To pretend homage to God and intend only the advantage to myself is rather to mock God than to worship Him. When we believe we ought to be satisfied rather than God glorified, we set God below ourselves and imagine that He should submit His own honor to our advantage....
Most middle-class Americans tend to: worship their work; work at their play; and play at their worship. That which we worship, we serve, and that which we serve we will give our all—heart, soul, mind and body. from Work, Play, and Worship in a Leisure-Oriented...
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...
Corporate worship can become empty—it can turn into an abstraction—outside of each individual worship taking on full responsibility, for each person is the church, and it is the church that is to be at worship, individual by individual. In corporate worship, it is not...
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...
Worship is the celebrative response to what God has done, is doing, and promises to do.
If we create space in which God can act and speak, something surprising will happen.
[…recalling the time when he was young, and he and his brother made a disaster out of preparing Mother’s Day breakfast for their mother…] Even when Christian worship is at its best, it is much like that Mother’s Day breakfast. It is always the work of amateurs, people...
The shallowness of our inner experience, the hollowness of our worship, and that servile imitation of the world which marks our promotional methods all testify that we, in this day, know God only imperfectly, and the peace of God scarcely at all.
I firmly believe that when Paul called the church the body of Christ he meant it. I don’t think that he meant we constitute the body of Christ when we gather 10 high school boys for a small group. The practice of worship and the celebration of the sacraments requires...