Psalm 122:1: I rejoiced when they said to me, Let us go to the house of the Lord.

Worship is a journey. Every Sunday, we literally leave home and go on a pilgrimage, for most of us a fairly short one, to this place, where we gather as the house of the Lord.

The worship service itself is a journey, and a journey of ascent.

At the beginning of the journey, we are standing on the threshold of God’s house, awaiting entry. When we confess, God cleanses us and invites us in. We ascend to the Lord’s house on His mountain, where we hear the Word of the Lord and are at last invited to sit at His table in His kingdom. If the worship service is a journey, an ascent, it is a journey toward a table, toward a feast.

That means our worship is a journey to joy. Yahweh set His name in His house in Jerusalem because that was the place where Israel was to gather to eat, drink, and rejoice before Him. A feast is always an occasion of joy.

The feast is also an occasion to receive life. We don’t live by our own resources. We have to take the world into ourselves and make it part of ourselves in order to live. We live by the Word and Spirit of God, and that dependence is highlighted each week when we arrive at this table. Our journey to the table is a journey to life.

It’s a journey, an ascent, to the heavenly Zion. As the writer to the Hebrews said, we have not come to a terrifying Sinai, but “to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, to an innumerable company of angels, to the general assembly and church of the firstborn who are registered in heaven, to God the Judge of all, to the spirits of just men made perfect, to Jesus the Mediator of the new covenant, and to the blood of sprinkling that speaks better things than that of Abel.”

As Pastor Sumpter has taught this morning, this house of the Lord sets the pattern for our own homes. By our participation in this family, our families are transformed. The worship service is a journey, but it is followed by another journey, a journey home, a journey to your family table.

Since you have journeyed to this table, journey home, and work by God’s grace to make that journey also a journey to joy, a journey to life, an ascent to a peak of the heavenly Zion.