For that is true, that one day we will stand before the Lord and we will have nothing to present to him of our own values or worth, but only that of the worth of Christ. Therefore, Christian, continue looking to Christ, continue seeking him above all else as a great treasure even in this life. We are going to continue in our series on worship. And today we're going to look at our responses in worship. If you have your copy of the scriptures, Isaiah chapter six, if you're using the Pew Bible, it's page 571. I will get you to that text. But before we read that text, we'd ask that you would join me in prayer. Gracious Father, we bless your name for you are exalted above all gods. This world is but your footstool and we, your people, are here to praise you because you have called us. You have initiated us to be here this morning. You are meeting with us as the one who will change us and who will make us to be more conformed into the image of Christ. Lord, would you help us to see today how this hour that we spend together is so greatly needed in our lives or that it would be exalted in our own thinking and our priorities. Thank you again for your great mercy to us, especially your word that your spirit uses to point us back to Christ that extols the truth in our lives and that is trustworthy and sufficient that we may live our lives in honor of you. Thank you again for the gifts that you've given us. May this time, this hour honor you and this we ask in the name of Jesus Christ, amen. I'd like to read our text, Isaiah chapter six, verses one through five. In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting upon the throne, high and lifted up, and the train of his robe filled the temple. Above him stood the seraphim, each had six wings, with two he covered his face, and with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew. And one called out to another and said, holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts. The whole earth is full of his glory. The foundations of the threshold shook at the voice of him who called, and the house was filled with smoke. And I said, woe is me, for I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips, for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts. Now, our series on worship began by introducing the biblical understanding and principles of true worship And then we saw that God, because of his desire to draw to himself worshipers, that is those who would worship him in spirit and in truth, he designed worship by his own pattern of revelation in a context of what you and I know to be covenant. It is from this covenant communion that is initiated and empowered through the renewal of God's covenant promises to us that we are conformed into the likeness of Christ. We were challenged to ask ourselves, do we believe that God is present with us as we are gathered here this morning to respond to his call to come and worship and come and commune with him? Is that what was in your mind when you showed up this morning? I'm coming to meet with the Lord. The Lord has called me to come meet with him. Therefore, that is why I am here. Now, if that was not your thought coming in the doors, fear not. It's a problem that we all have, right? We all have this same problem. We're reminded that as God's people, we can easily slip into the idea that worship is quite one-sided, that it's all about us coming to praise and to offer our praise and worship of God, who, by the way, is worthy of such praise and worship, even more than we give Him. And yet, worship in the Bible is not one-sided. Look at your handout. True worship is not one-sided. It's not monological. It's not one way. It's dialogical. It's two ways. It's communion. It's communication. We see this in our definition of worship. We have defined worship is the covenant communion with God in which believers by grace center their mind's attention and their heart's affection on the Lord, humbly glorifying God in response to his greatness in his word by the power of the Holy Spirit. That's our definition of worship. When we say worship, that's what we're talking about. It's a spiritual action, all right? It's a spiritual action. And a spiritual action, as physical people who are made both of body and spirit, there are times when we may not feel like that spiritual action is actually doing anything. And yet worship is still taking place in the soul level of who we are. Since true worship by God's standard is relational, spiritual, dialogical, and Godward in its essence, then God is the one who initiates true worship of himself. Remember, we saw it all the way back in the garden. If God wasn't the one who would initiate communion with his fallen creatures, the fallen creature's natural tendency is to run the other direction. Therefore, it takes God calling us back to himself, being the initiator See, it's in this dialogue, God revealing and our responding to him and his truth, which resides the core of true worship. Therefore, our service of worship is intentionally constructed to facilitate an authentic conversation between God and us. This is based on the covenant that God says to his people, you will be my people, I will be your God, right? He's