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The Importance of Regular Church Attendance

September 11, 2012 in Church life, Corporate Worship with 2 Comments

 And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near. – Hebrews 10:24-25

Here are 25 reasons why you should regularly take part in the public and corporate worship assemblies of your local congregation:

1. The word of God teaches it (Heb. 10:24-25). A high and correct view of scripture demands regular church attendance.

2. Corporate worship is where the preaching and teaching of God’s word takes place (2 Tim. 4:1-5).

3. It follows the example set by the Lord Jesus Christ (Luke 4:16).

4. It honors the best and brightest day of the week – Sunday, the Lord’s Day – the day on which the Lord Jesus rose from the dead.

5. It is a wise and proper use of the privilege we have to publicly and corporately worship God. There are Christians in other lands who do not have this freedom. The only way for us to express our gratitude for this liberty is to use it faithfully and thankfully.

6. Your neglect of corporate worship grieves the Holy Spirit who lives within the individual believer and the church as a whole (Eph. 4:30).

7. It brings joy to the spiritual leaders who watch over your soul and who must give account for you. Absenteeism grieves them and is unprofitably for you (Heb. 13:17).

8. It demonstrates that you share the mission and ministry of the particular church family of which you are a member.

9. Your absence from church services renders it difficult, and in some instances impossible, for you to participate in the church’s mutual ministry to itself, especially the “one another” commands of the New Testament.

10. You need the encouragement that comes from the assembling of the saints (Heb. 10:24-25). In fact, the more evil the days become, the more you need this encouragement.

11. God demands first place. We should give God the first part of our financial increase. We should have a daily quiet time to give God the first part of our day. And we should regularly attend church on Sunday to give God the first part of our week.

12. It reminds you that God of a new community of people through faith in Jesus Christ (Rom. 12:5).

13. It is a way of preserving the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace (Eph. 4:3).

14. Public and corporate worship is one of the key places where you exercise your spiritual gifts. It is a strategic place to minister to other believers (1 Co. 14:12-14).

15. You regular attendance serves as a positive example and influence for others.

16. If you take part in some ministry of the church – and you should – your absence can hinder the overall effectiveness of the group and discourage other members.

17. Being involved in public and corporate worship services counteracts our self-centeredness.

18. You should take the time to stop and say “thank you” to God for bringing you through another week.

19. Absenteeism is a poor testimony to unbelievers who see your inconsistency (John 13:34-35).

20. True and saving faith will create love for that which Christ loves; namely, the church (Eph. 5:25). Regularly attending church services is a fundamental way to show your love for the bride of Christ.

21. It is the practice of good habits like regular church attendance that builds spiritual character.

22. The New Testament teaches us to recognize, to share all good things with, to submit to, and to honor the spiritual leaders who teach us the word. Attending worship is a way of doing that. (Remember, not only are we accountable to the word of God, we are also accountable to those who God uses to teach us his word.)

23. Attending public and corporate worship services renews and strengthens us for the days ahead (Heb. 10:24-25).

24. Corporate worship helps reinforce the truth that worship is not about getting from God. Fundamentally, Christian worship is about giving to God.

25. Public and corporate worship is the officially designated place to carry out the ordinances of the church – Baptism and the Lord’s Supper.

Let them thank the Lord for his steadfast love, for his wondrous works to the children of man! Let them extol him in the congregation of the people, and praise him in the assembly of the elders. – Psalm 107:31-32

What are your thoughts about the importance of regular church attendance? Can you think of any other reasons why it is important to be marked present on the Lord’s Day? Join the conversation in the comments section. 

Sunday Morning Begins On Saturday Night

July 7, 2012 in Corporate Worship, Spiritual disciplines with 2 Comments

Let’s face it. We’ve all done it.

We have all had those times when we participated in corporate worship services without truly worshiping God in spirit and truth. We have all gone through the motions. We have all sat in services with our minds and hearts being at some distant place.

Why does this happen? You love God. You have been looking forward to going to church all week. The worship was uplifting, the music was inspiring, and the sermon was edifying. But, somehow, you missed it all.

As the worship flowed, you were fault-finding. As the musical praise was rendered, you thoughtlessly mouthed the words. As the sermon was preached, you were daydreaming. You share Jacob’s sad post-Bethel testimony: “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it.” (Gen. 28:16) What happened?

