In a worship service, we are coming into the presence of God. As we learn from Psalm 139: 9-10 (“if I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there Your right hand shall lead me and Your right hand shall hold me”) and from Matthew 18:20 (“wherever two or three are gathered in My name, behold, I am there in the midst of them”), He is us with always, and we are never apart from Him, especially when we come into His house to worship Him. And it’s what He promised in the Great Commission in Matthew 28:20 (“And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age”).
But there is something unique about the corporate gathering of God’s people on the Lord’s Day. He delights to come and meet with us to receive our adoration and hear our prayers. The realization that we will be in the presence of the King of the universe should make a powerful impact on us, causing us to think twice before we arrive, so that our hearts are prepared to meet with Him. In addition, it should cause us to be richly energized and filled with a special excitement as the service begins.
We typically call the initial prayer an invocation, calling upon the Lord to come and meet with us to bless us with His presence through His Word, as it is read and preached to us and as we pray and sing it to Him. But in a sense, He is already there when we arrive. It’s not so much that we are invoking His presence, because He is already present, having called us and then waiting for us to come at His invitation. In our invocation, what we are more accurately doing is asking Him to energize our hearts and minds so that we can more fully and consciously enter into His presence.