already in a covenantal dialogue with us because of the statement that he's made. This means as Christ's body of believers, our spiritual communion with God is to be built upon a worship pattern which God has given and not a pattern which we do as we please. This is very difficult for us in 21st century America. There's a rugged individualism that rests inside our hearts, especially as Americans, where we want to do it the way we want to do it, right? We all struggle against this. And yet God is the one who has said, if you're going to worship me, you're going to worship me as I say so. Now that may not set well with some, but God doesn't leave us to our own devices for approaching him in worship. You had the example of Nadab and Abihu. They'd been trained on how to bring true worship before the Lord. They decided one day, hey, let's offer this strange fire, see what happens. Dead, right? We may think that's extreme, but the Lord has said what he requires of us and he gives to us what he requires of us that we may honor him. Thinking of it in our own terms and doing it our own way is not one of those things that God's laid before us. The tendency and the reason why that's the case is because we tend to pervert God when we do that. Our own natural inclination is to create God in our own image, and in doing so, we end up worshiping a false god. Look at your handout. His word is sufficient and worthy and acceptable. Biblical pattern is given and modeled for us in Isaiah 6. Here, the episode of worship is fully designed by God. Remember, God's word is trustworthy. It's sufficient. We can trust it. We can trust that he will give us what we need in this biblical conversation, this pattern between God and his people. The order of spiritual actions in this text is as follows. Revelation, adoration, confession, forgiveness, proclamation, dedication, supplication, and commission. Notice if you have your order of service near you, that's exactly the way our order of service is laid out. The large red letters, notice adoration, notice confession, notice proclamation, right? We're using this Isaiah 6 text as a pattern for our worship each week because it has built into it a logic. We're gonna call it a gospel logic. The biblical pattern serves the basic framework for our regular weekly corporate services of worship. Notice God's word is sufficient even for framing our corporate worship. The service with a gospel logic, an invitation to commune with God in Christ by his spirit. Again, God's not leading us to our own devices. As stated earlier, worship is an authentic conversation, is composed of the acts of God and the acts of the people. Look at your handout. The content of the acts of God will always be revelatory, that is derived from scripture, as we rely on the Holy Spirit to use the scriptures to facilitate worship. these capacities. How is it that the scriptures used in our service of worship today, what kind of impact and what kind of relationship do we have to those scriptures? The scriptures serve as the primary source of divine revelation and worship, your handout. The scriptures represent and speak for God in conversation of worship, that's God's word responses. The scriptures serve as a mirror in which we may see ourselves as God sees us. The scriptures create and preserve a God-centered focus on worship. The scriptures provide the foundation and framework for worship in truth. and the scriptures prompt and guide the worship responses of the congregation. See, this is how the scriptures, by God's spirit, are related to us in worship. That is, God displays his covenantal faithfulness, and we respond with covenant commitment. God displays his faithfulness. Our response of faith is to believe and to trust that what God has said is true and to rest in his promises. And all those promises are fulfilled in Christ. See, worship is where we learn and are trained in the disciplines that are crucial to the Christian life, like trust and obedience and submission, or in a word, faith. See, worship is faith expressing itself obedience and adoration. This is a time when we renew our commitment and obedience to the Lord. See this God-centered worship service that we see in Isaiah six is the garden in which faith is planted and grown and cultivated. We therefore must surrender our wants and our preferences and recognize that whatever God says goes. And when we do that, We truly reflect Christ, for it was the Son is the one who perfectly submits to the will of the Father in all things. And as we come to corporate worship with an intention that we want to please God and please our Father over ourselves, it's a way in which we can fulfill what Paul calls us to and that which we are to have the mind of Christ being humbled and taking the very form of a servant before God, Philippians 2, five through eight. That's what we are being conformed into, into this service. But even more than that, covenant communion is a time to revel in God's unfailing commitment to us in his son. Look at your handout. Because of Jesus, the basic covenant pattern of worship is now transformed for us. Notice that we are called to worship God in the name of the Son, John 14, six. We