Called to Discipleship

At the beginning of worship every week, you are called to worship. The Call to Worship is labeled Entrance in your bulletin and includes our processional hymn, the Greeting, and our opening Prayer, the Collect for Purity. At the beginning of the worship service, you are summonsed by the God of the whole universe to worship, to enter into His presence, to hear His voice, to eat and fellowship with Him and one another together, and to receive His blessing. One way of thinking about the Call to Worship at the beginning of the service is as nothing less than the Call of Jesus to follow Him as His disciple. Remember at the beginning of the gospels, Jesus walks around telling people to follow Him. He calls James and John, Simon Peter and Andrew to leave their fathers and the nets in their boats to follow Him. He calls Matthew at the tax office. He calls Philip and then Nathanael from under a fig tree. At one point Jesus called a man to follow Him who asked if he might first go and bury his father. But Jesus said, let the dead bury their dead, but you go and preach the kingdom of God. The Call to Worship is the Call to Discipleship, the Call to follow Jesus, to obey Him, to leave everything behind for Him, to preach the gospel of the Kingdom. This is not just something we do, something we say to start the service. This is God addressing you, calling you, and we respond committing ourselves to Him, swearing allegiance to Him. We are here standing in your gates O, Jerusalem. Our help is in the Name of the Lord, Maker of heaven and earth. All that we are is His. All that we have is His. We are summonsed before the King, and we are at His disposal. To worship Jesus is to lay your life before Him, to confess that you don’t belong to yourself, but you wholly belong to Him.