Message from Tim

 

Gathering for Worship at Pentecost

When was the last time you ‘went to church’ at 10.30 on a Sunday morning? How do you feel about coming back? With this Sunday being Pentecost and restrictions easing, it seems a good time to resume gathering for worship again. If you intend to come, please remember to book ahead. If you don’t intend to come, then God bless you as you worship at home, because if the Spirit of Christ dwells in you, then wherever you are at 10.30 on Sunday, you a member of God’s extended family, someone who has been redeemed by Jesus Christ, and that makes you part of the church. It is God’s gift of the Holy Spirit that marks you out as belonging to him. So how do we receive the Spirit? Simply by asking, by inviting Christ into our hearts. When we do that, he is always pleased to accept the invitation and make our hearts his home, our lives his temple.

So, if having the Spirit means that you belong to the church, perhaps we might do better to drop the phrase ‘going to church’ from our vocabulary and thinking. Does that mean we could also forget about ‘going to church’ in the sense of gathering for worship? Well, one thing Covid has taught us is that you can’t measure anyone’s Christian commitment by their level of church attendance. And yet, for all that, we are told we should not neglect meeting together; instead we should encourage one another (Hebrews 10:25). That means that one of the key reasons for gathering together is so that we can build one another up.

Well, that could make a positive difference to my expectations of church – I come, not thinking, ‘What am I going to get out of this service’ but, ‘Who can I encourage today, and how can I do this?’ When we come ready to give to other people in this way, we work in partnership with the Spirit of God, since the Spirit works through what we say and the gifts we use in the service of others to build up the Body of Christ. We are used to thinking of the Holy Spirit as the ‘Comforter’, but the idea that the Holy Spirit is also the ‘encourager’ is closely associated as well. Through our interaction with each other the Holy Spirit is at work to bring comfort and encouragement to everyone in the meeting.

So what is church for? What does the Holy Spirit want to achieve when we gather for worship? He wants to encourage, equip and enable us to live our lives for Jesus the other 167 hours in the week. Good worship does not involve singing (though perhaps we are sometimes guilty of reducing it to this, and losing the whole point in the process); good worship focuses the whole of our being on God for that hour or so, and it will also enable us to keep that focus in the following week, so that everything we do, we do for Christ.

That is the litmus test for worship whether we use YouTube to worship at home in front of the TV or whether we drag ourselves out of bed to make our way to Brighton Road. But if, as we gather for worship, the Holy Spirit works through you to encourage, comfort or build up someone else, then that sacrifice of getting out of bed on a Sunday morning will have been worth the effort.