One of the reasons why we “miss” some of the worship services we are in is because we start preparing ourselves way too late.

In fact, before I go any further, let me ask you a question.

Do you prepare for worship? On Sunday mornings, do you just get up, get dressed, and get going? Or do you take time to get the meditations of your heart ready to be acceptable to the Lord (Ps. 19:14)?

If not, I challenge you to make a new commitment today to take spiritual preparation for corporate worship service more seriously.

You should take the time to ready your heart for corporate worship. And the best time to begin these preparations is Saturday night, not Sunday morning.

You can’t rip and run Saturday morning, ignore the Lord Saturday evening, and stay up all Saturday night; then get up on Sunday morning and try to shake all of that off for worship.

While you should take advantage of the free time Saturday provides; you should do so without forgetting that you will begin your week in worship and fellowship with the Lord Jesus and his body, the church.

Interestingly, many of us do this when the 1st Sunday approaches, knowing that we must examine ourselves before the Lord’s Supper. But this self-examination should be a regular part of our preparations for corporate worship (1 Cor. 11:28).

Are you tired of coming to church and neglecting the very one who is the subject and object of our worship? I challenge you to begin your preparations for Sunday morning on Saturday nights.

What do you do to prepare yourself for corporate worship on Sunday morning?

Thanksgiving Day Service @ Shiloh

November 23, 2011 in Corporate Worship, Shiloh, Thanksgiving with 0 Comments

There will not be a Midweek Worship Service at Shiloh this evening.

We will meet in the morning for a special Thanksgiving Day Service at 9 AM in our Coleman Auditorium.

Start your holiday be joining us for corporate worship. God is the source every good gift and perfect gift. And he is worthy to be praised for all of his undeserved benefits toward us.

Hope to see you there!

“Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.” – 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18 (ESV)

On Technology and Transcendence

September 14, 2010 in Articles, Corporate Worship with 1 Comment

So there I was in a worship service at the National Baptist Convention in Kansas City last week. Between messages, during the offering, the woman sitting next to me said to me, “Now you know you should not be playing with your phone during worship.” I explained that I chose to use the Bible on my phone and that I was simply following along with the text during the sermon. She accepted my explanation but added that using the Bible on my phone is a temptation to check emails or do something else in church. All I could say was, “You’re right.”

The times are changing. Rapidly changing. Ten years ago… five years ago… last year… we would not have dreamed of some of the technological gadgets that we not take for granted. And we can expect the pace of updates to continue in the days to come. Just today I read that my five-month old iPad may become outdated by the possible release of the iPad 2 by the end of 2010. And I love it. I am a gadget geek. And I love all of the user-friendly gadgets that are being released. Except when they come to church.

Am I old fashioned about worship protocol? I guess it depends on who you ask. I would like to think that I embrace a reverent informality when it comes to corporate worship. There are so many things I cannot believe people get so stuffy about in church. But then I catch myself getting stuffy about the use of gadgets in worship. I guess I am a recovering Pharisee, too.

For the record, there is nothing wrong with people using the Bible on their phones in worship, in and of itself. What matters are the words of the text, not whether those words are printed on dead trees. But I think that pushy lady who sat next to me in church last week may have been on to something. Because I was using the Bible on my phone, I was tempted to check emails, send a text, or pull up my Facebook page. Things I do not otherwise think about in worship.

On top of that, my cell phone Bible version was apparently a distraction for the lady sitting next to me. Sure, I could say that it was none of her business what I was doing with my phone. But that is not the spirit of Christ. The very nature of corporate worship and Christian living requires that I be careful not to allow my liberty in Christ to become a stumbling block for a weaker brother or sister.

Several weeks ago, a friend and colleague visited the midweek service at the church I serve. One of my members leaned over and asked him, “Why are you playing with that thing and not listening to my pastor’s sermon?” My friend was listening and following along and taking notes. On his iPad. But the fact that he was doing so on an iPad became a distraction to the person sitting next to him. And ultimately to him, as well, as he had to stop listening and explain himself while the sermon was going on. Is this right or wrong? I don’t know. But I think it is something to think about.

We are now at a place where people in church respond to something encouraging or helpful in the sermon by Tweeting it or posting it on their Facebook page. “Touch your neighbor and tell them…” has apparently been replaced by “Text your neighbor and tell them…” Before we just declare this reality to be the way it is, we should carefully think through the implications of how we use technology in worship.

