In reflecting on Psalm 127, Eugene Peterson writes:

The main difference between Christians and others is that we take God seriously and they do not. We really do believe that he is the central reality of all existence. … Our work goes wrong when we lose touch with the God who works ‘his salvation in the midst of the earth.’ It goes wrong both when we work anxiously and when we don’t work at all, when we become frantic and compulsive in our work (Babel) and when we become indolent and lethargic in our work (Thessalonica). … Christian worship [as a gift of God's grace in which we learn to immitate God's glory and grace in our lives] gathers the energy and focuses the motivation that transform us from consumers who use work to get things into people who are intimate and in whom work is a way of being in creative, restoring relationship with another. As Christians worship and do the jobs and tasks assigned to them by their God of grace in what the world calls ‘work’, we learn to pay attention to and practice what God is doing in love and justice, in helping and healing, in liberating and cheering. (Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction, p111.)

As we prepare to gather together this weekend in response to God’s gracious invitation in Christ, to gaze upon his glory and grace in Christ and be changed into instruments tuned to his heartbeat in Christ for the display of his glory, may we pray together God would be pleased, that he would be glorified by our fellowshipping worship so that we may be a cause of rejoicing in the world among the people in which he has planted us.

File: Order of Worship for March 4, 2007