It's All About Giving God the Glory, Honor, and Praise!

June 18, 2025

Leadership Notes

     I received a lovely text message Sunday {June 15} afternoon. It was quite simply put:

“It was really nice to be in {worship} service today!”

There are a whole lot of things right with this beautiful church in our little corner of Lenawee County. The most rightest thing is our love for worship. Your love for Jesus…your gratitude for God’s grace and mercy…your desire to love each other and our community…are all seen in how you worship. It reminds me of Psalm 133:1:

“How good and pleasant it is when God’s people live together in unity!”

     A pastor says a friend told him he says a special prayer before every worship service. “Lord, remind me that I’m here to worship you, not have my preferences met.” The pastor says that’s one of the most culturally subversive prayers he’s ever heard. And I couldn’t agree more. It seems to me that is the predominate attitude Covenant Church people bring to worship every Sunday morning.

     As I shared Sunday morning, I love R.C. Sproul’s take on the section of the Westminster Confession of Faith dealing with worship. He writes, “True worship involves the reading of Scripture in an attitude of reverence, where we cling to every word and delight in hearing it. Today’s worship is different from the Puritan worship of our nation’s early history, which often involved the reading of a chapter from the Old Testament and a chapter from the New Testament. We are told that today the average attention span for listening to the reading of the Word is about ten verses. So a Scripture text is selected on the assumption that more than ten verses will lose the {congregation}.”

     Sproul goes on to observe, “Next the confession mentions the sound preaching and conscionable hearing of the Word. This addresses the shepherd and the sheep. Not only does God want the Scriptures to be read, but He wants the Scriptures to be interpreted by preaching. Nothing is said about dynamic, exciting, interesting, eloquent, fascinating preaching. Only one word is used to describe the preaching: sound. God’s concern is that preaching be sound and Biblical.”

     And that, my friends, is an accurate description of where we are, preacher and worshiper, as God’s people. Amen?

     Here’s the mind-set we bring to worship. It’s all about giving God the glory, honor, and praise. It’s not about us. It’s about humbling ourselves before His awesome, immense greatness. As Lauren Daigle affirms in that wonderful song of praise:

I am guilty

Ashamed of what I've done, what I've become

These hands are dirty

I dare not lift them up to the Holy one

You plead my cause, You right my wrongs

You break my chains, You overcome

You gave Your life, to give me mine

You say that I am free, How can it be

How can it be

     Amazing grace that the maker of the universe has redeemed us and He accepts our praise. How can it be? Did you know that the James Webb Telescope recently mapped 800,000 galaxies spanning 13.5 billion years of space? Genesis 1:16 simply states, “He made the stars also.” I love how God’s creation of galaxies is mentioned as if it was no big deal – effortless majesty. How can it be? Yet our majestic God condescends to us to save us in Jesus Christ. As Paul puts it in 2 Corinthians 8:9, “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich.” How can it be?

     With so much turbulence, turmoil, and trouble clanging about, it’s nice to know we worship the One True God who transcends all that. Let the heathen rage. Misfits, malcontents, and miscreants are never going away. They will continue their idolatrous pursuits. As devoted followers of Jesus, our focus will remain on worship, loving each other, and loving our community. Our motivation lines up with this lovely observation by Charles H. Spurgeon:

“THERE IS NOTHING LITTLE IN GOD; HIS STEADFAST LOVE IS LIKE HIMSELF – IT IS INFINITE. YOU CANNOT MEASURE IT.”

I think I just heard you say, “Amen.” Amen, indeed.

               With Much Love and Affection,

                                Richard