I will be visiting some of the saints in Enterprise, Oregon this morning and thus will not be preaching for Christ Church in Moscow. Our pulpit here will be filled by Joost Nixon from our sister congregation in Spokane. Please pray for him and for me, that we would preach the Word of God as we ought to. Because I will be on the road shortly I will not be posting my normal routine for the Lord’s Day.
But this worship in different places highlights an important point, one that we have emphasized repeatedly here in Moscow as we have dealt with the various onslaughts that the petty-minded have devised for us. Our fundamental response to everything that comes against us must always and everywhere be to turn to God in worship. And every faithful congregation appears before Him every seven days. Until the world ends, we have the privilege of appearing in His presence, and presenting our worship to Him. That worship includes our appeals to Him to intervene on behalf of His people. In our worship, we glorify the name of the Lord Jesus in the heavenly places, and then we turn and ask God to glorify His name on earth, as it has been in heaven. We can (and must) respond to our attackers in a Monday through Saturday kind of way (and I have a fun surprise for everybody tomorrow), but we must never trust in those sorts of things as though they were our deliverance. To do that would be to trust the arm of the flesh. Our deliverance, our God, our Savior, is in heaven, and He does as He pleases.
For the secular minded, this is nonsense. Someone (I forget who) once said that he did not mind that Lord Gladstone (I think it was) always had an ace of trumps up his sleeve. What he did mind was the notion that Gladstone tended to exude that God Almighty had put it there. This is how our appeals to the worship of the God of heaven appear to our opponents — an invocation of the Lord of Sabaoth, the God of battles, to intervene in a zoning flap in a small town in northern Idaho. It seems like overkill to them, an appeal to the moral government of the universe on behalf of a small church.
But we are not a small church. Every Lord’s Day, the entire church of all God’s people assemble at the heavenly Zion, the mountain that cannot be touched, and in that great assembly we present our worship, our praise, our petitions, and our thanks. We are preparing, all of us, to do that now. And every faithful believer needs to remember, always, that for our adversaries, in their attempted responses to the potency of Christian worship in the heavenlies, there are no countermeasures.