When they had finished eating, Jesus said to Simon Peter, "Simon son of John, do you truly love me more than these?" "Yes, Lord," he said, "You know that I love you." Jesus said, "Feed my lambs."
— John 21:15
A century ago a hymn was often sung in the churches, the first stanza of which ran like this: ?Tis a point I long to know, Oft it causes anxious thought, Do I love the Lord, or no! Am I His, or am I not? Those who thus confessed their spiritual anxiety were serious-minded, honest men and women who could open their hearts to each other in this manner without self-consciousness or loss of face. It is an evidence of the essential frivolity of the modern religious mind that this hymn is never sung today, and if mentioned from the pulpit at all it is quoted humorously as proof that those who once sang it were not up on the doctrine of grace.
Why ask, ?Do I love the Lord, or no?? when any number of personal workers stand by to quote convenient texts from the New Testament to prove that we do? But we had better not be too cocksure. The gravest question any of us face is whether we do or do not love the Lord. Too much hinges on the answer to pass the matter off lightly. And it is a question that no one can answer for another. Not even the Bible can tell the individual man that he loves the Lord; it can only tell him how he can know whether or not he does. It can and does tell us how to test our hearts for love as a man might test ore for the presence of uranium, but we must do the testing.
thought
Vehemently Peter had declared that though all others fall away he would never disown his Lord even if it meant his death (Mark 14:27-31). In the intervening hours the test came and Peter failed. He recognizes the weakness of his love and the Lord begins
prayer
Easy enough, Lord, to sing hymns and choruses declaring my love for You. But do I love You with agape love? Perfect my love.
"Woe to me!" I cried, "I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the LORD Almighty."
— Isaiah 6:5
It remains only to be said that worship as we have described it here is almost (though, thank God, not quite) a forgotten art in our day. For whatever we can say of modern Bible-believing Christians, it can hardly be denied that we are not remarkable for our spirit of worship. The gospel as preached by good men in our times may save souls, but it does not create worshipers. Our meetings are characterized by cordiality, humor, affability, zeal and high animal spirits; but hardly anywhere do we find gatherings marked by the overshadowing presence of God.
We manage to get along on correct doctrine, fast tunes, pleasing personalities and religious amusements. How few, how pitifully few are the enraptured souls who languish for love of Christ. The sweet ?madness? that visited such men as Bernard and St. Francis and Richard Rolle and Jonathan Edwards and Samuel Rutherford is scarcely known today. The passionate adorations of Teresa and Madame Guyon are a thing of the past. Christianity has fallen into the hands of leaders who knew not Joseph. The very memory of better days is slowly passing from us and a new type of religious person is emerging. How is the gold tarnished and the silver become lead! If Bible Christianity is to survive the present world upheaval, we shall need to recapture the spirit of worship. We shall need to have a fresh revelation of the greatness of God and the beauty of Jesus.
We shall need to put away our phobias and our prejudices against the deeper life and seek again to be filled with the Holy Spirit. He alone can raise our cold hearts to rapture and restore again the art of true worship.
thought
Have we learned to worship? We have worship leaders, worship teams, worship choruses. We have folksy sermons and pleasant humor. Is there worship? Are we ever struck speechless by the awesome presence of God?
prayer
Lord, make me a worshiper of You.
Then I heard every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and on the sea, and all that is in them, singing: "To him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb be praise and honor and glory and power, for ever and ever!" The four living creatures said, ?Amen,? and the elders fell down and worshiped.
— Revelation 5:13-14
The love of Christ both wounds and heals, it fascinates and frightens, it kills and makes alive, it draws and repulses, it sobers and enraptures. There can be nothing more terrible or more wonderful than to be stricken with love for Christ so deeply that the whole being goes out in a pained adoration of His person, an adoration that disturbs and disconcerts while it purges and satisfies and relaxes the deep inner heart. This love as a kind of moral fragrance is ever detected upon the garments of the saints. In the writings of Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, for instance, this fragrance is so strong as to be very nearly intoxicating.
There are passages in his Confessions so passionately sweet as to be unbearable, yet so respectful and self-effacing as to excite pity for the man who thus kneels in adoring wonder, caught between holy love and an equally holy fear. The list of fragrant saints is long. It includes men and women of every shade of theological thought within the bounds of the orthodox Christian faith. It embraces persons of every social level, every degree of education, every race and color. This radiant love for Christ is to my mind the true test of catholicity, the one sure proof of membership in the Church universal.
thought
Prayed Augustine: "You are the life of lives, the life of souls. You are livingness itself, and You will not change, O Light of my soul" (F. J. Sheed translation). The prayer of an adorer!
prayer
O God, I'm but a beginner in the worship of You. Teach me, Lord, in Jesus' name.
Suddenly Jesus met them. "Greetings," he said. They came to him, clasped his feet and worshiped him.