are cleansed, not by anything our hands have done and not by any sacrifices we offer, but by the once for all sacrifice of Christ on the cross, Hebrews 7, 27. We're consecrated to God's people by the preaching of Christ's gospel, Colossians 1, 28. We commune with God as we partake of the body and the blood of his son, 1 Corinthians 10, 16. And we're commissioned to serve in the name of Jesus as those who bear the name Christian. See, we serve in his strength and then we are commissioned to leave with his blessing. Now, knowing that God, through his spirit and word, initiates and renews covenant promises to us in Christ causes us to respond to him in communion. When we see his holiness, when we see his love, when we see his grace and his mercy, we want to, in response, offer our praise to him. The contents of the acts of the people are the words of response to God, which derived from various sources, but they're always in line with biblical content. All right, this is that in truth portion of worship the Lord in spirit and in truth from John chapter four. One reason why the word is so present in the service from beginning to end is because the word cannot and will not lead us astray in regards to who God is or what God has done for us, or even telling us truly who we are in the eyes of God. The Word of God is trustworthy. The Word of God is sufficient. The Word of God is the one thing in this life that we can actually count on. And God's bound himself to that Word covenantally, has done so for his people. See, this means corporate worship is comprised of both types of content, relevatory actions, that's God's actions or His responses, and responsive, our responses. Look at your handout. The scriptures are replete with many responses of God's people in covenant communion with Him. In response to all forms of divine revelation, our corporate worship regularly provides the opportunity and means for the corporate expression of the following. Now, these are our responses. God's revealing himself through his word, and then we're going to enter into that communion or that conversation or that dialogue with him. And what parts do we do? What are our responses? Look at your hand up. Praise, adoration, and thanks to God. Contrition, repentance, and confession of sin to God. Dedication, submission, and commitment to God. Petition, supplication, and intercession before God. We're gonna do that today in our service a little later. Now these are our responses to God's initiative of weekly covenant renewal of his promises in Christ. And our responses are all some form of prayer All right, this is, we've got to understand this. I know you keep hearing it, I wanna remind you, prayer is the way that we commune with God. And everything that we do in our service is some form of prayer. Prayer is any type of direct address to God. Corporate singing and worship falls under this category. John Calvin recognized the role of singing as prayer and writes, as for public prayers, there are two kinds. The one consists simply of speech and the other of song, or simply stated, the man who sings prays twice. That's a good way to remember it, right? Everything that we do from our side of the conversation is some form of prayer, whether it's spoken, whether it's internal in our heart, or whether it's exclaimed through singing or music. As we just stated, there are many responses. We are called to offer to the Lord when he initiates communion with his people, and our time today is limited. I'm not able to go through all 12 of those that are listed above for you. I didn't hear an amen on that, so that's good. But I want to be able to expound on just a couple. I wanna tease out a couple of these, and maybe at some point in the future, we can elaborate on all of these. so that we see that there's some biblical distinctions between these four groups of things that are listed. But our response is I want to expound on a little better so that we can think about our responses in the presence of God. Look at your handout. The two responses that I wanna look at today are praise, so that's out of that first line up there, A, praise, adoration, and thanks. And the second I wanna look at is confession of sin, the next one, contrition, repentance, and confession of sin. So praise and confession of sin are the two things I want us to look at today in our responses. Now, as Christians in corporate worship, we approach God first with praise. As Christians, we always approach God first with praise. And some may say, well, you know, as sinners, you'd think we'd wanna confess our sin first, and then we'd praise God. And the reality is, is you are in Christ, your sins are already forgiven. All right? So you can come before the Lord with praise right out the gates. And this isn't uncommon. We see this in the scriptures all the time. And this is exactly what Isaiah witnessed when he saw the Lord Jesus Christ. By the way, Isaiah in Isaiah six, when he says, I saw the Lord lifted and exalted, it's Jesus Christ that he saw who's trained the robe filled the temple. How do we know that? John chapter 12, verse 41 tells us that's who Isaiah saw. sitting on the throne, lofty and exalted. Look at your handout. In