Ideas for the Lord's Day: To Sanctify the Lord's Day

 Ideas for Lord’s Day Worship: To Sanctify the Lord’s Day
Geoffrey R. Kirkland
Christ Fellowship Bible Church


The Lord’s Day is not to be “Boring-Day” or “Do-Nothing-Day.”  It is a special day, the high day, the holy day, the celebration day when we cheerfully triumph because Christ our Champion has died for our sins and He has risen for us! He lives for us, intercedes for us, protects us, and shall come again for us!  He is just as longing for and anticipating the meeting of the saints as we are. He walks among the lampstands and is eager to gather where two or three in His name assemble.

The Sunday heart of worship actually begins Saturday night. Get rest. Go to bed early. Fill your heart with Truth. Don’t go to bed intoxicated with worldly music, movies, words and shows. Prepare yourself and your heart Saturday night and you’ll rise Sunday morning with a heart ready  and alert and eager to glorify Christ. Go to bed with a heart full of Christ and His Word and you will find yourself rising with an eager and anticipating heart for corporate worship.

SOME PASTORAL SUGGESTIONS TO CONSIDER AND ADAPT TO YOUR PARTICULAR CONTEXT:

1. Have high and lofty thoughts of the Lord’s Day. Remember this is God’s Gift-Day to you to prioritize Him and His worth. On this day, God’s people worship with the Saints and affirm and confess and unify together with like-minded gospel-saints and an opportunity to serve others. Perhaps one of the greatest ways to elevate your thoughts of the Lord’s Day is to believe what God says about it: it is to be a day of joy and celebration, a delight (Isa 58.12-14).

2. Do a study on the Attributes of God. You could watch the Ligonier videos on the Attributes of God, grab one of the Systematic Theologies and work through God’s attributes. You would benefit greatly from reading the Blessed and Boundless God by George Swinnock, or JI Packer’s Knowing God. Even if you selected one chapter to carefully read through on the Lord’s Day morning, your heart will well up with wonder and praise for the God who chose you in salvation, redeemed you with His blood, and invites you to worship Him in the Spirit!

3. Pray through the Membership List Carefully, Specifically, Individually. Grab the membership list and pray through it. Or, perhaps you could pray through a portion of that membership list. Pray by name. Pray specifically. Pray for their children. Pray for their marriages, their places of ministry and their growth in grace.

4. Pray through area Churches that faithfully preach the gospel  (and consider praying thru area false-churches that have left gospel preaching & pray for God to grant repentance to them, leadership teams and people). Spend time praying for the power of the Word to fill pulpits and bless hearers as Christ’s honor and gospel thunders forth. Pray for divine power, the unction, the empowerment of the Spirit to assist and attend the reading and preaching of the Word.

5. Pray through the missionaries — a country, a people group. You may consider selecting a particular country or people group (JoshuaProject.net) and learn a bit of it, pray specifically for it, and let your heart be drawn to the people who live in desperate need of the gospel of grace. Pray for God to raise up missionaries. Pray for the Lord to raise up workers to go out to this harvest field.

6. Consider hospitality / a brunch, a lunch. Maybe you could plan and prepare to have someone over for a meal. It doesn’t have to be flashy or expensive or super formal. Keep it simple, warm, inviting, and intentional! Focus on good conversations, share testimonies, speak of Christ and His Word, share your favorite hymn and doctrine. Then have a time of Scripture reading and prayer — and even preparation for worship together!

7. Consider the Sunday morning CARE GROUP.  We have a CARE group that meets Sunday mornings to prepare for the worship in the afternoon.  Consider jumping in and joining that group.

8. Come early for the 1:00PM Prayer meeting for the worship service & for divine power. All that we do, if God does not attend with spiritual power, is a mere human event and void of spiritual efficacy. Therefore, we pray, and we must pray. A group gathers in the church building to seek the Lord’s face in prayer and beg for His power and working in our midst during the worship service. Come to this prayer meeting!

9. Weather and season permitting, go for a walk, enjoy an outdoor activity by yourself, with your family & kids, or with others. God has given endless opportunities to enjoy Him and bathe in His creation. He puts His power, attributes, glory and wisdom on display outdoors. Go for a walk. Go to a park. Take a hike. Take another along with you. Ponder, meditate, memorize, talk about, reflect on Christ and His Word together.

10. Have extended time of preparation for worship.  Read the Scripture, think on it, do a brief study of the text. Grasp the outline, the meaning, the ideas, the application points.  Sing the songs. Read the portion that’ll be read during the pastoral reading & prayer. Pray through all the elements of the worship service.  

11. Work through the catechism on your own that’ll be taught in the 2pm classes for the Young People.  Read it, memorize it (go over it repeatedly till you have it down word for word verbatim). Then study the footnote that gives the fuller, theological explanation and support for the catechism answer. If you do this carefully, systematically and deliberately, you will work through a full systematic theology through all the doctrines so as to sharpen your knowledge of God and His Truth.

12. Plan and pray for a way you can serve another in your church family on this day.  Think of an adult and a child.  Find them. Make a beeline for them. Encourage them. Pray with them. To do this well, plan early, pray for wisdom, be specific and thoughtful and engage with different people so as to encourage the Church family — younger and older — as you see them in the corporate assembly.

 

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My Goals as a Preacher of the Word of God.

 MY GOALS AS A PREACHER OF THE WORD OF GOD.
Geoffrey R. Kirkland

Pastor, Christ Fellowship Bible Church

As I preach God’s Word, I have goals that help me as I study and pray over the Word, and craft and outline the sermon, and prepare and deliver the message. Here are some goals that I have as a preacher of the Word of God.
 

