CD - The Third Commandment - Acts 17:10-15

The third commandment tells us what we get to do. Who do we get to worship? We get to worship our Lord. Actually, we get to do divine service which means we get to let God give us His gifts and blessings. Worship implies something that we do, and although we do get to do something, we get to come and respond to what the Lord first does for us and gives to us that is we get to praise the Lord. Yet, most of what happens at church is what God does for us. At divine service we are given gifts - faith, forgiveness, life, eternal life, salvation, etc.

Worship, divine service, is the way the Lord grows His church. In the book of Acts Luke tells us that the church grew through people being in the Word. It is the Holy Spirit working through the Word and the Sacraments, the means of grace, that God grows His church. How can that be? The illustration of the cup and pitcher explain it the best. God is like a pitcher, a bottomless, never emptying pitcher. When we come to worship, He fills our cups, our lives, with the spiritual milk from His pitcher. The more we come to the place where He gives His gifts, the Word and Sacraments, the more we are filled until we reach the point that we are overflowing, at which point we spill out His gifts onto others, we share His Word with others.

The Psalmist understood the idea of how important was divine service. He says, “I love the house where You live, O Lord, the place where Your glory dwells” (Psalm 26:8). Later he says, “I was glad when they said unto me, Let us go into the house of the Lord” (Psalm 122:1). The Psalmist loved going to the Lord’s house, to divine service, because there he knew that he would be given all the Lord’s good gifts and blessings. And he knew that he would be able to sing praises to the Lord for all the benefits he had been given.

Divine service is where we go to be given all God’s good gifts and blessings. Yet, we do not go blindly, deafly, or dumbly to divine service. We go with hearts and minds eager and ready to be given to. We go as the Paul tells us of the Bereans. “They received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true” (Acts 17:11b). We go, and we check out what the pastor preaches. Not because we do not trust the pastor, but to help him and to make sure that what he is preaching is the Word of God. We do this with everything we watch, read, and hear. Think about it; there are so many books, movies, radio and television evangelists in our world, and they are all promoting their own brand of God’s Word. We are to use His Word to check to make sure what we watch, hear, and speak is God’s Word, according to His Word. Imagine how much you would grow in your faith if you were like the Bereans.

A good attitude for divine service is one which moves a person to pray before, during and after service. Pray for the pastor that he might rightly divide Law and Gospel and boldly proclaim the true Word of God according to the Bible. Pray that the Lord would stir in the hearts of people so that they will be in worship. Pray that the Lord would send His Holy Spirit into your heart as well as into the hearts of the people who come to worship. Pray that the Lord would open your hearts and minds to hear His Word, so that the Word may take root in your heart and life and spring up and bear abundant fruit. Pray that the worship service might be for the strengthening of God’s people, for the extending of His Kingdom and to the praise and glory of His Holy Name.

Dear Lord, bless our pastor that he might rightly and boldly proclaim Your Word to us. Stir in the hearts of our congregation that we might be in worship, that we might hear the Word and that the Word might take root in our hearts and lives so that we will bear abundant fruit. For Jesus’ sake. Amen.