Today, my church, like many other churches around the world, streamed its worship service on Facebook Live. My family and I, also like many other churchgoing families worldwide, gathered in our living room to tune in.

But we didn’t only tune in; we participated. The pastors invited everyone to stand and sing, stand for the reading of Scripture, say “Thanks be to God” after the reading, and pray along during the confession and after.

We sang loudly along with the worship team. By “we,” I mean me and my wife. Our daughter sang when she knew the words, and our son mostly ran around swinging his stuffed animal and shoving it in our faces.

I marveled at the time in which we live. By God’s common grace, we have technology that allows us to participate in a worship service with around a hundred of our isolated brothers and sisters. I sat on the comfortable lounger of our huge couch, Bible and notebook in hand, listening to our pastor preach the first sermon in our Easter series and thinking about how to discuss it during our life group later this week. Thanks be to God that we can do that during a global pandemic.

God feeds us through singing, the preaching of his word, and the administration of the sacraments. And while God certainly works in us through the Internet, I didn’t realize just how much I love his church until I wasn’t able to go.

During the singing, though, I realized it just wasn’t the same.

I love singing with my wife. And I knew as we were singing, our fellow congregants were singing with us, united in a chorus to our God. But I heard their absence around us. And while the introvert in me is normally averse to church greeting times, I missed being able to shake hands with my family in Christ.

Going to church is one of the most concrete ways for us to hold “fast to the Head, from whom the whole body, nourished and knit together through its joints and ligaments, grows with a growth that is from God” (Col 2:19 ESV). God feeds us through singing, the preaching of his word, and the administration of the sacraments. And while God certainly works in us through the Internet, I didn’t realize just how much I love his church until I wasn’t able to go.

I look forward to being able to go again.

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(This post was originally published at https://underauthorityblog.wordpress.com/ and is reposted with permission.)