1. Understandable.  I desire to be an understandable preacher.  I want people to understand God’s Word from the text that lays before us. Whatever passage, or chapter, or verse I herald, my ultimate goal is this: did it help God’s people? Did they understand it? Did the text become clearer to them?  I want them to understand God and His Word better after the sermon is complete.
 

2. Exegetical.  I must labor hard and labor long in my study in the text of Scripture.  The exegesis process demands much time, care, patience, prayerfulness, humility, and submission. To exegete the text means to go deep into the text of Scripture (in the original languages) so as to draw out — that is, to bring out — the meaning of the text.  My exegesis always drives my sermon preparation. I must arrive at the meaning of the text before anything else can come together. I must know what the A/author intended to convey by the words of the text. 

3. Faithful.  In my preaching, I must be faithful to Christ and to His Truth. I want to be powerful and authoritative as an instrument of God for the good of souls. But to be useful to my Master, I must be faithful to Him in studying and interpreting His revealed Word. It is not my goal to be clever, or relevant, or funny, or entertaining. My goal is simple: am I being faithful to God and to His Word? Faithfulness demands truthfulness and trustworthiness. Whatever the text says should carry the sermon along. I would be unfaithful if I imposed my interpretation or meaning upon a text of Scripture. I must humbly submit to God’s Word and allow the text to speak for itself. I want to be a ‘faithful servant.’
 

4. Practical. In my preaching, I must be practical. I want people to know how the passage of Scripture, rightly interpreted and understood, must affect their lives, their conversations, their heart-attitudes, and their thoughts of God and about life. I never want to stand up and give a commentary or merely a lecture on a text. I must explain the meaning and give the truth of the text. But faithful preaching drives it home powerfully, forcefully, clearly, specifically, individually, and inescapably so that all the hearers (both saved and unsaved) know that it calls for a verdict and demands that they do something in light of what they heard.
 

5. Powerful.  When I stand to herald the oracles of God from His Word, I have no intention of being a talking head or another oratorical speaker. I long for power. I want power. I crave for spiritual unction. This, I believe, only comes through lingering long in God’s presence in desperate prayer and calling upon God for His Spirit to fill me, take control of me, and be the authoritative divine voice, working through my mouth, to change and transform my hearers. My goal is to preach with Almighty power. Thus, I resolve to make God’s Word the center of my message.

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Why I Preach The Word of God.

 Why I Preach The Word
Geoffrey R. Kirkland

Why am I resolved and resolutely focused on expositing God’s Word faithfully, powerfully, authoritatively and prayerfully?  What drives my thinking, my praying, my studying, my heralding?   

Here are a handful of reasons why I preach the Word.

1. to submit to the Word.   I preach the Word because the Word of God is my authority. I have nothing to say apart from the Word. Without God’s Word as my authority & object of heralding, I stand as nothing more than a clanging cymbal or a dumb animal. I herald the Word because I stand under authority, and on commission, and in burning affection for the Bible, the very Word of God.
 

2. to hear from the Father.  I preach and minister the Word because God speaks to His people through His Word. Every word of Scripture is God-breathed and therefore wholly inspired and totally sufficient. People gather each week, throughout the week, not to hear man’s quips and thoughts and jokes, but they assemble to hear a word from the Almighty who has revealed Himself savingly in the Word of God. This is why Scripture is my source and message of preaching.
 

3. to exalt the Son of God.  I preach the Word to exalt and extol Jesus Christ, the only substitute for ruined sinners. He alone can reconcile guilty man with the Holy God. No other mediator exists. God provides no other redeemer or atonement or propitiation to save wretches from eternal wrath. Christ alone! Proclaiming Christ and Him crucified is needed for the converted the unconverted. All need to hear of Christ regularly. He is glorified as He is heralded.
 

4. to employ the means the Spirit uses.  The Spirit of God ministers and speaks through the Word He inspired to both bring salvation to dead sinners and to sanctify believers as they grow in Christlikeness.  The Spirit of God does not work apart from His Word. In the teaching and expounding of the Word, the Spirit powerfully works to convict and to convert those whom He shall draw to Christ.
 

5. to instruct the believer’s mind.  The ministry of preaching instructs the minds of believers. God’s people must remember that Christian living does not consist of a feeling-oriented life, but a Truth-driven and a Truth-governed life. Feelings and emotions and circumstances change. God’s Truth in His Word never does. Thus, I must relentlessly preach the Word to instruct believers on the nature and character of God, the glory of Christ, the duty and specifics of repentance and faith, humility, love, and Christian virtues.
 

6. to save the unconverted.  The Word of God must go forth because this alone is the means by which God saves the unconverted soul. No man can be saved apart from the truth of the gospel. Though the unbelievers cannot hear and believe on their own, being dead in sin and haters of God, the Word of God that goes forth has irresistible power to humble the proud, save the lost, deliver the enslaved, and wash the filthy.

7. to model biblical hermeneutics.  I am devoted to preaching the Word to provide an example for God’s people in how to read, study, interpret and apply Scripture. I preach through books of the Bible consecutively, remembering context, doing word studies, comparing Scripture with Scripture, arriving at the meaning and authorial intent with the aim of applying and implementing the Word in my life and the lives of my hearers. This process, week by week, models how to do Bible study.
 

8. to obey God. I preach the Word because God commands it. The timeless, ultimate prescription in the Word, as demonstrated by His faithful mouthpieces in both Old and New Testaments is the clear, bold proclamation of the Word. The heavenly Lord commands that preaching be the main driving power in the local church, so I obey my Master’s orders and preach the Word.


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