If you are new to our Mid-Week Worship devotional, learn more about it here.
For this week’s devotional, we will be guided by this week’s texts from the Revised Common Lectionary.
Songs used in the Mid-Week Worship devotional are added each week to a Spotify playlist.
You can follow it here.
Time of Preparation
Begin by taking inventory of your surroundings. Are things in your vicinity conducive to a time of personal worship? Are there any changes or adjustments (turning off tech, making yourself comfortable) you need to make before you begin?
This week we are taking an extended time of silence and prepare our hearts for worship. Being still before God is not something we rush through. As you listen to the instrumental song below, give yourself the space to simply sit and breathe. As you do, ask God to clear away any distractions that might keep you from being truly present in this moment. Allow these moments for God to still your heart and mind.
SONG OF PREPARATION: Light in the Stillness (no lyrics)
Encounter With God
In this first movement, we simply seek to see God for who He is: the One worthy of worship.
“Shout for joy to the Lord, all the earth.
Worship the Lord with gladness;
come before him with joyful songs.
Know that the Lord is God.
It is he who made us, and we are his,
we are his people, the sheep of his pasture.
Enter his gates with thanksgiving
and his courts with praise;
Give thanks to him and praise his name.
For the Lord is good and his love endures forever;
His faithfulness continues through all generations.
—Psalm 100 (NIV)
SONG OF ENCOUNTER: Great is They Faithfulness (lyrics here)
Confession
In this second movement, we simply see ourselves for who we are: people who need God.
“I love the Lord, for he heard my voice;
He heard my cry for mercy.
—Psalm 116:1 (NRSV)
Take a moment in silence to breathe in God’s invitation to bring your sin and struggles to Him. Remind yourself that his invitation is not rooted in shame, but inexhaustible love.
Afterwards, spend some time contemplating this prayer of confession adopted from Augustine.
Lord, our hearts are restless until they rest in you. Teach me first what I need most — whether to call on you before I know you, or to know you before I can call on you. For how can I call on one I do not know? And yet I have turned away from you. I have not listened for your voice. I have looked everywhere for rest except in you.
I do not come to you because I have found my way back. I come because you have stirred something in me that will not be quiet. So let me seek you with longing, and long for you in my seeking. Let me find you by loving, and learn to love you in the finding.
Have mercy on me — not because I deserve to be heard, but because you are the kind of God who hears. Amen.
Assurance
In this third movement, we receive the good news of the gospel: we are forgiven.
“Therefore, since we have been justified through faith,
we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ,
through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace
in which we now stand.”
—Romans 5:1-2 (NIV)
SONG OF ASSURANCE: His Mercy is More (lyrics here)
Commission
In this final movement, we are encouraged and equipped for the work God would have us do.
“Not only this, but we also rejoice in sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance, character, and character, hope. And hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us.”
—Romans 5:3-5 (NET)
There is a kind of hope that is really just optimism in disguise — cheerful when the sun is out, nowhere to be found when the storms come. In Romans 5, Paul is talking about something else entirely.
The hope he describes doesn't arrive by skipping suffering. It arrives through it, and not in one step but three. Suffering produces perseverance: the slow, unglamorous work of not giving up. Perseverance produces character: the kind of person you can only become by being tested. And character produces hope.
Most of us would have preferred the shortcut. But shortcuts produce a different kind of person — someone who believes in good outcomes without having been shaped by the journey to reach them.
There’s a popular sermon illustration about a man who sees a newly-transformed butterfly struggling to emerge from its cocoon. The process was slow and painful to observe — the creature straining against the narrow opening for hours. Eventually, unable to bear watching any longer, the man took a small pair of scissors and carefully snipped the cocoon open. The butterfly emerged easily.
But something was wrong. Its wings were small and shrivelled, its body swollen. It would never fly. What the man didn't know was that the hard journey through the narrow opening is what forces fluid from the butterfly's body into its wings. The very struggle he had removed was the thing that would have made flight possible.
Whatever we’re facing in our life right now, we have to trust that God is using it to form us, to mold us more in the image of Jesus. And that journey is the journey of redemption and hope.
SONG OF COMMISSION: O Lord My Rock and My Redeemer (lyrics here)
Benediction
May the love of the Father enfold us,
the wisdom of the Son enlighten us,
the fire of the Spirit inflame us;
and may the blessing of the triune God rest on us,
and abide with us,
now and evermore.
—Unknown