This is the sixth in this series. Here is the first.
Celebration of the Lord’s Supper
Closing Prayer and Benediction
We celebrate the Lord's Supper every week. It is not just an awkward add-on to the service. For one thing, during the Supper I usually relate a theme from the sermon to our celebration. But also, since celebrating the Supper is a renewing of the covenant relationship that we have with God, it is, then, our response to what He has just told us in the sermon. We are renewing our promises to trust, love and obey Him, especially in the matters that He spoke about. At the same time, God is doing something in the Supper. He is blessing His people with the ability that we need in order to do that trusting, loving and obeying that we promise. As part of this section of the service we recite a creed. We rotate among about a dozen of them.
After Communion there is Closing Prayer and the Benediction. The prayer is our thanks to God for His kind invitation to enter His presence for worship. I write a different Benediction for each service, almost always related to a theme in the sermon. And again, it's important to know what this Benediction is. It's God's last statement to His people, a statement of His blessing over them, as He sends us back into the world to live as disciples of Jesus. God gets the first word, the Call to Worship, and the last word, the Benediction.
And that's our liturgy, along with some of the reasons why I really like it.