Have you ever wondered why we have a call to worship or a benediction in our Lord’s Day worship service? If you are like me, you have probably never encountered these elements in your previous church. Furthermore, these practices may have become so routine that no one really pays attention to the words anymore. For example, the call to worship may simply have become a Pavlovian signal to find your seat, settle the children, and look at the church’s program for the number of the first hymn.[1] In most of our minds, the “opening stuff” is an assortment of hymns and prayers we need to sit through prior to the “real thing” – the sermon. However, when we gather as a body of believers each week, every element of our worship service carries profound purpose and significance. The order of worship you hold in your hands is not merely an arbitrary formality, nor is it a collection of rituals passed down through human tradition that we are compelled to follow to make God happy. Rather, each component is intentionally rooted in the Word of God and thoughtfully arranged to guide us into a genuine encounter with our Creator/Redeemer God. Scripture warns us against honoring God with our lips while our hearts remain far from Him (Matt. 15:8–9), and it is precisely this warning that compels us to approach every aspect of our gathered worship with intentional reverence and awe. Each section of our liturgy has been carefully considered and prayerfully selected by the Pastors, not to impose a rigid structure, but to ensure that what we do in worship reflects what God Himself has revealed about how His people are to draw near to Him. Therefore, as we walk through the components of our service together, my prayer is that we will come to see each moment, not as routine and ritualistic, but as a sacred, Scripture-saturated invitation to glorify God in spirit and in truth (John 4:23–24).

Opening Welcome

How do you prepare to worship God? For most of us, it’s a victory if we and our families arrive on time and in one piece. But as you enter the sanctuary, know the room itself is not holy. Nor is there any biblical command to be as quiet as a mouse. But when you walk in, you see the congregational seating, the cross, the pulpit, and the communion table. They can act as a reminder: you are entering the assembly of the saints; you are setting aside other concerns to focus on Christ. Preparing to worship is much more than turning off one’s cell phone; it’s quieting your heart, it’s reading the Scripture passages in the bulletin ahead of time, and it’s praying. The Bible doesn’t tell us how loud or how quiet we should be when we walk in the door. Habakkuk 2:20 (ESV) says, “The Lord is in His holy temple: let all the earth keep silence before him.”[2] But Psalm 100 tells us to come into God’s presence with singing, to enter His courts with praise and thanksgiving. Hebrews 12:28 instructs us, “let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe.” Therefore, the Pastor’s opening is offering you a gift, helping you transition towards reverence. Use it well.

The Call to Worship

The Call to Worship is the official beginning to this time of public dialogue between God and His people, and God has the first word. A lot has been happening in our lives before we show up on Sunday morning. God has been preparing us our entire lives to meet with Him. While we might think we voluntarily chose to show up to church, ultimately, we are here because God called us, He created us to give Him glory, and He commands us to praise Him. In offering this invitation, God is both host and honoree, and God’s people are both invited and compelled by His mercy to give Him glory. [3] Usually, the “call to worship” is a cluster of verses from the Psalms in which the Pastor exhorts the rest of the congregation to set aside worldly distractions, focus their hearts, minds, and actions, and join him in praising the LORD. This would suggest that it is the Pastor, not God, who is calling us to worship. But the psalms are not only prayers to God but also inspired by the Holy Spirit; they are breathed out by God (2 Tim. 3:16).  If we recognize that we live, move, and have our being in Him and because of Him, then we can appreciate that it is God who has brought us to this place for the purpose of worship, for the purpose of making much of God. It would be arrogant for any of us to command others to praise us, but God knows that we are most deeply blessed when we are praising Him. God always speaks first – “Let there be light” – and there was light. Anything good that we bring to the worship service is a response to God’s prior work in us, a response He prepared in advance for us to do. Therefore, God not only calls us to worship, but He calls us to respond to His revelation and His redemption. He does not simply invite us to a “church service”, but into His awesome presence before whom all creation will bow and for whom all heaven now sings.[4]

Prayer

Since the worship service is a dialogue between God and His people, we aim to saturate the service with prayer. Sometimes we pray silently, sometimes out loud in unison, and sometimes a leader prays for us. But all our prayers are, as Paul says in Ephesians 5:20, “giving thanks always and for everything to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.” We pray in Christ; He is our access to the throne of the sovereign God. Early in the service we offer a brief prayer of adoration to the living God. A longer, pastoral prayer is offered in the middle of the service, praying for particular requests and for specific people who are in need. We sometimes pray for government leaders by name, not because we are endorsing them or their policies, but because Paul urges us in 1 Timothy 2:1-2 that “supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way.” Before the appointed preacher preaches the word, we pray a “chorus of prayer” that God the Holy Spirit would illumine the pages before us, enabling us to understand what He has inspired. Through the Spirit working “by and with the Word in our hearts” (1689 LBCF 1.5), we would truly know conviction of our sin, release from our guilt and the joy of our salvation. Likewise, we pray at the conclusion of the sermon: having just heard God’s Word preached to us, we respond with thanks and with a request for heart-level and street-level change.

