When we gather for the weekly worship service, we gather as those starved for God, and starved for transcendence. We have been swimming all week in the normal, trivial, earthly, ordinary, and natural. We need the abnormal. We need the essential. We need the heavenly. We need the extraordinary. We need what is above nature. We need the supernatural. This is what weekly worship gives us.

The church, an institution whose existence transcends present history, struggles to offer its members its own chief good: transcendence.

The church is not made by men. It was not created by an agency. It has no earthly origin. The church is the brainchild of God. The church has existence for one and only reason: God dreamed it into being. God began it. God wanted it to exist.

As the people of God, the church is more about heaven than earth. It is not as if earth created the church. Heaven created the church. The church only lives at all because the Father willed to form a people for Himself by the blood of his Son and the sealing of his Spirit (Ephesians 1). Take away God, and there is no church. There is no worship. There is no people of God.

How strange, then, that churches would grasp after immanence in their weekly worship. How odd that churches would strive “to make people feel comfortable” in their services.

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