When Christians care enough to prepare to hear good teaching, they will profit greatly. When they don’t care to prepare, they can arrive at worship late, distracted, hungry, irritated and already a bit bored.
It’s no wonder that pastors are tempted to make their sermons match the ebb and flow of unprepared people. What comedy routine or sensational story will be good enough to make people care to listen?
If we are to recover a sense of God’s holiness and the gravity of his glory (Hebrew, kavod, Greek doxa), we must care, repenting of our carelessness.
Care to Expect Great Things
Imagine if your church had the congregants setting aside time on Saturday night to prepare for Sunday worship. What if they spent time on Sunday morning before they left the house, praying for the preaching of the Word, the worship of the praises sung, the conversion of sinners and the building up of the saints?
When people care to prepare they have an expectancy about what can happen. They are buoyant as they expect to see what God will do according to his Word. Because they care to prepare, they are able to say with the missionary William Carey, “Expect Great Things (from God). Attempt Great Things (for God). “
JI Packer on Caring to Prepare
JI Packer diagnosed this lack of preparation in our modern-day compared to the intentionality of the Puritans. He wrote:
But we neglect to prepare our hearts; for, as the Puritans would have been the first to tell us, thirty seconds of private prayer upon taking our seat in the church building is not time enough in which to do it. It is here that we need to take ourselves in hand. What we need at the present time to deepen our worship is not new liturgical forms or formulae, nor new hymns and tunes, but more preparatory ‘heart-work’ before we use the old ones. There is nothing wrong with new hymns, tunes, and worship styles—there may be very good reasons for them—but without ‘heart-work’ they will not make our worship more fruitful and God-honouring; they will only strengthen the syndrome that C.S. Lewis called ‘the liturgical fidgets’. ‘Heart-work’ must have priority or spiritually our worship will get nowhere.
JI Packer, Quest for Godliness, 257
Care To Prepare For Church
So we need to care to prepare with this “heart-work”. It is vital for our lives and our churches. And the result will be that God will answer our prayers and the tunings of our hearts in ways that we never could have imagined. Tony Payne says in his book titled, “How to Walk Into Church”:
When I remember to pray about church (either the night before or just before I go), it’s quite incredible-actually, we might say quite unsurprising-how often those prayers are answered; that is, how often rich opportunities for encouragement and growth present themselves in church that week, either for me personally or for those around me as we talk together.
Tony Payne, How to Walk into Church, 39
If you care to prepare, it doesn’t have to be difficult. It just means prioritizing what actually happens when the saints gather together to meet with God, hear his Word and sing his praise. If you can give a bit of thought beforehand you will benefit much more from your time at church. You will also resist the listener’s itch. And you will have a heart turned toward God in a receptive way, as any servant should. You will say with Isaiah, “Here am I. Send me” (Isa 6:8).
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