Hymns and Songs

Congregational singing combines prayer, teaching, and biblical meditation in a way that engages the whole person, body and soul. Whether we have musical talent or not, we set aside our musical preferences and join our voices as one to obey what Paul instructs in Ephesians 5:18b-19 – “be filled with the Spirit, addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with your heart.” We aren’t trying to impress each other. Rather, our sole audience is the Lord Himself, the object of our worship. Most of the hymns we sing operate on two levels: vertically, they orient us upward in praise to God, and horizontally, they teach us about ourselves and God. Some of the lyrics are drawn directly from the psalms, and some are meditations on many Scriptures. Our song leaders gather songs that are biblical, reverent, and joyful. Often, selections are chosen because they fit the themes touched upon in the sermon, but care is also taken to choose songs that are accessible and worth shaping us over a lifetime. While the majority of the music is congregational, we follow the biblical pattern (Neh. 12:40; Hab. 3:19) of having a choir, gifted soloists, and musicians lead us in praise. Music has become so obsessively important to people that they refer to the musical portion of the service as “worship,” as if preaching and praying were somehow not worship. But music is just one part of worship, a powerful part that draws spirit and body together in praise to God.

Affirmation of Faith

To confess or affirm our faith is to state publicly what our foundational beliefs are, those truths which we have found plainly taught in Scripture, the basics of the gospel which describe the shape of our life as the people of God. Such confessions were part of Israel’s life in the desert in Deuteronomy 6:4-5 – “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.” – and the life of the church in Ephesus in 1 Timothy 3:16 – “Great indeed, we confess, is the mystery of godliness: He was manifested in the flesh, vindicated by the Spirit, seen by angels, proclaimed among the nations, believed on in the world, taken up in glory.” At key points in church history, believers have responded to heresies by returning to the Bible to formulate creeds that are worth teaching and repeating across generations. One benefit of the creeds is that they serve to unify the church, expressing what believers all over the globe throughout many centuries have believed. A merely private faith fails to acknowledge that together we are the body of Christ. A statement crafted by a single local church can easily contain too many blind spots. But a corporate confession of faith embraced by many congregations is a gift to the church, helping us remember how saints in the past read and interpreted the Bible. The Bible remains our only authority. Confessions (such as the Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed, and the 1689 London Baptist Confession) help us summarize what the Bible teaches.

Scripture Reading

Though we live in a culture where the literacy rate is quite high, the Word of God is seldom read, and seldom recognized as the supreme authority, the way the Holy Spirit has chosen to speak to us. For it is in Scripture that we have the most trustworthy revelation of God and His will, and it is through reading Scripture aloud that God speaks directly to all of us at the same time and in the same way. This practice dates back to the Old Testament, where the oral reading of Scripture was a form of worship as the people assembled to hear, learn, and fear the Lord (Deut. 31:9-12). Scripture reading in the worship service is so important that Paul places it at the start of a short list of priorities in 1 Timothy 4:13 – “devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture, to exhortation, to teaching.” It is because of what the written Word says about itself, in places such as Psalm 138:2, that we acknowledge the Scripture’s governing role in our worship, and stop everything else as a group to give it an audience – “I bow down toward your holy temple and give thanks to your name for your steadfast love and your faithfulness, for you have exalted above all things your name and your word.” God’s Word not only rules us, it is the food by which the Spirit feeds us, as Christ said in Matthew 4:4 – “It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’” We may think, “I prefer to read the Bible on my own time in my own way. I don’t need to sit in church to listen to it.” But part of the beauty of the Word is found in humbly and patiently receiving it along with the rest of the congregation, allowing someone else to select the passage, and being reminded that this is God’s Word not merely to me privately, but to us as an entire community of faith.

Preaching of the Word

In an age of YouTube shorts, memes, and Instagram, a one-hour verbal exposition from ancient Hebrew and Greek seems like a tedious and hopelessly outdated form of communication. So why do we continue to devote the bulk of our worship service to preaching? Because though “the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, to us who are being saved it the power of God” (1 Cor 1:18). God has chosen preaching as the instrument by which to plant and grow His Word in our lives – “How are they to hear without someone preaching?” (Rom 10:14b). A sermon that belongs in a God-glorifying worship service is one that aims to explain the Scripture, not to advance the preacher’s own agenda – “They read from the book, from the Law of God, clearly, and they gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading” (Neh 8:8). A sermon that belongs in a Christ-centered worship service makes Jesus the climax of the message, not our new efforts – “We proclaim Him, admonishing every man and teaching every man with all wisdom, so that we may present every man complete in Christ” (Col 1:28). When Jesus sent Paul to preach the gospel to the nations, Jesus described the purpose of preaching (Acts 26:18) – “to open their eyes, so that they may turn from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me.” Pray that the Spirit would bless both the preaching and the receiving of His Word.