Isaiah 6, 3 tells us in the seraphim, we're calling to one another, holy, holy, holy is the Lord almighty. The whole earth is full of his glory. See, it's the praise of the Lord, which echoes throughout the heavenlies and to which we are called to participate. In ancient Israel, the usual way to approach Zion was with hymns of praise. And is that not a fitting that we too should enter the heavenly Mount Zion in Christian worship with a song of praise upon our lips? Remember, that's what's happening to us right now, is that Christ is mediating for us before the Father and his body is being taken up before the Lord spiritually. And we are meeting with God in the heavenlies and we are praising him there. Therefore, our initial response needs to be one of praise. Praise is the sense of awe and wonder we have when we enter into the presence of God. As long as we are present with our holy God, praise is inevitable, Matthew 9, 15. See, that's one reason why singing is so appropriate, and that's one reason why Singing is so spread out through the entirety of our service that we have here today. Many of you come out of traditions where the singing's front loaded at the front side of the service and that's about the last time anybody sings. 20 or 30 minutes worth of singing in a big group clustered together. And yet we have the opportunity as Christians to always be praising or even lamenting or being thankful before the Lord. And music and song is one of those ways that, and really is a primary way that we can express what's going on inside the essence and the heart of who we are. It's a very powerful thing that God has given in music. We even know that the primary instrument of worship in the worship of God when his people are gathered together, primary instrument is the voice. I'm so thankful for Naomi and for William who helped undergird our service with these instruments that we have. But may it never be that the instruments become the focus. May it never be that our voices are drowned out by instrumentation. Long before instrumentation was brought into play in the singing of God's people, long before that ever happened, was the voice of the people. The human voice. That's why these songs are spread out in our service. And as we are before God and amazed by his glory, grace, and goodness, we cannot help but sing, singing or exclaiming praise of God, who he is and what he's done for us is an overflow of our soul. It's the outlet for our most intense thoughts, feelings, desires. And for this reason, singing and praising God is truly good for us. God has commanded us to praise him. God has commanded us to do something that's good for us. He has our good in mind. This reminds us that when we sing in corporate worship, it's part of a covenant conversation in which we speak back to God And we know that when we call out to him, whether it's in singing or speaking, he hears us for the sake of Christ. Romans 8 34. Look at your handout. Christ is the mediator who makes our cares his own and brings them to the throne of the heavenly father. Our prayers become his. Our requests and petitions are made known to him. As our great high priest, he sings our humble song into the father's ear and therefore we can know that we are heard. I wanna point you back to Jonathan Cruz's little blue book on what happens when we worship. That was taken right out of that book. It's a wonderful book. If you've not read it or it's been a while, I encourage you to pick it back up. Be reminded of what's going on as we meet together as God's people on Sunday. But praise need not and should not be the only thing that defines our responses. Why is that the case? Well, life doesn't always play out in the major key, so why should our songs? This tends to be more of an issue in those striving after an entertainment aesthetic in worship. After all, what is entertaining about sin? What is entertaining about calamity? What is entertaining about stress? What is entertaining about anxiety? What is entertaining about living in this world and being pushed down? See, life is difficult and messy. And God wants us to come before him, casting our cares before him. Also, church singing offers a cleansing expression of our deepest troubles without having to pretend like everything is just hunky-dory. Attending a lot of services these days, you would think that there's absolutely nothing that goes wrong in the life of a Christian, because all of our song's about nothing goes wrong. And yet when we leave out this back door, we're going to run headlong into a fallen world where things are just collapsing. They're just eroding around us. Why would we cut out in our worship of God something so vital as confessing to him that we're struggling, that I'm tired, that I need something more than myself? See the large concentration of songs of lament and distress in the psalm show us that it is appropriate to come to God with our troubles, our concerns, our problems, and our worries. And not just to come to him, but to come to him in song. I don't know if when your personal time of reading the scriptures or praying that you're one of those people that's ever thought about bringing music or song into that