I believe the most valuable asset we have as humans is our time. And with all the time saving gadgets available to us, most of us still complain that we do not have enough time for the things that are important to us. That includes God! Isn’t ironic that our time saving gadgets are crowding out the one place and time where many people focus on God – in corporate worship on Sunday mornings?

One of the great indictments against contemporary worship is that we have lost a sense of the transcendence of God. Everything is so immediate and imminent that we do not acknowledge that God is above and beyond us. The Lord is sitting on the pew next to us, not sitting on a throne high and lifted up. While I am grateful for all the ways the technology makes our lives easier, I am concerned about anything that aids our trivialization of the Almighty. And any medium that gets in way of the message. As we integrate our gadgets into our worship lives – or before we do so – we should think long and hard about whether our gadgets dull our sense of the majesty of God in worship or help us to see and sense the supremacy of God more clearly and deeply and joyfully.

Could it be that using mobile devices in worship can be just as dangerous as texting while driving?

June 10, 2009 in Corporate Worship, Preaching, Quotations with 1 Comment

Why? Why do we do what we do? What is our ultimate goal? Why do we dress as we dress? Why do we allot time as we do in our services? Why do we preach as we preach? Why do we sing, and why do we sing it the way we do? Do we care about what the world will think of our activities? Where is God in all this? Do we seek to meet Him in His truth, begging the Spirit to use the word to reveal to us the depths of our on hearts so that we may be changed and made better servants of His? Do we think He is lucky to have us around, or do we tremble at the thought of approaching Him, not out of fear of retribution or wrath (being in Christ), but because we stand in awe of his glory, His power, His condescension, His grace? Are we more concerned about making a misstep in our performance for the audience, or about the purity of the motives of our hearts before the God with whom we have to do? These are the questions that separate worship from entertainment? – James R. White, Pulpit Crimes: The Criminal Mishandling of God’s Word, pp. 93-94

Should Young Children Receive Communion?

April 28, 2009 in Corporate Worship, My Thursday Article, Ordinances with 6 Comments

Like many Baptist congregations, the church I serve practices what is called open Communion, rather than closed Communion. This means that every professing believer who is present for our Lord’s Supper services is welcome to participate, whether they are a member of our local congregation or not. By extension, it also means that every true believer is welcome to participate no matter what his or her age may be. Any and every child who has received the Lord Jesus as Savior and Lord and sincerely intends to follow Christ is encouraged to commune with us at the Lord’s Table. And we do not have any examination process to determine a child’s readiness for Communion, as we do with baptism. We simply leave it up to the parents to determine whether a child should receive the elements of the Supper.

That’s the issue that I want to address in this article. When should parents allow their children to receive the Lord’s Supper?

Let me preface my answer by clearly stating that when it comes to the spiritual development of children, parents (with the partnership of their local church) should be very aggressive. The flesh, the world, and the devil do not wait to corrupt our children and lead them away from God. And we should not wait to sanctify our children and lead them to Christ. So I would say to parents do not wait to teach your children the importance of regular church attendance, the priority of prayer, the blessings of generosity, and the duty of service to God and others. But I believe that the Lord’s Supper is a different matter. I think that parents should be slow, cautious, and prayerful about when and how they introduce their children to the Lord’s Supper. I believe this is the proper approach, because of the nature of the Christian ordinances.

There is no redemptive value in the ordinances. God saves sinners – both children and adults – by grace through faith in Jesus Christ, plus or minus nothing. So baptism and the Lord’s Supper have no saving power. But these Christ-instituted rituals are symbols of salvation. That is, baptism and the Lord’s Supper are divinely revealed pictures of what it means to be saved. Through these ordinances, we identify ourselves with the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ, along with all the redeemed saints of God. They mark us as saved people; they do not bring salvation. For this reason, it may be best that parents keep their children from participating in the Lord’s Supper until they are old enough to understand the meaning of it and can receive it with faith, repentance, and thanksgiving.

In 1 Corinthians 11:28-30, a corrective against the abuse of the Lord’s Supper, Paul says, “Let a person examine himself, then, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment on himself. That is why many of you are weak and ill, and some have died” (ESV). These are stern warnings and exhortations about the importance of the Lord’s Supper. And it would be foolish to fail to factor them into your family’s deliberations about when young children should receive Communion.

