Slowing Down To Say Thank You

Father, thank You for keeping watch over us while we slept. We were vulnerable but did not even think of it because our confidence in You is woven so deeply in us that we go to sleep without obsessing over the dozens of haunts and hazards that might have otherwise owned our minds. Now we are awake and approaching this new day. Today, Sunday, is that day we ascribe to You with the titleThe Lord’s Day. Your servant, John, gave us that title in Your word and we find it precious to us. Truly all days belong to You and they are all purposed for Your worship and Your glory. Yet on Sunday we find ourselves strangely purposed and fixated at a higher level upon whom You are to us and who we are to You, and to one another. You call us to gather together, putting all other things aside for a later hour. You empower our singing, You motivate us to part with a portion of what we have earned so that Your gospel work can be funded, You place readied teachers among us who bring us Your truth and then You call us to pray. Today is special, not because of where it falls on our calendars, but because of what occurs among millions of Your children across the planet when they gather to worship Your Son and our Savior, Jesus Christ.

Thank You for including us in that number that is welcomed to worship. Thank You for sending the Gospel to us through parents, through neighbors, through schoolmates, through pastors and teachers and other random witnesses. Thank you for those Pentecostal college students who shared the Gospel with me on the front stoop of my apartment while I drank beer and laughed at them. Thank you for a Baptist grandmother who was gentle but consistent in her planting of Your message in my young heart. Thank you for the Potters – that family who took a sad little boy to Tucker Christian Church with them for several years, never knowing that what they invested in me would one day become fruitful. Thank you for parents who secretly prayed for my conversion when I was in the height of my rebellion and depths of my shame while I refused to speak with them in those years. Thank you for a teenage girl named Amy and her mother Deborah who were praying for Amy’s future husband before she knew him and a long time before I came to You. You had them praying for my salvation before they ever knew me! Today, Abba, we really do not know what You will be doing in our midst. Oh, we know that there will be singing, teaching, praying and preaching – but we do not know what You will do in the midst of these things. By faith we declare that we have no idea what harvest will come from our scattered Sunday-seeds. We simply rejoice in being able to sow them for You. Jesus has been made everything to us and we want that surging reality to hit us like a tsunami this morning when we gather. Our songs are not only for You but because of You. Our prayers communicate our expectancy that our Living God will move in divine concert with what we ask. Our lessons and sermons are offered in hope that they will be believed and acted upon by those in whom Your Holy Spirit dwells. Some among us today will not even know You – so may there be a spiritual rebirth or twelve in the sanctuary today! You are our delight and great need today. Truthfully, I will go home disappointed if I cannot say that I have met with You today in the presence of Your other kids. Meeting with them is not enough. Them meeting with me is insufficient. We love each other … but we adore You. You are the substance of Sunday.

“Be strong, and let your heart take courage, all you who wait for the LORD!” – Psalm 31:24