Almighty God, give us grace to cast away the works of darkness, and put on the armor of light, now in the time of this mortal life in which your Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the living and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

– Collect for the First Sunday of Advent, Book of Common Prayer

Order of Worship • Kids' Guide

The Lord loves thankful people. They never cease to praise him, and they regularly thank him. In both good times and bad times, they offer praise and thanksgiving to God. They worship the Lord, the God of times, without regard to what the times are like. 

– Athanasius 

Order of Worship • Kids' Guide

In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. . . . And . . . pretty much anything . . . you worship will eat you alive. 

– David Foster Wallace

Order of Worship • Kids' Guide

God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world. 

– C. S. Lewis

Order of Worship • Kids' Guide

To reconcile offending man, 
Make Justice drop her angry rod; 
What creature could have formed the plan, 
Or who fulfill it but a God? 
No drop remains of all the curse, 
For wretches who deserved the whole; 
No arrows dipped in wrath to pierce 
The guilty, but returning soul. 
Peace by such means so dearly bought, 
What rebel could have hoped to see? 
Peace by his injured Sovereign wrought, 
His Sovereign fastened to a tree.

– William Cowper 

Order of Worship • Kids' Guide

Question 33: What is justification? 
Answer: Justification is an act of God’s free grace, wherein He pardoneth all our sins, and accepteth us as righteous in His sight, only for the righteousness of Christ imputed to us, and received by faith alone. 

– Westminster Shorter Catechism

Order of Worship • Kids' Guide

Congregation of the Lord Jesus Christ, in all your troubles and darkness, remember what you are and have. You have been loved with an everlasting love. You are supported by everlasting arms. 
You are recipients of everlasting life and heirs of an everlasting kingdom, all sealed and made sure by the blood of an everlasting covenant. 
Amen. 

— Dale Ralph Davis 

Order of Worship • Kids' Guide

The love of Christ! . . . It is like the blue sky into which you may see clearly, but the real vastness of which you cannot measure. It is like the deep, deep sea, into [which] you can look a little way, but its depths are unfathomable. It has a breadth without a bound, length without end, height without top, and depth without bottom. 

—Robert Murray M’Cheyne 

Order of Worship • Kids' Guide

Never mind that bread and wine, unless you can use them as folks often use their spectacles. What do they use them for? To look at? No, to look through them. So, use the bread and wine as a pair of spectacles. Look through them, and do not be satisfied until you can say, “Yes, yes, I can see the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world.”

– C. H. Spurgeon

Order of Worship • Kids' Guide

The oftener we are mown down by you, the more in number we grow; the blood of Christians is seed.

– Tertullian

Order of Worship

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People who do not know the Lord ask why in the world we waste our lives as missionaries. They forget that they too are expending their lives … and when the bubble has burst, they will have nothing of eternal significance to show for the years they have wasted. 

– Nate Saint, missionary martyr to Ecuador

Order of Worship • Kids' Guide

The world is rated R, and no one is checking IDs. Do not try to make it G by imagining the shadows away. Do not try to hide your children from the world forever, but do not try to pretend there is no danger. Train them. Give them sharp eyes and bellies full of laughter. Make them dangerous. Make them yeast, and when they’ve grown, they will pollute the shadows. 

– N. D. Wilson 

Order of Worship • Kids' Guide

The love of Christ is rich and free; 
Fixed on his own eternally; 
Nor earth, nor hell, can it remove; 
Long as he lives his own he’ll love. 

– William Gadsby 

Order of Worship • Kids' Guide

If the Bible is telling us the truth about reality, then the universe we live in was created primarily with marital romance in mind. The heavens and the earth were created for the marriage of Adam and Eve. The new heavens and the new earth will be created for the marriage of Christ and his bride. The whole of cosmic reality exists as the venue for the eternal honeymoon of the perfect husband with his perfect bride in marital bliss forever and ever. This is the breathtaking claim of the Bible. There is more at stake in marriage than we ever could have known, without the mystery revealed in the Christian gospel (Eph. 5:32). 

— Ray Ortlund 

Order of Worship • Kids' Guide

Christian singleness is a testimony to the supreme sufficiency of Christ for all things, testifying that through Christ life is fully blessed, even without marriage and children. It prophetically points to reality greater than the satisfaction of the present age by consciously anticipating the Christian’s eternal inheritance and the kingdom of God. Christian singleness lived as a testimony of this gospel truth is a redeeming singleness. 

— Barry Danylak 

Order of Worship • Kids' Guide

Genesis affirms a balance of sameness and difference between the sexes. This is a delicate balance that is difficult, but necessary, to maintain. Most theories of gender lose this balance, veering into extremes of uniformity (men and women are interchangeable) or polarity (men are from Mars, women are from Venus). Both extremes lose the fruitful tension expressed here in Genesis…. [The] origin story of sexual difference [between men and women] proclaims that our identities as men and women matter; they carry sacred significance and occupy a prominent place in this worldview. 

— Abigail Favale

Order of Worship • Kids' Guide

The Lord puts a special honour upon baptism, and it would be ill for us to neglect that which he so evidently esteems. Do not make any mistake, and imagine that immersion in water can wash away sin; but do remember that if the Lord puts this outward profession side by side with the washing away of sins it is not a trifling matter. 

— C. H. Spurgeon

Order of Worship • Kids' Guide

The Father is pleased with us because we are united to His Son. United to Christ, the Father loves us as He loves His Son and accepts us completely and unreservedly. 

— Michael Barrett 

Order of Worship • Kids' Guide

The central basis of Christian assurance is not how much our hearts are set on God, but how unshakably his heart is set on us. 

— Tim Keller

Order of Worship • Kids' Guide

The gospel is a glorious declaration of the mighty acts of God when he invaded this earth in the person of his eternal Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. 

— John Blanchard

Order of Worship • Kids' Guide