WORSHIP-PURPOSE
The danger is
that worship becomes simply a performance, an exhibition that focuses on us
instead of God. It may give people the false impression that the chief purpose
of God is to glorify humans rather than vice versa.
Nothing makes
God more supreme and more central in worship than when a people are utterly
persuaded that nothing – not money or prestige or leisure or family or job or
health or sports or toys or friends – nothing is going to bring satisfaction to
their sinful, guilty, aching hearts besides God.
John Piper
God's Passion for His Glory, p. 41.
A
God-centered theology must be a missionary theology. If you say that you love
the glory of God, the test of your authenticity is whether you love the spread
of that glory among all the peoples of the world. Or another way to say it is
that worship is the fuel and the goal of missions. Missions
exists because worship doesn't. God's passion is to be known and honored
and worshipped among all the peoples. To worship him is to share that passion
for his supremacy among the nations.
John Piper
The Driving Convictions Behind
Missions, Nov. 2, 1996.
In the
process of striving to fulfill our needs and satisfy our desires, the church
has slipped into a philosophy of “Christian humanism” that is flawed with
self-love, self-esteem, self-fulfillment, and self-glory. There appears to be
scant concern about worshiping our glorious God on His terms. So-called worship
seems little more than some liturgy (high or low) equated with stained-glass
windows, organ music, or emotion-filled songs and prayers. If the bulletin
didn’t say “Worship Service,” maybe we wouldn’t know what we were supposed to
be doing. And that reflects the absence
of a worshiping life – of which a Sunday service is to be only a corporate
overflow.
John MacArthur
The Ultimate Priority, Moody Press
1983, p. viii.
The supreme
motive in our redemption is not for us to receive anything. Rather, we have
been redeemed so that God may receive worship – so that our lives might glorify
Him. Any personal blessing for us is a divine response to the fulfillment of
that supreme purpose… We are to seek to glorify God before we seek to gain
anything from Him. To be concerned primarily with the blessings is to
experience salvation in a shallow, self-centered manner.
John MacArthur
The Ultimate Priority, Moody Press 1983, p.
24.
To pretend to
homage to God, and intend only the advantage of self, is rather to mock Him
than worship Him. When we believe that we ought to be satisfied, rather than
God glorified, we set God below ourselves, imagine that He should submit His
own honor to our advantage: we make ourselves more glorious than God.
Stephen Charnock
Discourses upon the Existence and
Attributes of God, p. 225-226.
I think we
delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but
completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation. If it were possible
for a created soul fully to “appreciate,” that is, to love and delight in, the
worthiest object of all, and simultaneously at every moment to give this
delight perfect expression, then that soul would be in supreme blessedness. To
praise God fully we must suppose ourselves to be in perfect love with God,
drowned in, dissolved by that delight which, far from remaining pent up within
ourselves as incommunicable bliss, flows out from us incessantly again in
effortless and perfect expression. Our joy is no more separable from the praise
in which it liberates and utters itself than the brightness a mirror receives
is separable from the brightness it sheds.
C.S. Lewis
It is in the
process of being worshipped that God communicates His presence to men.
C.S. Lewis
Just as an
indescribable sunset or a breath-taking mountaintop vista evokes a spontaneous
response, so we cannot encounter the worthiness of God without the response of
worship. If you could see God at this moment, you would so utterly understand
how worthy He is of worship that you would instinctively fall on you face and
worship Him.
Donald Whitney
Spiritual Disciplines for the
Christian Life, 1991, p.
87, Used by permission of NavPress – www.navpress.com,
All rights reserved.
For more information please see the website www.BibicalSpirituality.org.
Worship is a
Spiritual Discipline insofar as it is both an end and a means. The worship of
God is an end in itself because worship, as we’ve defined it, is to
focus on and respond to God. There is no higher goal than focusing on and
responding to God. But worship is also a means in the sense that it is a
means to Godliness. The more truly we worship God, the more we become like Him.
Donald Whitney
Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life,
1991, p. 94-95, Used by permission of NavPress – www.navpress.com, All
rights reserved. For more information
please see the website www.BibicalSpirituality.org.
There is one
fundamental reason why the living God wants His people to assemble in worship:
that is, to ascribe to Him the worth and value that are His, individually and
as a body, and to present their bodies as living sacrifices. Worshiping God is
not a means to an end; it is an end in itself!
Ron Owens
The Worship Service: A Hindrance or a Highway
for Revival, Revival Commentary, v. 2, n. 2.
God…is our
“audience” in worship. It is His approval that we are to seek.
Ron Owens
The Worship Service: A Hindrance or a Highway
for Revival, Revival Commentary, v. 2, n. 2.