The Rightly Ordered World – Words of Grace – September 20, 2019

We all want the world to be right. We want goodness and peace. We long for things to be as they should be, where people are doing what they are meant to do and the world is functioning well.

This is a good longing, and we all have it, so why doesn’t this world exist? We have been looking for the answer to this question since the beginning of time. People have migrated and settled in lands, built cities and houses, erected towers, and even fought wars, all in an attempt to create a rightly ordered world. And yet, it eludes us.

One of the main points of the Bible is that the world is disordered because people worship created things rather than the Creator of all things (Romans 1:25). The moment life was re-ordered from God being loved, served, and worshipped to humans being self-determining lords over the world God created, disorder began its reign on earth.

The Bible also gives us the solution to the disorder of the world. We might think the solution is us deciding to right the wrong of our rebellion against God.  But, that is not the way. We must be set right, made right, and brought back into a right relationship with God by the One who is righteous. Once again, we find the solution in the gospel of Jesus Christ. He died for our sin of rebellion, and through the forgiveness of that sin he restores us to God. Being rightly related to God by grace through faith means we can now reorder ourselves in humility and gratitude to worship our Creator and Redeemer.

The rightly ordered world is where the Creator and Redeemer is worshipped by the created and redeemed. The book of Revelation tells us that this is what the world to come will be. Until then, God’s people on earth rightly order themselves in worship before him. “Come, let us worship and bow down, let us kneel before the Lord our Maker (Psalm 95:6).”

As the redeemed people of God, we gather together in congregations to worship him. When we do, we acknowledge that the Lord is God and that he is good (Psalm 100). We are anticipating the Day when all things will be rightly ordered because God will be worshipped (Revelation 22:3). We are giving evidence that through Jesus, disordered rebels are forgiven, restored, and welcomed before God’s throne to the world as it should be.

At Grace Community Church, we value the worship of God. Worship is what we do. We don’t mystify worship, we practice it. We gather, at a time, in a location, with each other. We hear the Word of God, sing praise to God, pray, preach, and respond to him with love and obedience. We do this every Lord’s Day, week after week. Everyone is welcome to attend the worship service at Grace. Most will actually worship because they know God through faith in Jesus. Others will watch, listen and take it all in. We hope that in our worship service they will see a microcosm of a rightly ordered world. We pray they will soon repent, believe, and become worshipers of God.

I look forward to seeing you Sunday.

-Scott