This is simply an excellent sermon on corporate worship from Psalm 42.  A few highlights:

This believer, whoever he is, has a right estimation of the value of corporate worship.  He seeks through the ordinances of the public, the corporate worship of the people of God, to encounter the living God, to appear before the living God, to see the face of the living God.  And he also understands that the focus of the ordinance of worship is God Himself.

What he misses is God.  He understands that the means of grace are just that: they are means to get us to God, to get us into fellowship with God, to get us a taste of God, to get us the experience of God in His promises and in His person and in His glory.  And not being able to participate in those means of grace is spiritual torture to him because he knows that those means have been a means of blessing him with the experience of the presence and the person of God.  He is a worshipper who, for whatever reason, can’t worship; he can’t be in the house of God, and it’s absolutely killing him.

Love for God’s house, you see, is of the essence of true piety.  And that is true in both the old covenant and the new covenant.  Yes, God’s house has changed: God’s house is no longer that glorious temple in Jerusalem.  God’s house is now you, the people of God, wherever you are gathered.  If you were gathered in the Winn-Dixie parking lot, gathered for the purpose of the worship of the living God and not in this glorious building, you would still be the house of God.  And we would still be able to worship in spirit and in truth utilizing the means of grace which God has provided us.  But for the believer in both the New Testament and the Old, a longing to be with the people of God in the corporate praise of God is of the essence of piety.

Christ is the “great worshipper”–Christ Himself.  It is His meet to do the will of the Heavenly Father, and it is His desire to lead brothers in the assembly of praise.

God would teach us here, friends, of the heart desire which is at the core of true worship.  Christ is the great worshipper, but His longing to worship the living God in the deepest extremity of His life is but a call to us to long to worship the living God, to desire for more grace and more fellowship knowledge of God as we come together under the worship of the living God.

Besides the fact that all this is true and excellently proclaimed, nostalgia adds to my appreciation.  Reading this, I flash back to my OT prof Jack Collins of Covenant Theological Seminary.  He taught my class on Psalms and Wisdom and really stressed that, while private piety is obvious in the Psalms, it was always oriented as preparation and longing for public corporate worship.

I also can’t say enough how much I appreciate the point that Christ is the chief worshiper.  Paul tells us to give “thanks always and for everything to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.”  When you do something in someone elses name it is presupposed that the deed is perfectly appropriate for that person.  You can’t sin in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.  But you can worship God in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.  As the priest, sacrifice, temple, and altar, Jesus is the Worship of God.  When we enter into public worship we are entering into Christ’s self-offering to the Father.