The flow of Christian worship is God coming to his people in Christ and the beauty of Christ drawing his people up to him, returning everything as a sweet aroma of praise to God. During the sermon, the preacher is not the performer nor the audience the congregation. The audience is God and the performer is God's people as they lift their hearts in harmonious praise under the direction of a faithful preacher who follows the score of God's word.
First day worship is founded on the work of Christ and is an act of faith that looks forward to the fulfillment of that work, day by day, leading to the great day. Christian worship has a Spiritual manner, a true form (John 4:24), but its end and purpose is Christ and his work (Eph 3:20-21). The Lord's Day is a day of worship, not an hour. It is a day we acknowledge our between-ness, looking back to the resurrection, but also forward to the coming kingdom. Memory and anticipation set the tone as we start a new week. Christ has gone before us and is the foundation of all we are about to do; he stands in front of us and is the goal of every step we will take (2 Cor 4:16-18). On this day our new life is replenished from the source so that living water springs up in our hearts (John 7:37). On this day, even though we are far from home, we rest in the arms of our Lord and are nourished by the fruit of the world to come (1 Cor 15:50-58). The next day and the next, he has called us to a hard journey to the place we long for, our final life with him (1 John 3:1-3).