personal time. I would encourage you to entertain that. I would encourage you to let your heart open up to sing praises to the Lord in your quiet time or in your closet. Something deep down the way we've been wired that singing does for us. Many times it's these struggles and trials in our lives that really do bring forth some of our greatest music that we as a church have used through the ages If you remember, the sudden loss of family at sea inspired the song It Is Well With My Soul by Horatio Spafford. It was Paul and Silas who knew that singing was a powerful way to appeal to God and comfort one another in their trial in the Philippian jail in Acts 16. Look at your handout. The Psalms give us a proper balance of emotive music, songs of praise as well as lament, songs of adoration as well as confession, And the church's singing should teach Christians how to pray. It should serve as a lesson in how to cry out to God, let our ears be attentive to the voice of my supplication, oh Lord, as we're told in Psalm 130. You see a wonderful opportunity for us to commune with God at some of the deepest levels of who we are as his children. And the whole of worship ought to be filled with praise and acclamation. Yes, it should. That shouldn't be the only thing. We rightly praise God as he calls us into worship, as he pardons us for our sin, as he illuminates our hearts and minds with the word, as he invites us into his heavenly table, and as he blesses us with a high and holy name to be called his children. All these things he has done for us in Christ, and so it is fitting that through him we utter our amen to God, 2 Corinthians 1.20. Or put another way, look at your handout, Christ is the content of our song. And with the perfections of Christ's person and work at the center, nothing short of joyous praise can, approximately mark the songs and the singing of worship of the saints. And so we pray and sing not primarily with our vocal cords or our lips, but with our hearts. Let me ask you this, is your heart singing in worship this morning? We must be cautious not to be carried away by the music or the song in worship, which many churches today think is equivalent of an authentic or a meaningful worship experience. The overemphasis we find in many churches today on feeling and emotions in worship is destructive to the formation of godly character. Yes, we just linked corporate worship on Sunday morning with sanctification and godly character. I'll even argue to you in just a moment that even the type of music that is used has something to do with how we develop. And may I argue whether we actually develop. Even that's how powerful music can be. See, the sad reality is that many Christians evaluate the merit of worship their worship service based on emotional thrill they get from the music. Now, this is dangerous. If we say true worship happens when we feel good, then we impress on our hearts and on the hearts of other worshipers that anything which feels good, therefore, must be true. If you've lived longer than the age of 10 or 15, you know one thing you can't trust, and that is your feelings. Right? There's things we wrongly feel every day. I'm not talking about putting your hand on a hot stove. That's the right feeling when you want to jerk it off, right? Pull it off. What I'm talking about is equating a certain feeling with that's proof that God's spirit is here. That's why we talk about this being a spiritual action of worship. It's not that the physical world isn't involved in any regard. It's that there are things happening at the spiritual level which you and I don't even recognize sometimes because the essence of who we are as spirit is God's playground. He's the one that changes us at that deep of a level. Get your hand out, Marva Dawn. By the way, she writes a lot of books on worship. Reminds us that our goal is that worship practices will form characters so that believers respond to God with commitment, love, thought, and virtuous action. The scriptures make it clear that God wants his people not just to so-called feel good, but to be good. So she warns shallow music forms shallow people. Rather, what we want to do is be carried away by the new song, that is by the redemption accomplished for us in the victory of Christ over sin and death. It's his victory that makes worship possible. It's his victory that makes entrance into God's present possible. And so it is this new song that best express the supernatural wonder of worship. Look at your hand up. It is the worthy lamb who makes us worthy to be priests before God. a people who offer themselves up as a living sacrifice, a people who are called out of the world into his presence, a people who receive his word and respond in faith and obedience, a people who fellowship and feast with him, a people who are sent to the world as ambassadors and witnesses. And in a word, it's this new song that consecrates us as the people who worship. we should be known as worshipers, first and foremost in our own thinking, that we are children of God who worship the one true God. Now, this has been but an introduction to the idea of praise. Our second response in communion with God is that of confession of