worship

I always have the feeling we are merely fearfully trying to save room for God; I would rather speak of God at the center than at the limits, in strength rather than weakness, and thus in human life and goodness rather than in death and guilt.

Although there are things that can be done to enhance corporate worship, there is a profound sense in which excellent worship cannot be attained merely by pursuing excellent worship. In the same way that, according to Jesus, you cannot find yourself until you lose yourself, so also you cannot find excellent corporate worship until you stop trying to find excellent corporate worship and pursue God himself. Despite the protestations, one sometimes wonders if we are beginning to worship worship rather than worship God. As a brother put it to me, it__ a bit like those who begin by admiring the sunset and soon begin to admire themselves admiring the sunset.

Christians__ho have no patience with Darwinistic materialism__ften sound as progressive as the most ardent evolutionist. They look for __ew_ theologies, __ew_ ways of worship, and __ew_ music, being quite willing to toss out their entire __ld-fashioned_ Christian heritage.

...but you - women like you are dangerous- ominous _ take care, Love _ men will first fear you, then later, turn you into a deity...

This was our rhythm, our worship: give and take, gift and receive, honor and entrust. Making love to this man wasn__ just an expression of my feelings for him or a carnal, physical need__t was an offering.

...when I chose you, I didn't want the commonplace - I didn't want a 'partner' - I wanted a shrine...

...I worship at the temple of your body and without you, I'd have no art...

When something becomes so important to you that it drives your behavior and commands your emotions, you are worshipping it.

I needed to decide if I would still worship God if he allowed Matt to lose his eye.

Sabbath, in the first instance, is not about worship. It is about work stoppage. It is about withdrawal from the anxiety system of Pharaoh, the refusal to let one__ life be defined by production and consumption and the endless pursuit of private well-being.

Let us be so taken up with the knowledge of God's goodness and the desire to fellowship with Him that our emotions are warmed and our outer man reflects great love. Although we must not seek emotional experiences for their own sake, we must not shun them merely because others misuse them or ignore God's instructions on worship.

Waking up is the dangerous act of worship. It's dangerous because worship is meant to produce lives fully attentive to reality as God sees it, and that's more than most of us want to deal with.

Long looking with admiration produces change. From your heroes you pick up mannerisms and phrases and tones of voice and facial expressions and habits and demeanors and convictions and beliefs. The more admirable the hero is and the more intense your admiration is, the more profound will be your transformation. In the case of Jesus, he is infinitely admirable, and our admiration rises to the most absolute worship. Therefore, when we behold him as we should, the change is profound.

The solution to our human frailty is not to try harder, but to turn Godward.

Now I myself, I cheerfully admit, feel that enormity in Kensington Gardens as something quite natural. I feel it so because I have been brought up, so to speak, under its shadow; and stared at the graven images of Raphael and Shakespeare almost before I knew their names; and long before I saw anything funny in their figures being carved, on a smaller scale, under the feet of Prince Albert. I even took a certain childish pleasure in the gilding of the canopy and spire, as if in the golden palace of what was, to Peter Pan and all children, something of a fairy garden. So do the Christians of Jerusalem take pleasure, and possibly a childish pleasure, in the gilding of a better palace, besides a nobler garden, ornamented with a somewhat worthier aim. But the point is that the people of Kensington, whatever they might think about the Holy Sepulchre, do not think anything at all about the Albert Memorial. They are quite unconscious of how strange a thing it is; and that simply because they are used to it. The religious groups in Jerusalem are also accustomed to their coloured background; and they are surely none the worse if they still feel rather more of the meaning of the colours. It may be said that they retain their childish illusion about their Albert Memorial. I confess I cannot manage to regard Palestine as a place where a special curse was laid on those who can become like little children. And I never could understand why such critics who agree that the kingdom of heaven is for children, should forbid it to be the only sort of kingdom that children would really like; a kingdom with real crowns of gold or even of tinsel. But that is another question, which I shall discuss in another place; the point is for the moment that such people would be quite as much surprised at the place of tinsel in our lives as we are at its place in theirs. If we are critical of the petty things they do to glorify great things, they would find quite as much to criticise (as in Kensington Gardens) in the great things we do to glorify petty things. And if we wonder at the way in which they seem to gild the lily, they would wonder quite as much at the way we gild the weed.

Down on my knees again. Worship isn__ enough.__eter leaned forward and rubbed his forehead against Charlie__. ____ going to like this,_ he murmured. __aily services. Hourly services.

even there a shining is flowing from all the stonesthough the eyes are not yet made that can see it

Never was living beauty so enchanting as a dying Saviour.