Themes
People of the gospel • The faith once for all delivered to the saints • Scripture • The good news • Communion with God • Knowledge • Agendas • Incarnation • Trinity • Eternal sonship • Spirit of Christ • God’s initiative • Wisdom • Union with God • Regeneration • Recreation
Knowledge of God is union with God… and that is personal—very personal—not propositional, not informational.
Scripture reading
Romans 1:1–4 1 Corinthians 1:17–23; 2:1–5
This call to worship1 invites us to be re-centered—pulled back from the noisy entanglements of identity politics, personal agendas, and cultural currents—to the one thing that truly and eternally defines us: the gospel of God. It moves from Scripture’s witness to the Father’s initiative, the Son’s incarnate obedience, and the Spirit’s indwelling power. It reminds us that the gospel is not something we wield, but something we receive—a communion we are drawn into, not a message we control.
Paul opens his letter to the Romans with these words about the gospel: Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God— the gospel God promised beforehand through His prophets in the holy Scriptures, the gospel concerning His Son, who as to His earthly life was a descendant of David, but who through the Spirit was declared to be the Son of God by His resurrection from the dead: Jesus Christ our Lord. And then in his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul wrote: Christ sent me to preach the gospel— not with wisdom. Why? Lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power. For the word of the cross is foolish— it is foolish to those who are perishing— but to us who are being saved it is the power of God (not the wisdom of men). Where is the person who is wise? Where is the person who can debate this age? In the wisdom of God, the world would not know God through its wisdom. Instead, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. We preach Christ crucified. When I came to you, I did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God with wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified. I was with you in weakness (not wisdom) and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom. No! My message was in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God. I remind you, brothers, of the gospel which you received, of the gospel in which you stand, and by which you are being saved. For I delivered to you as of first importance what I received. And that is: Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that He was buried, that He was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures.
Prayer
Father in heaven, help us to be people of the gospel. Help us to be defined only by the Gospel, and not by any other agenda. It seems far too easy for us to want to confuse our agendas, our desires, our feelings with Your gospel. Bring us back to our foundation, to the faith that was once for all, delivered to the saints, so that we can truly be gospel people— people defined by Your good news, not our politics, our ethnicity, our occupation, our status, our age, our gender, our sexual inclination. As we come here, week after week, year after year, may we be more and more enabled to act out of theologically and biblically grounded conviction. May our primary subject matter always be the gospel, and may all our secondary conversations about anything else we may ever discuss— with our spouses, with our friends, with our coworkers— may they always be derived from the gospel. May our primary source be Your scripture. May we become evermore committed to the good news of Jesus Christ found in Scripture— the good news, Father, concerning Your Son, who was declared to be both the Eternal Son of God and the human incarnate descendant of David, declared according to Your Spirit, the same Spirit who raised Him from the dead and so could bear witness to His eternal sonship. And, by the Spirit of Christ who is now indwelling in us, we are—ourselves, unbelievably so— brought into the Son’s own knowledge of You, Father. Through the Spirit in us, we have been drawn into the Son’s very own communion with You. All of this began with Your initiative, Father, not ours. The gospel is Your good news to us. And it moves through a real historical, God-incarnate, son-of-David human being, and it culminates in the Holy Spirit, Your Spirit, the Spirit of Christ, raising Him from the dead and revealing and confirming to us His divine Sonship. Father, enable this holy-scripture, Christ-centered, Spirit-effected regenerative gospel to grip us. Your gospel is not merely information. If it were, it would rest then in our wisdom— in our figuring it out. And it does not. It would be about plausible words of wisdom. And it is not. It rests entirely in Your power. It is not first a message we deliver, but a reality we receive, grounded in Your initiative. It was Your wisdom, Father, that knew from the beginning that we could never know You through our wisdom, because what needs to be known are not words or information or propositions, but something that could never be expressed by these. And that is: communion with You! Communion with You is knowing You. Knowledge of You is union with You, and that is personal —very personal— not propositional, not informational. You are not an object to be analyzed. That’s not how we know You! You are the Living One, the Triune Communion of Father, Son, and Spirit, who gives Himself to us to be known in love. We know You by being brought into that very communion with You It is there, only there, that we can really, really know You. And now we can! The incarnate human Son, unfathomably so, in His death, reached the deepest and darkest parts of our broken humanity and healed us there. And then Your Spirit raised Him from the dead, from that place that holds our greatest fear, from that place that is at the end of who we are. And He sat upon your throne, revealing to us who He truly is: Your co-eternal divine Son, one in being with You, worthy to sit on Your throne. And then He released His Spirit to descend on us, and now through Your Spirit, who now lives in us, and who has regenerated us, and recreated us, we have been brought into Your very own Triune relationship, where we now experience communion with You— in the Son, through the Spirit— the only place where You are fully known. In the name —in the one name— of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Amen.
1
This call to worship was given to the small assembly of Christians that gathered in Pathway Church, Beaverdam, Michigan, on July 20 2025.