Quotes about Worship

As I look around on Sunday morning at the people populating the pews, I see the risk that God has assumed. For whatever reason, God now reveals himself in the world not through a pillar of smoke and fire, not even through the physical body of his Son in Galilee, but through the mongrel collection that comprises my local church and every other such gathering in God's name. (p. 68, Church: Why Bother?)

Many churches offer more entertainment than worship, more uniformity than diversity, more exclusivity than outreach, more law than grace.

Shouldn't we be presenting an alternative to the prevailing culture rather than simply mimicking it? What would a church look like that created space for quietness, that bucked the celebrity trend and unplugged from noisy media, that actively resisted our consumer culture? What would worship look like if we directed it more toward God than toward our own amusement?

Stoning prophets and erecting churches to their memory afterwards has been the way of the world through the ages. Today we worship Christ, but the Christ in the flesh we crucified. —Mahatma Gandhi

We have not, it seems, the power to abstain from worship. Instead, we swallow the sweet poison, substituting lesser gods for God.

We should leave a worship service asking ourselves not "What did I get out of it?" but rather "Was God pleased with what happened?

Taken as a whole, the Bible clearly puts the emphasis on what pleases God—the point of worship, after all. To worship, says Walter Wink, is to remember Who owns the house.

What would worship look like if we directed it more toward God than toward our own amusement?

Highlight — Genesis 24:3 Marrying Foreigners From this earliest period of Israelite history, there was an emphasis on not marrying foreigners. The reason had to do with religion, not race—in many cases foreigners were distant relatives, but they worshiped false gods. When foreigners were willing to worship Israel's God, they were welcomed (see the book of Ruth, for example).

God's purpose in giving you Sabbath spaces amid your full, productive life is to help you be uninhibited in your devotion, service, and worship of Yahweh. Margin keeps you from marginalizing God.

Nope, he penned these words of worship while sitting on the cold-floor, cold-food, maddening reality of Roman confinement. House arrest. Guards at the door, preventing his escape. When he wrote this glorious sentence, he was under a sentence himself, probably for as much as two years. Locked up. Locked down. Imprisoned.

Again, one of the qualities that makes the gospel so real and so great is that it doesn't eliminate our past but just so thoroughly deals with it. God forgives it. He changes it. He transforms all that mess into this huge mountain of grace that only takes us higher and closer to Him. So now, instead of being a reason for endless shame, guilt, and regret, our past is a reason for endless worship and free-flowing testimony.