Tuesday • 6/18/2024 •
Welcome to Daily Office Devotions. I’m Reggie Kidd. Thanks for joining me.
We’re taking a detour from the Daily Office readings last week and this week. Instead, we’re thinking through various facets of worship and how our Lord provides meaningful communion with him through our formal corporate worship as well as in individual worship in our daily devotions. The thoughts offered here are excerpts (sometimes lightly edited) from articles I wrote for Worship Leader magazine a few years ago.
They come from a season in my life when I was on a journey from more generic free-form worship to worship shaped by the classic liturgy. I hope these observations help you in your own quest to love God and your neighbor.
“Jesus Christ, Our Worship Leader,” Part Two of Five
This week, we explore the way Jesus exquisitely leads worship in our midst: he prays for us, declares the Father’s name to us, sings over us in love, and brings us bread and wine from God’s holy heavenly altar.
Prayers for the Rescued
Perhaps the first thing to notice about Jesus’s work as the church’s prime worship leader is what the writer says just before calling Jesus heaven’s Liturgist. “He holds his priesthood permanently, because he continues forever. Consequently, he is able for all time to save those who draw near to God through him, since he always lives to make intercession for them” (Heb. 7:24-25).
On his breastplate Israel’s high priest bore the names of the tribes of Israel, those whom Yahweh had redeemed and called into relationship with himself (Exod. 28:29). What’s different about Jesus’s priestly ministry of prayer is that our names aren’t carved on some sort of accessory. As Isaiah put it so tantalizingly: “I have inscribed you on the palms of my hands” (Isa 49:16). Our names are written into Jesus’s flesh, into the very scars he bears for eternity in his side, his hands, his feet, and his brow.
The writer to the Hebrews sums Jesus’s life up as one long series of “prayers and supplication, with loud cries and tears, to him who was able to save him out of (note: the Greek is not “from” but “out of”) death, and he was heard for his godly fear” (Heb. 5:7). His life was one long lesson in obedient prayer, even in that dark moment when he implored that perhaps there was another way, “Let this cup pass.” Happily, in the Garden the Father said, “No!” to his Son in order that now in heaven the Father can say, “Yes!” to his Son in our behalf.
I remember the first time I experienced incense in worship. Immediately, I recalled the word picture in Revelation: the prayers of the saints and the incense mixing and rising into God’s presence (Rev. 8:3-4). The sweetness of the smell brought to mind Christ’s “fragrant offering and sacrifice” that qualifies us to stand righteous and pure before God’s throne (Eph. 5:2). I imagined Christ bringing those incense-laced prayers into the heavenly courts and mingling them there with the Glory Cloud, the depiction of God’s presence in the Old Testament. What a profound picture of our union with God by the Spirit through Christ’s prayer with, for, and in us!
Hours later, I was driving one of my kids to an event on the other side of town, and I kept sensing a certain smell. It was vaguely familiar but maddeningly elusive. Suddenly, I remembered that I had not changed clothes after church. The smell of the incense had penetrated my shirt and pants, clinging to me long after the service was over. Heaven smells of us, because Jesus is there bringing our needs and burdens always before the Father. None of us, I realized, makes it through a moment of this life by virtue of our looks, our brains, our skills, or our likability. We make it because we have a friend in a high place, who “always lives to make intercession.”
Be blessed this day,
Reggie Kidd+