Quotes About Worship

These images may be well motivated, but they still lack the personal contact with a living God that fuels and solidifies religious expression and life.

In other words, where Borg and Crossan stress the critique of large political structures with the values of justice and nonviolence, Jesus' teaching appears to address the local structures of relation-ships, neighbors, and manner of worship before God, while under-scoring love of one's neighbor and calling for just treatment of others.

For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil" (emphasis added). It's not about money; it's about our attitude. God doesn't like it when we worship anything other than Him. He's a jealous God, and if our love of money (or family, or career, or hobbies, or . . . you fill in the blank) gets in the way of our relationship with Him, then we have a problem. He doesn't like that.

It isn't how loud or how quiet you worship; it's how much of your entire being you pour into every statement of adoration.

The shrine before her gave her a way to concentrate her thoughts, and powerful as symbols were, it was still just a symbol. Monuments and rituals served their purpose, but they fell away to insignificance before the essence of faith itself. That was what she offered the God-Emperor now.

The history of Temples teaches us that the people of God have been strong, or weak, in proportion to the faithfulness with which they have attended to their sanctuaries.

Respect for everyone he met. The preference of service over power. The rejection of violence. Israel—its Law and worship—as the primal source of meaning.

IN A MILIEU WHERE the church and its people are so quickly and roundly criticized for their shortcomings, it is easy to overlook a central theological truth; that is, that however inadequate or pitiful the church may seem at times (and may, in fact, be), where the scripture is proclaimed, the sacraments administered, and the people of God continue to seek to follow God in word and deed, God is at work; the Holy Spirit is still very much active.

And this must be the supreme concern of every Christian! God's honor must be expressed as He prescribes.

The God I worship is the personification of love, but not that maudlin love that oftimes blinds our eyes to facts and leads us to inconsistent actions

All normative judgments about worship must be avoided. Attempts to use biblicism as a guideline, as we shall see, tend to be abandoned in the course of time or lead to biblicism of only certain portions of scripture. After all, there is more biblical authority for snake handling (Mark 16:18) than there is for confirmation! Historically, attempts to deduce norms for worship from scripture fail because the Bible was not written for such a purpose.

I have attended church-service in the garrisons, and tried hard...to join in the prayers...but never could raise within me the solemn feelings and true affection that I feel when alone with God in the forest. There I seem to stand face to face with my Master; all around me is fresh and beautiful, as it came from His hand; and there is no nicety or doctrine to chill the feelings. No no; the woods are the true temple after all, for there the thoughts are free to mount higher even than the clouds.

When the Lilliputians first saw Gulliver's watch, that "wonderful kind of engine...a globe, half silver and half of some transparent metal," they identified it immediately as the god he worshiped. After all, "he seldom did anything without consulting it: he called it his oracle, and said it pointed out the time for every action in his life." To Jonathan Swift in 1726 that was worth a bit of satire. Modernity was under way. We're all Gullivers now. Or are we Yahoos?

If there is a god, I think he has a sense of humour. He does not require human beings to protect him from satire.

Catholic missionaries labored earnestly to convert indians. They fervently believed that God expected them to save the Indians' souls by convincing them to abandon their old sinful beliefs and to embrace the one true Christian faith. But after baptizing tens of thousands of Indians, the missionaries learned that many Indians continued to worship their own gods. Most priests came to believe that the Indians were lesser beings inherently incapable of fully understanding Christianity.

to know God is to perceive his worship-inspiring holiness and love, severity and kindness, righteousness and mercy.

it is righteous for God to seek his own glory. He is God and has no other gods before himself.

Let God Himself be the main attraction at church again, and let us be tireless in our insistence that church is for God, about God, through God, and to the glory of His great Son.

When we ask people what they want in church instead of giving them what they were created to long for, we play in the very idolatry that church was created to dismantle.

Our hearts are wired for worship, and our worship is directly tied to our sense of hope.

The people sang to the Lord, not about Him.

If we believe God is present in our worship as He promises to be,20 then we must frame all language of worship as to Him and not merely about Him.

Churches closing at a rate of six thousand per year in North America are not doing so because of worship style or form of government or methodology. They are failing because regardless of your preference on those points, it's pointless to deny the true cause behind debates and divisions—a failure to love.

Church was never intended to be a place where we serve God to the exclusion of meeting with Him.