‘Great and marvellous [wonderful, miraculous] are thy works, Lord God Almighty.’ This reminds us of Revelation, chapters 4 and 5. What a way to come into the presence of God! Our forebears always observed these things as standards for worship. When you called upon God at the beginning of the service, the preacher stood up straight and closed his eyes, and he called upon the mighty God: ‘Almighty and everlasting, all knowing, all-powerful, great and marvellous.’ You are to begin objectively worshipping and extolling God. You are to have a sense of God and a realisation of him and adore him and think of him. That is how worship always started until about 50 years ago. People then progressively decided that worship must be made more informal. It must be dumbed down; it must be made about me. Worship must not be about Almighty God; it must be about us. We are a consumer society. So now the preacher gets up and he says very quickly, ‘We thank thee O God that we have a Saviour, and we are happy and we are safe. We thank thee for this, and we thank thee for that’, and then there’s a very quick ‘Amen’. Sometimes it is not even in the name of Christ, and no sooner is the Amen said, but the preacher is hurrying to the next item. You have heard it many times: ‘Amen. Now let’s turn to the next hymn.’ It is done so quickly, as though it’s a matter of, ‘That’s over with; that formality is finished. We didn’t particularly mean it. Let’s get on with something we enjoy more than prayer and the worship of God.’ That is tragic, and yet that is how it’s so often done today. You listen even to some of the big personalities of the churches on the Internet, and that’s how they are praying. Their fathers never prayed like that, if they only thought back. But here we see the pattern for prayer: ‘Great and marvellous are thy works, Lord God Almighty.’ He is Lord; he is God, the God of infinite power; he’s omnipotent, almighty. He is just and true, genuine, in his ways, and he is the king of saints. When I need guidance of God, I must pray to my King and my God. I must be at his disposal: for my career, for my marriage, in the way I conduct myself and everything I do. He is not my mate next door who gives me a hand when I need him, but my Lord and my Ruler, and I gladly succumbed to him. It’s all here: ‘Thou King of saints.’