. It actually is not right to separate “worship” from the rest of what is done in the gathering. The way we greet, the way we love, the way we share, the way we encourage, the way even that we sing – not just to close our eyes and feel a certain way or be blessed or be lost in the beauty of the voices, but simply to honor the Lord and as a way to teach and admonish others – all of this is part of the assembly of the saints and is all properly speaking apart of our worship together. It is a good study to lookup all the Scriptures in the new Testament that speak to the assembly of the saints and see what it is in toto that we are to be one to another. 8. Absolutely refuse to argue about family, marital, or work issues on Sunday morning. Satan loves to undermine our worship of God, and this is a favorite method. Sometimes this is simply a decision we can make, a discipline. Susan and I have had in the past our occasional times of arriving to church with her in tears. 9. Think ahead about how God may use you to encourage others -- in private conversation and public sharing -- by sharing a word of how God has spoken to you in Scripture, through another person, how you have been encouraged, etc. The thinking ahead about giving something to the body helps free us from expectations of what state we feel we need to be in. 10. Play a tape of Christian songs on the way to meeting (perhaps Mack’s tape of Scripture songs). Make it a family sing-along. Then you have already worshipped when you arrive – family worship to boot! |
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