Quotes About Worship

We have to learn to lean into life as something beautiful even if it is not exactly what we expected. Trusting that God works all things together for the good despite the challenges we face is a gift of worship we give to God. Acceptance with humility must eventually come to each of us if we are to please God and not always fight against the limitations of our own family pattern.

Keeping house—picking up those messes one more time—is a service of worship to God as we craft a place of beauty and comfort for all who enter our sanctuary of His very presence.

Taking time away to really seek God and to remember what He has done always shows us a bigger picture of Him.

Some men worship rank, some worship heroes, some worship power, some worship God, & over these ideals they dispute & cannot unite but they all worship money.

Israel's monomaniacal Spinoza worship is amusing and exasperating by turns. For a start, his insistence that Spinoza was the singular font of the Enlightenment leaves him without a story of the Enlightenment's intellectual or cultural origins. Every historian has to begin somewhere, but the fact that Israel begins with Spinoza, and then reduces most of what follows the philosopher to a footnote, leaves his account of the Enlightenment founded on something like immaculate conception.

To church; and with my mourning, very handsome, and new periwig, make a great show.

I to church, and with my mourning, very handsome, and new periwigg, make a great shew.

Up and with my wife to church, where Mr. Mills made an unnecessary sermon on Original Sin, neither understood by himself, nor the people.

By many a temple half as old as Time.

I am most gladly content that Christ breaketh all my idols in pieces: it hath put a new edge upon my blunted love to Christ. I see He is jealous of my love, and will have all to Himself.

There is none like Him; I would not exchange one smile of His lovely face with kingdoms.

Earth, with her thousand voices, praises God.

For the king, love like an alter fire, eternal

How much we take the Omnissiah's gifts for granted, he thought ruefully, until we no longer have them.

your sweet apple grove, altars smoking with frankincense

To those of us who pride ourselves on being "informal," I'd encourage us to consider what story we could possibly be telling without form. Is our story merely about how cool our pastor is and how loud our subwoofers are? Or have we truly developed a biblical theology of worship that imparts the only story that really matters to the next generation?

When well told and well lived by the storytellers, worship, like story itself, offers opportunities for the imagination to be nurtured and transformed.

like story itself, worship works: it offers experiences of transcendence and timelessness, resonance and wonder, intimacy and identity, mystery and enchantment.

a story's plot has a beginning, middle, and end consisting of a sequence of events developed around a particular conflict or gradual unveiling. As far as worship-as-story is concerned, this guiding story arc has already been provided for us in the church calendar or liturgical year. It's not a plot we're creating from scratch.

be fully immersed in the baptismal waters of the Christian faith takes the entire pool of the worshiping community.

every church can treat each discipleship class and each worship service as an opportunity for continual rehearsal of what the words, stories, symbols, rituals, and experiences in the Christian community mean.

Worship is about God in Christ. I suppose one could argue that if there were no people to do the worshiping, no worship would take place; but scripture paints a different picture. Worship goes on in heaven from the lips of the seraphim (see Isa. 6:2-3), while here on earth—should humans fail to praise—even the stones would cry out (see Luke 19:37-40).

Writes Webber: This conflict of style has continued in the twentieth-century debate about traditional versus contemporary worship. Traditional worship seems to be hanging on to modernity while contemporary worship has capitulated to pop culture. In either case the debate continues to rage about style with little concern for a biblical theology of worship. 8

liturgy is not a particular style of worship or some outmoded preference on the part of old people; it's a timeless pattern based on the fourfold movement—one that was originally created by first-rate storytellers who knew what they were about.