The Lord’s Supper

The Lord’s supper is a victory meal, celebrating the new covenant that Jesus fulfilled in His death on the cross (Luke 22:20), and the life of faith He has called us into, in which we feed on Christ as the bread of life (John 6:33-35). The implied words of Paul in 1 Corinthians 11:20 indicate that we are to partake weekly. The bread and the wine (or juice) represent the body and blood of Christ, given for all who trust in Him (Matt 26:26-27), that we might receive genuine spiritual nourishment for our souls. Though the elements do not change physically, Christ is spiritually present with this ordinance (John 6:53-58). By partaking of the bread and wine we proclaim to ourselves and to others the death of Christ – with all its gospel significance – until He comes again (1 Cor 11:26). At His return, we will be seated at the wedding supper of the Lamb (Rev. 19:9). Baptized believers who receive the Lord’s Supper should repent of their sin, and receive the supper in a spirit of unity with other believers, rather than eat and drink judgment to themselves (1 Cor. 11:29). While we may unknowingly place the primacy of the Word to eclipse the other elements of worship, the grace preached should provide the context for understanding the grace expressed in the Lord’s supper. Therefore, while the tone of the supper is serious, as it focuses on Christ’s death, it ultimately is a celebration of joy, a foretaste of the kingdom of God.

Offering

Money is such an idol in our culture. We worship it so regularly that we become hypersensitive if anyone in church talks about it. But generous giving has always been part of how believers return thanks to God, from Abel offering his firstborn lamb (Gen 4:4), to Moses telling Israel to stop giving because their offerings to build the tabernacle had been so generous (Ex. 36:6-7), to Paul grounding his call for generosity in “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” (2 Cor 8:9). Jesus endorsed giving a tithe (ten percent) to the Lord, though He boldly challenged His disciples to move beyond a legalistic approach to an entire life of grace: “For you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness. These you ought to have done, without neglecting the others” (Mt 23:23). Paul encourages believers to give “on the first day of the week” (1 Cor 16:2), each person giving “as he has decided in his heart, not reluctantly or under compulsion” (2 Cor 9:7). As we take time in the service to give, we acknowledge that money is a servant, not a master; that we are stewards of what God already owns; that there is joy in sharing each other’s financial burdens; that the ministry of the gospel is worth investing in; and that God is glorified in our use of His resources.

Benediction

A benediction is not simply a Scripture verse with a nice sentiment or a summary of the sermon’s message. A benediction is a blessing. It is literally a “good word.” In the worship service – a dialogue between God and His people – God not only has the first word (the call to worship), He also has the last word, dismissing us with His blessing. It is not as if by going through the rituals of worship we have somehow earned God’s benediction of peace. Rather, all our acts of worship are done in Christ, so that it is Christ’s own obedience, His service of worship, that is the foundation of the blessing given to us at the service’s end. The Trinitarian blessing from the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit found at the close of Second Corinthians (2 Cor. 13:14) is foreshadowed in the blessing pronounced in Numbers 6:23-27 – “Speak to Aaron and his sons, saying, ‘Thus you shall bless the people of Israel: you shall say to them, “The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you; the Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace.” So shall they put my name upon the people of Israel, and I will bless them.’” Since the benediction is God’s Word to us, rather than our prayer to God, one need not adopt the posture of prayer (traditionally, the closing of one’s eyes) to receive it. The entire worship service, with its adoration of God, its conviction of sin, its preaching of the gospel, and its instruction, has been leading up to this final moment of God’s promise of peace, a full-orbed promise of right relationships and eternal blessing. Although a benediction may simply be the perfunctory close to a worship service, it can also be a powerful instrument of pastoral care as members experience the grace from the voice of a pastor who understands the power of sending God’s people out with a promise of divine pardon, presence, and peace. Making it a significant and meaningful element of the worship service.[5]

In conclusion, God gave us worship that enables us to praise His glory and reflect it. Awareness of this great privilege compels us to shape our worship by the gospel. Our worship is not merely shackles of tradition or idols of our own making; it is the treasure we mine to offer Him radiant love and the highest honor. We use it to lift to God the hope of the gospel He provides, the greatest emblem of our praise and the greatest expression of His glory. Our worship program is designed to proclaim the gospel so others can see His glory dancing in our hearts.[6]

[1] Daniel I. Block, For the Glory of God: Recovering a Biblical Theology of Worship (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2014), 146. 

[2] All Scripture verses quoted using English Standard Version translation (ESV)

[3] Bryan Chapell, Christ Centered Worship: Letting the Gospel Shape Our Practice (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2009), 160. 

[4] Ibid.,160.

[5] Ibid.,254.

[6] Concluding thoughts from section one. Bryan Chapell, Christ Centered Worship: Letting the Gospel Shape Our Practice (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2009), 155.