Has it happened yet? Has the music of your skill and practice unlocked the music of your heart? We’ve all had moments when the music of our heart has seeped out and been a part of a performance. But have you been able to access that music and use it in praise and...
Every word or act in worship constitutes a witness about God as well as an offering to God. The manner in which God is worshiped is a message about how God is perceived, how God’s holiness is to be reverenced and approached. from “Spiritual Formation in Corporate...
What is ironic and especially pertinent is that many debates about worship are just indirect ways of talking about ourselves, not God. Our debates devolve into how we like our worship served up each week. It's worship as consumption rather than offering. It’s an...
In Genesis 22 God tells Abraham to journey to the mountain of Moriah and there build an altar to worship [God]. But this is no ordinary worship time. God instructs Abraham to take his son Isaac, for he is to be the offering. And though God never intends to let Abraham...
The offering is the pinnacle act in worship. Likewise, all of worship is an offering. The self-emptying of Jesus is the model. Unless a person offers the total self to God, true worship does not occur. Actions devoid of self-giving do not qualify as the worship of God...
The Christian community is a community of the cross, for it has been brought into being by the cross, and the focus of worship is the Lamb once slain, now glorified. So the community of the cross is a community of celebration, a Eucharistic community, ceaselessly...
It is a help to think of the life and death of Jesus as sacrifice, but the word needs to be used with care. In the world of religion a sacrifice is either an offering to the ultimately holy or the giving up of something in devotion to the holy. The two ideas can blend...
We must beware of the naive idea that our music can “please” God as it would please a cultivated human hearer. That is like thinking, under the old law, that He really needed the blood of bulls and goats… For all our offerings, whether of music or martyrdom, are like...
Work is not primarily a thing one does to live, but the thing one lives to do. It is, or it should be, the full expression of the worker’s faculties, the thing in which he finds spiritual, mental, and bodily satisfaction, and the medium in which he offers himself to...
…What I can do is offer myself, wholehearted and present, to walk with the people I love through the fear and the mess. That’s all any of us can do. That’s what we’re here for.