The Gospel and Gathered Worship

Every weekend when the church gathers together, we step out of the busyness of our individual daily lives and join together with our brothers and sisters to worship Jesus Christ in all his glory and grace as our God, our Savior, and our King. We sing, read the Bible, and hear it preached. We observe baptism and the Lord’s Supper, and in all of these things, we worship the God of the gospel together.

But because of the gospel, we don’t only offer worship to Jesus, but we also worship through Jesus (Romans 5:11, 16:27; 1 Corinthians 15:57; Ephesians 1:5; Philippians 1:11; Hebrews 13:21).

We are only able to worship because Jesus worshiped in our place first. That might sound a little weird to our ears—to say that the Son of God, whom we worship, also worshiped God in our place. But that’s exactly the message of the gospel!

You see, humans were created to worship—we were made to know, love, and obey God above all else. But every one of us falls short of worshiping God the way he intended us to. From the very first man and woman and everyone else after them, all the way down to even you and me, we didn’t worship God perfectly—not one of us did, except Jesus.

Jesus is God, and he became human to live the perfect life—or, to say the same thing in a different way, Jesus became human to be the perfect worshiper. As a human, he knew, loved, and obeyed God perfectly in our place. He lived the perfect worship-filled life we could never live, died the death that we deserved, and resurrected from the dead. For all who believe in him, his perfectly obedient life and his sacrificial death are in our place, and in his resurrection, he gives us his eternal life. 

So every week when we gather together with our church family, we worship God through Jesus—his life, death, and resurrection—and he becomes the centerpiece of all that we do.

When we sing, we praise God for who he is and what he has done. We also sing to remind one another of the gospel and encourage our brothers and sisters to continue to trust him with their whole lives. 

When we preach the Bible, we hear the gospel again and anew, week by week. When we baptize new church family members, we see the death and resurrection pictured and rejoice that God continues to work, saving people by grace through faith (Ephesians 2:8). When we take the Lord’s Supper, we see Jesus’ body broken for us and his blood poured out. We receive the gospel as our nourishment through the bread and the fruit of the vine, and we remember his death until he comes.

In all of these activities in the church’s gathered worship, we offer all our worship to Jesus and rejoice that we worship through Jesus.