Law and Gospel in Worship

By Rev. George F. Borghardt

There is a direction to Lutheran worship.

It moves from God to you. It starts with God and goes to you. It’s the German word, “Gottesdienst” or Divine Service. God serves you! The Lord Himself does the acting, working and giving. He does the doing. He does the giving.

The Lord begins worship in His Name—the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Divine Service is all about Him delivering His love to you, and you soaking up the Father’s love for you in the giving up of His Son. His sacrifice on the Cross does you no good without its delivery to you today! The Divine Service is where the Spirit gives to you all that the Son did for you.

Faith flows from the Spirit’s gifts! Faith receives them and it opens your ears to hear the Words of Christ. Faith is watered in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. And faith tastes forgiveness in Christ’s Body and Blood in your mouth in the Sacrament.

God does the doing; faith does the receiving. You are saved. Faith saves because it receives Jesus’ cross and resurrection. That’s how God wants to be worshiped—by faith alone.

“Surely,” you think, “I have something to offer to God. I certainly do something. I praise Him. I feel it. I experience it. That makes it real for me.” That’s the divine service of the Law! It starts with you. It also ends with you. You offer God your works, your thoughts, your feelings. You think these things matter to you. I do, too. So they must matter to God too, right? They must hold some weight with Him as well.

Our hands are filled only with what we have done—our sins. We have done what we shouldn’t do and failed to do what we should have done. That’s what we have to bring to God. We bring to God our sins!

The worship of the Law ends with us. It stops there. It’s centered on what we do. And it’s as incomplete and flawed as we are. It may be the worship we think we need and what feels the most effective for us…but it’s not the worship that pleases God.

Faith alone pleases God. He gives you salvation and He wants you to receive it. He delivers forgiveness, emptying your hands of all your sins. That absolution was achieved by Jesus’ holy life and bitter sufferings and death, and it is delivered to you in this time and space in His gifts. The one called by God, your pastor, has been sent to you and he doesn’t just forgive some of your sins, He forgives all of them. You are made at peace with God.

But isn’t the receiving something I do? Well, does the person who is brought back to life by a doctor say, “I’m alive today because I decided to live.”? Does the baby make a choice to be born? The action is done from outside ourselves. We receive the action being done upon us.

The Word is the external, saving gift. Faith is how we receive the Lord’s Word in water, Word, and bread and wine. You have been raised from the dead. You have been born from above. You now live in Christ.

Faith responds with an, “Amen.” That’s an enlivened, born-from-above, raised-from-thedead Word. You say, “Amen,” meaning “Yes, yes, it shall be so.” Amen and faith go together. Where we have Jesus’ words, there we have the “Amen” of faith.

But your Amen isn’t just for you. No, having been given to, having been enlivened, having been raised from the dead and given the words to say by Jesus, faith then repeats what it has been given for others. You respond to God with what He says by repeating it for your neighbor!

You sing to God for others. You praise Him for others. You confess Him for others. You say the Creed so that others can be lifted up. You don’t live for yourself anymore. You don’t even serve yourself when you are worshiping God. Now, when you sing, praise, pray, you do these things as enlivened children of God for the sake of others.

Don’t you sing for yourself because it feels good to sing? Don’t you praise God because God wants you to praise God? Sure, you might do these things for those reasons. But the Lord gave you words to sing and praise— whether it feels good or not—so that others might be saved through the words He’s given you. He wants to save others like He’s saved you!

Worship in the way of the Law offers to God what we do: work, praise, sing in order to merit favor with God.

God wants to be worshiped by faith. He desires for you to be saved and to receive from Him all the good that He has done for you in the Cross of your Lord Jesus Christ. He wants to shower on you His love and forgiveness and mercy. He wants to do that for others, too!

True faith, living faith, active faith, receives from God what He did for us. It’s passive first. It’s like an empty hand that the Lord fills with goodies. Faith is then active for others— serving them with the forgiveness and love that God has given to us in Christ.

Rev. George F. Borghardt is the Senior Pastor at Zion Evangelical Lutheran Church in McHenry, Illinios. He also serves as the president of