What was the sermon about yesterday? + Household Worship Guide 2 Chronicles 36
Worship Connected is written to complement the weekly Lord’s Day sermons of Springs Reformed Church (SRC) by focusing hearts, minds, and lives throughout the week on the preaching passage and connecting household worship with the church’s gathered worship.
At SRC we distribute a weekly guide running from the Lord's Day to Saturday with Monday-Wednesday reviewing the sermons that were preached the Lord's Day at the start of the week and Thursday-Saturday previewing the sermons that will be preached the coming Lord's Day. However, for the posts here I will link to the guide from Thursday to Wednesday so that all are aimed at the Lord's Day as the peak of the 7-day rhythm as seen in the image above. The Lord's Day post includes links to the sermons.
This week we are considering God's mercy in his wrath as well as how the world hates the house of God from 2 Chronicles 36.
Thursday 2 Chronicles 36:1-14—The last of the kings of Judah.
Friday 2 Chronicles 36:15–21—The Lord’s wrath
Saturday 2 Chronicles 36:22-23—In wrath, mercy
Lord’s Day
Monday Hebrews 12:3–11—painful discipline
Tuesday 1 Thessalonians 1:2–10—Instead of wrath, rescue.
Wednesday Acts 9:1-19—Threats and Murder against the Church
If you find it useful to use these in your household/family worship, consider asking your pastor to speak to me about him developing something similar in your congregation.
Thoughts for Pastors:
“What was the sermon about yesterday?” “Yesterday? I can’t even remember what I had for breakfast this morning!” We’ve probably heard, or even said, things like that. Of course, other than possible health consequences, what we had for breakfast this morning (for me: ham and cheese and pineapple omelet, cottage cheese, English muffin, coffee) makes little difference. But remembering the sermon(s) we just heard is of vital importance for the Christian.
Why do words preached matter? Because God matters. And because God speaks. From the beginning of creation—God speaks. Ten times in Genesis one, we have the statement “God said.” Although most of this speaking activity was God’s creating activity, twice in these verses we read that “God said to them” (Gen 1:28), his newly created man and woman. God continues speaking to us humans in chapter two when “the LORD God commanded the man, ‘You are free to eat from any tree of the garden, but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for on the day you eat from it, you will certainly die’” (Gen:2:16-17). And, as we know all too well, the very Word of God was questioned by the serpent in chapter three when “he said to the woman, ‘Did God really say…?’” (Gen 3:1).
The reader may be thinking, “Well, this is about God speaking, but the topic of this chapter is about how people respond to the preacher speaking. So, what is the connection?” The connection is that God makes clear in his Word that when the preacher speaks faithfully, in a mysterious way God himself is speaking. As Paul reminds the church in Thessalonica, “This is why we constantly thank God, because when you received the Word of God that you heard from us, you welcomed it not as a human message, but as it truly is, the Word of God, which also works effectively in you who believe” (1 Th 2:13).
A key aim of this Worship Connected Household Worship Guide is preparation. How much better prepared would one be to hear and respond to the Word preached than to have reviewed the text to be preached and to have considered some of the areas to be addressed for three days prior to the preaching? In that way, Worship Connected seeks to be a bridge between reading and thinking about the Bible at home and hearing and thinking about the Bible preached at church.
One of the hopes of, and in my experience one of the benefits of, Worship Connected is that the review of the sermons just preached helps to move the hearer to respond to the Word preached, and the preview of the sermons to come each week helps to prepare the kind of eager listeners that we preachers want our congregation to be. Perhaps the daily exercise of this household worship guide will serve as “batting practice” for those who use it so that they will be more prepared for the regular “singles” of their preacher, and, if the Lord is willing, the occasional “extra-base hit.”