Now, if you decide that your young children should participate in the Lord’s Supper with you, you are not violating the scriptures. There is no direct statement in scripture to regulate what age children should be when they receive Communion for the first time. So that decision really is left to the discretion of the parents. But I commend to you that the wisest thing for your child’s spiritual development may be to wait to receive the Lord’s Supper.

Wait until your child understands the meaning of the Lord’s Supper. The Lord’s Supper symbolizes the broken body and shed blood of the Lord Jesus. In other words, the elements of the Supper point us to the cross, where Jesus became our substitute and died to pay the penalty for our sins. So I would recommend that parents wait until their children have a basic and clear understanding of the gospel, before they give them Communion. Don’t give it to them if they are not able to relate to the elements beyond having juice and crackers in church. Wait to make sure they understand that the “juice and crackers” point to what Jesus did on the cross. And wait for them to understand more than the facts; wait for them to understand the meaning of the cross.

Wait until your child professes saving faith in Jesus Christ. The Christian ordinances are just that, Christian ordinances. So the best standard for when a person should receive the ordinances is when they have become a Christian through saving faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. Don’t confuse your children about salvation, give them a false confidence of salvation, or lead your children to discount the value of Christ’s atoning work, by allowing them to take the Lord’s Supper before they are able to receive it in a meaningful way.

Wait until your child is mature enough to make an independent and credible decision to follow Jesus Christ. The Lord’s Supper bids us to live in a way that honors the great price that Christ has paid for our salvation. This is why we are commanded to examine ourselves before we receive the Supper. We play the hypocrite, dishonor Christ, and invite judgment on ourselves when we take Communion, but live in contradiction to the spiritual values that the Lord’s Supper symbolizes. And when parents allow this to happen with their children, they inadvertently teach their children how to “play church” without being a fully devoted follower of Jesus Christ. So wait until your child is ready to live for Jesus before you allow them to take the Lord’s Supper.

Don’t be in too big a hurry to have them participate in the Supper that you don’t seriously process the spiritual implications of their participation. And if they ask you why they can’t have the juice and crackers like everyone else (and, at some point, they will), tell them why and explain to them the wonderful plan of salvation through faith in the cross of Jesus Christ. In fact, tell them about the meaning of the Supper as often as you can. Pray diligently for the salvation of your young children. Make sure that you live before them in such a way that your lifestyle does not contradict your witness. Lead them to participate in the elements of corporate worship and ministry programs in your church that are appropriate for your children. And wait with confidence for God to work.

2008 State of the Church Address

February 4, 2008 in Corporate Worship, MSMBC, Pastoral Work, Preaching with 1 Comment

I usually give a “State of the Church Address” each year at Mt. Sinai, during the first midweek service resumes. We call it our “Vision Night” service. But I chose to delay that message this year, not really knowing if I would ever actually get to it. Our congregation is in the midst of a relocation process. The Lord has been answering our prayers and doing great things on our behalf. But these first weeks of the new year have also been rather challenging. We delayed our final planning that would have been completed in October or November, trusting that there would be more clarity in the new year. Well, the new year came. And things have remained very fluid. So I questioned whether or not I should do the state of the church message this year. But I decided to do this message yesterday, in our Sunday morning service, to help give our congregation a sense of direction amidst all that changes that are taking place.

I was quite nervous about doing this “special message” yesterday. I believe that Sunday mornings are times for preaching. So I really didn’t know how comfortable the congregation would be with me doing so different. But the Lord helped me in a great way. I was able to share my heart, cast vision, and point the congregation to several passages of scripture that have meant much to me in this process. And our congregation received the message warmly. I was very encouraged to hear members share with me how it provided the clarification, direction and confirmation that they needed to go forward. God be praised!

The title of my message yesterday was “Great Expectations.” And it accurately reflects my attitude toward the days to come. I am blessed to pastor a great church! It is my joy to minister to them and serve Christ with them. Mt. Sinai has a great history and legacy. But our dreams are even greater than our memories. We confidently expect great things from God. And we are committed to attempt great things for God. Please pray for us that the Lord will fulfill every holy desire we have and fulfill every deed prompted by faith to his glory.