What if the weekly Sunday morning worship gathering of your local church wasn’t just something you attended each week, but something you looked forward to and prepared your heart for each week? What if it became for you the central event of your week, every week? How might that change your experience of going to church? How might it improve and even transform your life?
In his new devotional, Sunday Matters: 52 Devotions to Prepare Your Heart For Church (Crossway, 2023), Paul David Tripp seeks to help us prepare our hearts for the weekly worship gathering each week becuase Sunday matters a great deal more than most of us might think. In this book are 52 devotionals, one for each Sunday of the year, meant to be read and meditated upon each Saturday evening or early Sunday morning before attending the worship gathering.
At the beginning of each devotional, Tripp gives a concise, once-sentence summary of the main point of that week’s chapter. For example, “Corporate worship is designed to help us remember the grace we easily forget when we succumb to the deadly combination of busyness and self-righteousness.” (Kindle loc. 1134) He then spends the rest of the chapter fleshing this out. Each week’s devotional concludes with a suggested Scripture reading, a short reflection sentence or two, and questions for family discussion.
The quote above is telling and representative of the entire book. A consistent theme throughout the book is what Tripp calls “God amnesia.” It is human nature to forget God and to forget who we are and all we have in Christ. The corporate worship gathering is designed by God to be a regular reminder to us of these things. In fact, as I read through the book, I could not help but notice that Tripp uses the words remind, remember, and their forms more than any other words in the book. Over and over again, he stresses this aspect of the weekly worship gathering.
At one point, I thought I had found a point of critique. I began to become slightly frustrated at the repetitiveness of the book. A number of the devotions toward the end seemed like they were simply rehashing a previous week’s theme. However, as I thought more about it, I realized this is actually a strength of the book, reinforcing Tripp’s main theme of worship as a reminder. I read this book straight through in a few days, but that’s not the way it is intended to be read. It’s meant to be read one chapter per week. If you read the book this way, the repetition will actually not feel like repetition becuase of the time between readings. But more importantly, it will prove to be a great benefit as Tripp is doing for his readers the very thing he tells us corporate worship was designed to do — namely, remind us of the most important truths again and again.
As a full-time preacher and pastor, I am deeply thankful for what Paul Tripp has done here. It is perhaps easier for me to prepare my heart for Sunday mornings each week. After all, I am meditating on the sermon text all week. I’m involved in choosing the songs we sing. Praying and preparing my heart each Sunday morning comes with the territory for me, so to speak. But what about church members who don’t serve in ministry for their vocations and are not regularly a part of the service (at least up front)?
A resource like this could quite literally change someone’s life. Taking time to prepare your heart before the Sunday worship gathering — instead of just showing up — drastically increases the likelihood that you will receive a deep and intense spiritual blessing during that hour, and that you will walk away with the eyes of your heart having been lifted to the glory of God in Christ. I have found immense benefit in spending Sunday mornings praying for the service, anticipating the songs I will sing with my brothers and sisters in Christ, and meditating on the text of the sermon or Scripture reading. Doing this beforehand has increased the joy I experience during the service. This book can do the same thing for you. And I cannot stress this enough: if the Sunday worship gathering begins to mean more to you, if you begin to consistently walk away from that hour with an intense blessing and closeness with the Lord, it will affect and change so many other areas of your life. That’s what God intended it to do for us.
If the Sunday morning worship gathering seems boring or lifeless to you, have you ever considered that it might have more to do with you than with what your church does or does not do? Sunday Matters is one way you can prepare your heart and get yourself into a spiritual state of anticipation for what God wants to do for you every Sunday morning as you gather with your local church. When we come each week with anticipation and prepared hearts, it becomes difficult not to receive a deep and intense blessing from the Lord, no matter what your worship service is like.
Editor’s Note: This title was received by the publisher in exchange for an honest review.
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