Hey Advent Family,
“It is good to give thanks to the Lord, to sing praises to the Most High. It is good to proclaim your unfailing love in the morning, your faithfulness in the evening.” — Psalm 92:1-2, NLT
I have been reading The Five Stones by one of our former guest speakers, Foye Belyea, and the picture behind the book has stayed with me because when hikers travel above the tree line, where the trail can disappear and the landscape starts looking the same in every direction, people who have gone before them stack stones along the path so the next traveler can look up and know, “I am still going the right way.” Christians have always needed those kinds of markers because following Jesus is not sustained by one emotional moment, one great sermon, or one season when everything feels spiritually alive. We need rhythms that keep pointing us back toward Christ when life becomes crowded and confusing, and one of those ancient rhythms is Sabbath worship, the deliberate decision to stop long enough to remember that God is God and we are not. That becomes especially important as life gets fuller, because some of you are carrying children who are grown now and making decisions you cannot control anymore, some are watching your health change in ways you never expected, some are thinking about retirement or wondering whether the money will stretch far enough, and some are caring for a spouse, helping with grandchildren, or quietly grieving the fact that this season of life does not look like the one you pictured twenty years ago. Those concerns are real, but if we are not careful, the very things we love most become the things that consume our minds most, and what consumes our attention eventually begins to compete for the place in our hearts that belongs to God.
We usually build the most protection around the thing we are most afraid of losing, so the parent who fears what might happen to a child keeps replaying every decision that child makes, the person worried about health begins measuring life by every appointment and test result, and the person afraid of financial insecurity keeps thinking that one more hour of work, one more account, or one more plan will finally make the fear go away, yet the strange thing is that all of this effort can leave us more exhausted without making us more secure. Slowly the daily grind cuts away at us until patience becomes shorter, joy becomes thinner, prayer becomes rushed, and we can spend years surviving from an empty cup while telling everyone around us that we are fine. Sabbath worship is God’s gracious interruption of that cycle because He invites us to bring the things we have been gripping so tightly and place them back on the altar, not because our responsibilities disappear, but because worship puts them back in their proper order. Your children matter, but they are not your savior. Your health matters, but it is not your lord. Your career mattered, your retirement matters, your family matters, but none of them were ever designed to carry the weight of your soul. In worship, God reminds us again that we are loved before we accomplish anything, that He remains faithful when circumstances are uncertain, and that hope does not depend on everything around us finally going the way we wanted it to go.
So the question is not simply whether you attend church on Sunday, but whether you have prepared your heart to worship when you arrive, because it is possible to sit in the same pew for thirty years and become so familiar with holy things that they stop feeling holy. Maybe you need to stop rushing into the room after spending the entire morning irritated and distracted, and instead put worship music on in the car and actually sing; maybe you need to arrive ten minutes early, sit quietly, open Scripture, and pray, “Lord, I have carried enough this week, help me put my eyes back on You”; maybe you need to meet someone for coffee before worship and encourage them instead of walking into church already focused on yourself; maybe you need to take notes again, invite somebody who is lonely, keep asking God for a hungrier heart, receive Communion with wonder instead of routine, or simply walk into the sanctuary expecting that the living God still speaks to His people. We prepare intensely for the things we believe matter, which is why people arrive early for football games, spend money they probably should not spend on concert tickets, and count down the days to vacations, yet we can approach the worship of Almighty God with less expectation than we bring to dinner reservations. Sunday worship is not ordinary. We are gathering with the saints, opening the Word of God, coming to the table of Christ, and joining the worship of heaven, so prepare your heart before you enter the room, because worship should not merely fill an hour on Sunday morning, it should reorder the way you carry everything waiting for you on Monday.
Pastor Chance