The forty-fifth Psalm is the coronation oath of Christ to His Church. And here are three thoughts strung together to do honour to the occasion Christ's delight in His Church's beauty, Christ's claim to His Church's service, and Christ the centre of His Church's worship.
I. The service of worship is giving honour to God. And this is a higher and more heavenly thing than the worship which we make for our own sake, to satisfy our own desires, and to supply our own necessities. Both in public and in private, the highest part of prayer and the far end of all that we ask for ourselves or others is the confession and acknowledgment which that prayer contains of the majesty and the love of Almighty God.
II. Notice more accurately how we are to make worship service. It is only as any worship of our own mingles with the intercession of Jesus and is perfumed with His sweet name and merit that it goes up pleasantly to God. It is the Christ which is in everything that makes it service. (1) Therefore the first requisite to make worship service is the presence and the recognition of the presence of the great High-priest. (2) Remember that if worship is service, you are the servants who are to do the service. You are God's priests it is God's own word you are God's priests to offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God in Jesus Christ. (3) Service implies all that makes a good servant's work order, accuracy, painstaking, reverence, a lowly feeling, a distinct aim to please and honour Him whose we are and whom we serve. To a man rightly taught the whole world is a temple, his heart is the fane, and all life is the service of worship.
J. Vaughan, Fifty Sermons,9th series, p. 55.
References: Psalms 45:13. Expositor,3rd series, vol. v., p. 313; J. M. Neale, Sermons on Passages of the Psalms,p. 140. Psalms 45:15. J. Sherman, Thursday Penny Pulpit,vol. v., p. 1.