Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.
(Colossians 3:12–14)
James K.A. Smith's book, You Are What You Love, is a tremendous resource. The title itself is instructive, but Smith goes on to point out that "to be human is to be animated and oriented by some vision of "the good life." The human heart, then, is "a compass." "You are what you love, because you live toward what you want." (12-13). This is one of the reasons corporate worship is so important to the life of the Christian. Corporate worship channels our hearts toward the right things. It reorders what we love.1
As sinful people, our flesh is constantly at war with the Spirit who lives in us (see Galatians 5), vying for control of our hearts. More than that, we are constantly bombarded with messages throughout our week that also vie for our attention and our affection. To be sure, they are not all bad things, but the only way to live in right relationship to everything else is to get our loves in order, so to speak. In other words, when we come to love God first and foremost, we will then put everything else in its proper place in relation to him. Of course, we will not reach perfection in this life, but as the Spirit takes over more and more of our hearts, we will gradually see our loves reordered and our lives transformed into the image of Christ.
We will talk about sacraments more in the future, but they are two of the elements of corporate worship that channel our hearts. The catechism calls baptism an "engagement to be the Lord’s" (WSC #94), and the Lord's Supper dramatically portrays the loving sacrifice Jesus made for us. Beyond that, the corporate worship service as a whole retells the story of the gospel, which is the supreme display of love and the only force strong enough to compel us to love rightly.
A member of the first congregation I pastored came to Christ through our church. She was a medical resident from the Philippines. She faithfully attended worship week after week, and the gospel was etched deeply into her mind. Her parents, however, were not pleased with her conversion to Christianity and were even more displeased with her engagement to another Christian.
They invited her home, and she hoped to go visit them and reconcile. When she arrived, however, her father took her captive. He took away her airline ticket and her passport and locked her in her room. On occasion, she was able to get a phone call out to keep us up to date. Our elders had a prayer vigil for her around the clock. Throughout all that, however, she never was frantic. Her dad had not recognized two books that she packed - a Bible and a Trinity hymnal. Every day, she would rehearse what she had learned in our worship services. She would have a call to worship and a hymn of response. She would confess her sin and have an assurance of pardoning grace. She would read the Bible and then sing a hymn of thanksgiving and commitment. God used it to sustain her during the time she was held captive in her father’s home, and God eventually freed her. She came back and married her fiancé.
This is what we want to do in our worship. We want to etch the gospel so deeply in our own minds and our children’s minds, so that in the day of trial, we naturally reflect God's love for sinners.
- James K. A. Smith, You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2016), 12-13.