Why do you come to corporate worship on the Lord’s Day morning? Many legitimate reasons could be offered, and we should be conscious of many of them as helpful, legitimate motivations that bring us together in the Lord’s House. But among them must surely be the expectation and the desire that Jesus Himself would call us to Himself, would meet with us, would teach us from His Word and would make that Word effective in causing us to grow to maturity as sons and daughters of God.
Having ascended bodily into heaven, we do not expect the Lord to be physically present with us until He returns at the end of the age. But He does meet with us spiritually through His Word. When it is read and preached, we hear Him speaking to us. The Apostle Paul wrote in 1 Thessalonians 2:13, “And we also thank God constantly for this, that when you received the word of God, which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men but as what it really is, the word of God, which is at work in you believers.”