sin. Your handout. We are moved naturally from hearing God's law and seeing his holiness to confessing our sin. Look at Isaiah 6.5. I said, woe is me, for I am lost, for I am dead, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell amidst the people of unclean lips, for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts. See, confession naturally and logically follows after being exposed to God's holiness, especially as he reveals himself through the law. The law is what God, is what we know and how we know what pleases God. To love God is to keep his commandments, not to make you a son or a daughter of God. You're that because of what Christ has done, is to teach you what it means to walk in the way that pleases the Lord. What it means to love God and to love neighbor. See, that is what the law does for the Christian. No longer does it bind our conscience. No longer does it make us guilty before the Lord for Christ has taken our sin upon the cross. And our guilt has been removed. And we do fail at keeping the law. But that failure doesn't remove us as a son or a daughter from the family of God. It reminds us that we can't look to ourselves to keep that law that has already been fulfilled in Christ and that we need to look to Christ even for help to do that which is good. See, we see and know that we are often rebellious and disobedient people, and yet people don't like the idea of confession, but God does. But God does. And it's his will for us that when we hear his law, we examine our lives against it, and that we subsequently confess our sins where we've fallen short. We have a biblical precedent for this. not just private confession, but even in the public and the corporate setting of worship. Notice we had a corporate prayer of confession. Prior to that, we had a silent prayers, right? The Lord dealing with you individually of what's going on in your life. But right after that, we had a corporate You should be able to look around the room and know as we pray that corporate prayer of confession together that everyone in this room is a sinner. We all struggle. We all need to be reminded that no one has got it all together. No matter what it looks like on the outside, no one's got it all together. We had this biblical precedent for a corporate setting of worship. Nehemiah 9 is one of the long chapters of confession and corporate worship service. Psalm 32 and 51, although they were penned as personal confessions, would go on to be used by all of Israel in their temple worship. And as those looking in the New Testament, 1 John 1.8 puts it bluntly for us. If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. What John is saying to us and to the churches that abandon confession in their worship are feeding into a delusion. We are sinners, and sinners need to confess. Even though we are saved, we still have sin in us. We've been taken out of the world of sin, Colossians 1.13, but sin has completely Sin hasn't been completely taken out of us, Romans 6, 1 and 2. Look at your handout. So as we come to God in confession, particularly in corporate worship, we are reminding ourselves of our identity. We are those who have been forgiven, but we are not perfect. We are, in the words of Martin Luther, simul ustaset peccare, simultaneously justified and sinful. See, this is what we experience on this side of heaven, isn't it? The things I do, the things I want to do, I don't do. The things I don't want to do are the things that I do, Paul says in Romans chapter 7. Remember, that's Paul. He's probably about in his 60s, right? It's old Paul, still struggling against the flesh over and over and over and over. And at the end of Romans chapter seven, he knows where his cure can be found. It's not in the law. It's not in trying harder. It's not looking to himself. It's Jesus Christ. And thanks be to God that Jesus Christ is the answer to our sin problem. The neglect of confession is to risk thinking that we are sinless saints. and we have no need of God after all. So yes, even if we are already Christians, we continue to be confessors as well. We are always becoming Christians again every day. Repentance and faith are always renewed daily. Confession and sorrow over and turning from sin must all be part of the regular makeup of our daily lives. And if they're part of our daily lives, then why shouldn't they be part of our corporate life and celebration together on Sunday? Whether people can articulate or not, deep down they want to confess. They don't like it, but deep down they want to confess. There's both a spiritual and a physical cleansing that comes from confession. It's a very freeing exercise. To withhold confession in worship is to keep people in bondage. Let me say that again. To withhold confession in worship is to keep people in bondage. Far from being awkward, confession is where true peace is found. David recognized this in Psalm 32. To abstain from confession was tantamount to slow, painful death. Listen to verses three and four of Psalm 32. When I kept silent, my bones grew old through my groaning all day long. For day and night, your hand was heavy upon me. My vitality was turned into the drought of summer. He's wasting away because he's