April 28, 2014
7:31 AM

Trinity Church is doing a church wide campaign called, Follow Me, complemented by a teaching series by David Platt. Our discussion in my small group this week reminded me how important corporate worship is for Christ-followers. Namely this, the more our hearts and minds are filled with a true picture of our glorious God the more we will be moved to wholeheartedly trust and follow him. Herein lies the main goal of our worship service: magnifying the glory of Christ! The Scriptures beautifully describe this as “the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ.” (2 Corinthians 4:4) The maturity of our faith is a byproduct of our knowledge of God. A very important aspect of the worship gathering of God’s people is declaration and teaching on the character and essence of our Triune God. On Sunday we sang Crowder’s, O Praise Him, which invites us to hear the worship of heaven and then join and sing “all to Christ the King.” We praise him because he is Holy! Mark Brown’s first point of the message, Follow Me: The Call, was this very thing, the call is to follow Jesus because of who he is! Then he proceeded to help us be amazed and awed by our Lord. David Platt did the same thing in the message we watched last night in our small group. I’m deeply grateful for pastor Gary Inrig’s greatest contribution to my life as a follower of Jesus and worship leader (and the quality of our worship as a church): consistently preaching & teaching a true and thorough picture of the majesty of God.

This is what we discovered in our group last night: following Jesus is directly related to our trusting Jesus. While we worship God simply because he is holy and worthy to be praised, we find that in worshiping him we come to trust him more. When we trust him more, we follow him more wholeheartedly, we become willing to die to self, lose our lives, surrender our will, risk to share our faith, to step out of our comfort and love in extraordinary ways. Worship fuels following Jesus. So while we are in this series that will seriously challenge us in what it means to follow Jesus, let us not forget that our motivation for following him does not come from our own effort producing the willpower to follow. No, it comes from a growing knowledge of who he is, his relentless love and amazing grace. (to quote Citizens, Made Alive) Such wonderful knowledge manifests itself into a worthy response: “Love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all!” (Isaac Watts, 1707)