The people of God, newly redeemed, stood in slack-jawed, knee-quaking silence as the voice of God thundered from Mt. Sinai. Behind them lay the Red Sea, now calm after having provided the Israelites safe passage and then immediately and violently swallowing the Egyptian army. Who was this who had defeated the world’s strongest pantheon of the world’s most powerful people and now called out to them?

And they heard: “I am YHWH, your God, the God your fathers Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. There is no other; there is none beside me. Therefore, you shall place no other so-called gods before me.” They had seen it: by the power of YHWH’s grace, the most powerful gods of the world had been systematically put to shame and defeated, along with their people so that the cries of His own people for justice and mercy may be vindicated and His own glory displayed for all the world to see.

When we come to worship, this is the God before whom we come, by Whose grace we come: the God who has not only defeated the Egyptian pantheon, but the kingdom of Death itself so that our cries for mercy may be vindicated and His own glory displayed. This week, as we come to worship, let us, by faith, prepare our hearts to worship THIS God, and no other; to worship THIS God alone, the God by whose power Jesus, the Christ, was raised and now reigns supreme in glory, and no other.

As you gather, please be in prayer for each other that we would gather to worship THIS God, and be in prayer for God’s people worldwide that together THIS God’s name would be magnified and glorified through Christ-centered worship before a watching and desperately needy world.

File: Order of Worship for February 4, 2007