With God, it’s always been personal.
A call to worship.
Themes
Abraham • Friendship with God • Redeemer • A personal God • Incarnation • Reconciliation • Covenant • Forgiveness • Lamb of God • The Lamb who was slain
God didn’t just show up at Bethlehem or drop in at the Incarnation. He has been coming to us all along—through covenant, through lineage, in genealogy and nation, binding Himself to all our human history and taking it all into Himself.
Scripture reading
Genesis 12:1–3, 6–7 Galatians 3:16 Hebrews 1:1-3 Rev. 13:8
This call to worship1 is about God binding Himself to all your personal history, taking it all into Himself, and healing it all in Jesus Christ.
In Genesis, we read the promise made by God to Abraham: Go from your country, go from your kindred, go from your father’s house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and I will make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. …in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed. [So] Abram traveled through the land… [and] the Lord appeared to Abram and said, “To your seed, I will give this land.” About 2000 years later, Paul’s wrote a letter to the Galatians. In it, he said: …promises were spoken to Abraham and to his seed… seed meaning one person, [that one person] is Christ. Similarly, the very first words in the Book of Hebrews are these: In the past God spoke to our ancestors… but in these last days He has spoken to us by His Son… [who] is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of His being, sustaining all things by His powerful word. After He had provided purification for sins, He sat down at the right hand of the Majesty in heaven. And one of the most astonishing things John writes in his book of Revelation are these words: …the Lamb who was slain from the creation of the world.
Prayer
Father in Heaven, we do not just have ideas and statements about who You are, about what You want from us. No. No. No. You haven’t sent us communications and proclamations and impersonal revelations. Instead, You personally have taken action —decisive action— toward us. In fact, it has been a long historical sequence of actions, starting with Abraham, where You personally, relationally, face-to-face, have engaged with us to bring about what You always intended and desired: a friendship with us. At the beginning, there with Abraham, it was not an impersonal abstract energy or a sense of something. It was —and it has always been— the overflowing of Your loving communion between Father, Son and Spirit, always revealing to us who You truly are in Your own personal being, never just sending us messages, never calling us into a religion, but always drawing us, as You did with Abraham, into real, covenantal friendship with Yourself. And so, You made Yourself personally available in history, not just as “the Creator” but as our Redeemer. It has always been personal: Your pursuit of us, step-by-step, family-by-family, right into the womb of Mary, right into this very moment here, now, sharing Your very self with us, embodied in human flesh, in the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ. Abraham didn’t deduce a doctrine. He heard and believed a living, speaking, personal God. Father, Your relationship with Abraham was the beginning of a long committed coming to us, revealing Yourself to us through flesh, through persons, and always with an eye toward Your Incarnation. With this one man, Abraham— who was at the beginning of the line, the line through which the Word would become flesh— You bound Yourself to him. And through him, You bound Yourself to the whole world, all in preparation for the coming of the One who would fully reveal You, who would reconcile the whole world back to You. You didn’t just show up at Bethlehem or drop in at the Incarnation. You have been coming to us all along— through covenant, through lineage, in genealogy and nation, binding Yourself to all our human history and taking it all into Yourself. Taking in our frailty, our countless misunderstandings of You— the long, painful wrestling over sin and atonement and forgiveness and sacrifice, the endless wanderings and covenant breaking, the giving and breaking of laws, the exiles and returns, the longings for a messiah. When Your Son became flesh, You had taken into yourself the weight of all these failures and promises, the meaning of the entire sacrificial system, all the prophetic words of Israel’s suffering, all the cries of forsakenness. Abraham—and all of Old Testament history—isn’t just prelude, or a bunch of object lessons or word pictures. It was real, saving engagement, preparing and enabling what would be the Incarnation— the gathering up of all of history, that would reach backward and forward through time, and heal it all in Jesus Christ. You didn’t give Abraham a doctrine of forgiveness to pass down. You patiently worked it out through a thousand-year history of sin and judgment, mercy, and renewal, all culminating in Jesus. He is the Lamb who was slain before the world was made. At His birth, His whole being was already bent toward bearing our sin. In the name of Jesus Christ, who embodied the sacrificial obedience Israel could not offer, the righteousness the Law demanded, the faithfulness the Covenant longed for, and the forgiveness Israel cried out for, Amen.
1
This call to worship was given to the small assembly of Christians that gathered in Pathway Church, Beaverdam, Michigan, on May 25 2025.