As the primary preacher, sermon preparation takes up a very large percentage of my work week. This must happen because Sunday morning comes every seven days without fail. Whether I am ready or not, God’s people will assemble for worship. Somewhere in that assembly, I will stand before the congregation and deliver “the message of the hour.” There will be a beginning, a middle, and an end. As we leave, I may get a little feedback, positive and negative (I appreciate both), and we will call it a day.

Let me bring you in on a little secret, though. The preacher’s sermon is not the only message delivered in the assembly. In fact, when he stands up to preach it’s not the beginning, nor is it the end of the message when he sits down. If anything, what he provides is the middle. You see, the message begins the moment Christians walk through the door.

In Colossians 3:16, the apostle Paul says that we are to “let the word (message) of Christ dwell in [us] richly…” In Matthew 15:18, Jesus taught the principle that “what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart.” It stands to reason, then, that when the message of Jesus dwells inside of us, whatever comes out of our mouths is, in effect, the message of Christ.

When Christians enter the building on Sunday morning, our interactions with one another are the beginning of the message of the day: our warm greetings, asking about each other’s weeks, celebrating victories, grieving over the losses. All of these are communicating that Jesus binds us together into a spiritual family that cannot be taken away.

Furthermore, Paul goes on to say in Colossians 3:16 that the message of Christ is communicated when we “[teach] and [admonish] one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God.” When we sing during our assemblies, we are all engaging in a mutual “message of the hour.” We horizontally educate and encourage as we vertically lift praise and adoration to God. Consider also what he says concerning the Lord’s Supper in 1 Corinthians 11:26. In partaking of the memorial feast we are communally proclaiming the salvific death of our Lord! We are communicating the power of his sacrifice. By the time the preacher gets up, the message is not beginning…it’s been going strong for quite a while.

In a consumer-driven world, it’s easy to slip into a pattern of thinking that churchgoers receive a single message during the hour of worship on Sunday. However, it is much more accurate to say that the sermon is merely a specific part of a much larger message that ALL Christians are proclaiming. When you pull into the parking lot on Sunday, or tune in to the livestream, pause for a moment and remember, the sermon is not the only message of the day. The message starts when you walk through the door.

Cory Waddell