holding on and not confessing sin. in terms of our sin, silence will mean suffering. We know this all too well. I'm not seeking, listen, I'm not seeking to beat you up, right? I'm trying to get the stuff out there so we can deal with it. You're sinning and you're being silent about it and it's bringing suffering. That is good, by the way, That is God's hand upon you saying, return to me, confess what I already know to be true and real. You're not hiding it from me. I see and know all things. The moment we open our hearts and our mouths and confess our guilt, we receive healing as David experienced in verse five of Psalm 32. Listen, I acknowledged my sin to you and my iniquity I have not hidden. I said, I will confess my transgressions to the Lord. Listen, and you forgave the iniquity of my sin. See, this is one of the greatest gifts of worship, is the curative power of confession. All you're doing when you confess is you're just telling the truth. You're just agreeing with God that what He says is wrong is actually wrong. That's all that that is. See, worship is part of the rhythm that God wove into creation. It's the rhythm of stop and go, of yes and no, of work and rest. And from the beginning, the rhythm that was needed was six days in the world working, and a day of coming back to God and worshiping and resting. That rhythm is still there today, and it's still needed today. Every week, we go to church, right? We go to church, and we'll air quote that, right? We are the church. We go to worship as the church, but we are the church. Every week we go to church, but we go to church expecting in many ways to experience the very same things we experienced the week before. You ever notice that? Some people would come into this service and go, wow, that service is boring. It's the same thing every week. And you know why it's the same thing every week? You and I have a problem. We forget. between today when we walk out of here and next week when we come back in here, we have forgotten who we are. We have forgotten who God is. We have bought into the lies of the world. We've eaten at the world's table and we found out that we are still hungry. And when we come back, God reorients us in the right direction and says, I am God, you are my child. Christ is the reason why that you can stand before me and worship me and praise me and even confess your sin. Week in and week out. And all of a sudden, we're being disciplined. We're being changed. We're being formed. We're being molded to start thinking about life in this context of the gospel. We come because God calls us and we answer this call in praise of who God is and what he has done for us in Christ. We are drawn by this divine call to confess our sins before his unfathomable holiness. We are reminded of the forgiveness that we have in Christ and that we belong to God through the proclamation of his word. We experience communion and fellowship with a reconciling God and then we are commissioned to go back out into the world to be his ambassadors of reconciliation. Look at your handout. All this looks like revelation, adoration, confession, forgiveness, proclamation, dedication, supplication, and commissioning. May I say feasting, depending on supplication and feasting there each week for us. See, we tell the same gospel story each week. We go through the same gospel logic every service because it's what our hearts and minds so desperately need. God's meeting us at our point of need. The trajectory of our service will set the trajectory for the whole week. One of hope, one of confidence, one of joy in Christ. And as we understand this, we see that the routine and the rhythm of worship is a blessing. First Corinthians 1433. Look at your handout. Let me end with a quote from Michael Horton to help reorient our thinking. The Lord's day is not another treadmill, but a day of resting from our works as we bask in God's marvelous provision for our salvation and temporal needs. See, we must go to him, praise him, confess our sins to him, and we must run to and not from him, and we find in him the rest that our restless hearts so desperately need. Do you see worship as burden or as boring? Or do you see worship as rest and joy and comfort in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ? At the divine call of God to come and worship, we have a response to God who is truly changing our hearts and souls. The question is, do you desire to be changed at the level of who you are, your soul level? Do you desire to have your sin removed and not held against you, the guilt of your sin removed? Then believe on Jesus Christ and look to him alone. He will by no means cast you out. Come to Christ and worship him. Our primary response is to give praise to the Lord God, the Almighty. Would you join me in prayer? Father, thank you again for your great word to us, the gospel that you've given to us in Christ. We do sing our praise to you and we ask that you would work upon our hearts and our minds and our souls as we sing praise to the Lord. Oh, let all that is in us adore him, all that has life and breath come now with praises before him. Let the amen sound from his people again. Gladly, forever, we adore him. Amen.