Life worth living.
A call to worship.
Themes
Hope • Hope laid up in heaven • Taking risks • Risky love • Danger • The road to Calvary • The myth of safety • Costly discipleship • Comfort
Jesus Christ explodes our myths of safety, calls us away from the beguiling enchantment of comfort, and gives us lives worth risking everything to live.
Scripture reading
Romans 15:4 Colossians 1:3–5 Acts 20:18–23
Do we have hope? Today’s call to worship1 comes from the Apostle Paul. He wrote the following about where our hope comes from and about what this hope is capable of doing.
Paul wrote: What was written in former days was written for our instruction, so that through the encouragement of the Scriptures, we might have hope. We thank God when we pray for you because we heard of the love that you have for all God’s people — love that comes from the hope laid up for you in heaven. And in the book of Acts, the author, Luke, records a conversation that Paul had with his friends when his friends were trying to persuade him for the sake of his safety not to travel to Jerusalem. And Paul says to them: You know how I lived among you — how I lived the whole time — serving the Lord with all humility and with tears and with trials that happened to me through the plots of the Jews; and how I did not shrink from declaring to you anything that was profitable, and how I did not shrink from teaching you in public and from house to house. And now, I am going to Jerusalem, constrained by the Spirit, not knowing what will happen to me there, except that the Holy Spirit testifies to me in every city that imprisonment and afflictions await me. I do not account my life of any value nor as precious to myself, if only I may finish my course and finish the ministry that I received from the Lord Jesus, to testify to the gospel of the grace of God.
Prayer
Father in heaven, thank You for all the historical stories, all the laws, all the proverbs, and the songs, and all that has been written by Your many prophets. It is all there, bound together in a book sitting beside us in the pew, all there so that we might have hope. And it’s this hope that causes us to love our brothers and our sisters, and to love others. It causes us to love people in the face of serious danger. Your hope, Father, creates the power to take great risks for the sake of others. You have not given to us a hope that is found in detailed revelations about how every risk we take will turn out; instead, You have laid up hope for us in heaven. Our lives are often one stressful risk after another, and we don’t know where each will take us. But in it all, we risk our lives for Your cause, Father. The roads aren’t safe. Our jobs aren’t safe. Our schools aren’t safe. Some of our friends aren’t safe. And before us are countless unspecified troubles. We don’t even know what today holds. But the road to Calvary nonetheless beckons us to take it. And the hope You’ve laid up for us empowers us to risk our lives. It is Your will that we be uncertain about how our lives here will turn out for us. And in that, it is Your will that the world around us be stunned by the Christ-exalting love we show in the face of great risk. It is costly to follow your beloved Son. There is risk everywhere in it. But this risk is also the means by which the value of Christ shines bright. In the name of Jesus Christ, who explodes our myths of safety, who calls us away from the beguiling enchantment of comfort, who gives us lives worth risking everything to live, Amen.
Inspiring resources
A call to worship creates wonderment, amazement, curiosity, yearning, captivation, provocation, hopefulness, thankfulness, affection, rapture, delight. As these mix together, the response is worship.
If this call to worship leaves you wondering or curious or provoked or hopeful, consider diving into this awesome little book from. This call to worship was written from this book. Much of what is in this call to worship is in this book.
This call to worship was given to the small assembly of Christians that gathered in Pathway Church, Beaverdam, Michigan, on August 28, 2022.