— Matthew 28:9
Many of our popular songs and choruses in praise of Christ are hollow and unconvincing. Some are even shocking in their amorous endearments, and strike a reverent soul as being a kind of flattery offered to One with whom neither composer nor singer is acquainted. The whole thing is in the mood of the love ditty, the only difference being the substitution of the name of Christ for that of the earthly lover. How different and how utterly wonderful are the emotions aroused by a true and Spirit-incited love for Christ. Such a love may rise to a degree of adoration almost beyond the power of the heart to endure, yet at the same time it will be serious, elevated, chaste and reverent.
Christ can never be known without a sense of awe and fear accompanying the knowledge. He is the fairest among ten thousand, but He is also the Lord high and mighty. He is meek and lowly in heart, but He is also Lord and Christ who will surely come to be the judge of all men. No one who knows Him intimately can ever be flippant in His presence.
thought
Our "worship services" are sometimes more flippant than contemplative, more entertaining than nourishing. Historically the Church has gone through periods when there seemed to be little joy in worship. The problem in evangelical culture today may be the
prayer
O Risen Christ, in heart I would fall at Your feet and worship You!
If we are out of our mind, it is for you. For Christ's love compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died.
— 2 Corinthians 5:13-14
Neither the word adoration nor any of its forms is found in our familiar King James Bible, but the idea is there in full bloom. The great Bible saints were, above all, enraptured lovers of God. The psalms celebrate the love which David (and a few others) felt for the person of God. As suggested above, Paul admitted that the love of God was in his breast a kind of madness: ?For whether we be beside ourselves, it is of God: or whether we be sober, it is for your cause. For the love of Christ constraineth us? (2 Cor. 5:13-14). In Weymouth?s translation the passage reads, ?For the love of Christ overmasters us.?
The idea appears to be that Paul?s love for Christ carried him beyond himself and made him do extravagant things which to a mind untouched with the delights of such love might seem quite irrational. Perhaps the most serious charge that can be brought against modern Christians is that we are not sufficiently in love with Christ. The Christ of Fundamentalism is strong but hardly beautiful. It is rarely that we find anyone aglow with personal love for Christ. I trust it is not uncharitable to say that in my opinion a great deal of praise in conservative circles is perfunctory and forced, where it is not downright insincere.
thought
Adoring worship is an expression of compelling love.
prayer
O Father, may I grow as an adorer of You!
. . . O Lord, the great and awesome God, who keeps his covenant of love with all who love him and obey his commands.
— Daniel 9:4
The third stage of true worship is wonder. Here the mind ceases to understand and goes over to a kind of delightful astonishment. Carlyle said that worship is ?transcendent wonder,? a degree of wonder without limit and beyond expression. That kind of worship is found throughout the Bible (though it is only fair to say that the lesser degrees of worship are found there also). Abraham fell on his face in holy wonderment as God spoke to him. Moses hid his face before the presence of God in the burning bush. Paul could hardly tell whether he was in or out of the body when he was allowed to see the unspeakable glories of the third heaven.
When John saw Jesus walking among His churches, he fell at His feet as dead. We cite these as examples; the list is long in the Biblical record. It may be said that such experiences as these are highly unusual and can be no criterion for the plain Christian today. This is true, but only of the external circumstances; the spiritual content of the experiences is unchanging and is found alike wherever true believers are found. It is always true that an encounter with God brings wonderment and awe. The pages of Christian biography are sweet with the testimonies of enraptured worshipers who met God in intimate experience and could find no words to express all they felt and saw and heard. Christian hymnody takes us where the efforts of common prose break down, and brings the wings of poetic feeling to the aid of the wondering saint.But wonder is not yet the last nor highest element in worship. The soaring saint has one more mountain peak to clear before he has reached the rarefied air of purest worship. He must adore.
Open an old hymnal and turn to the sections on worship and the divine perfections and you will see the part that wonder has played in worship through the centuries.
thought
Frederick Faber was one of those enraptured worshipers. He prayed: "Father of Jesus, love's reward. What rapture will it be prostrate before Thy throne to lie, and gaze and gaze on Thee!" When is the last time you so gazed?
prayer
O Lord, what delight to pause from asking and just to gaze, to gaze upon You.ot yet the last nor highest element in worship. The soaring saint has one more mountain peak to clear before he has reached the rarefied air of purest worship. He must adore.
The dictionary says that to admire is to regard with wondering esteem accompanied by pleasure and delight; to look at or upon with an elevated feeling of pleasure.
According to this definition, God has few admirers among Christians today. Many are they who are grateful for His goodness in providing salvation.
At Thanksgiving time the churches ring with songs of gratitude that all is safely gathered in.
Testimony meetings are mostly devoted to recitations of incidents where someone got into trouble and got out again in answer to prayer. To decry this would be uncharitable and unscriptural for there is much of the same thing in the Book of Psalms. It is good and right to render unto God thanksgiving for all His mercies to us. But Gods admirers, where are they The simple truth is that worship is elementary until it begins to take on the quality of admiration.
Just as long as the worshiper is engrossed with himself and his good fortune, he is a babe. We begin to grow up when our worship passes from thanksgiving to admiration. As our hearts rise to God in lofty esteem for that which He is (?I AM THAT I AM), we begin to share a little of the selfless pleasure which is the portion of the blessed in heaven.
verse
Great is the LORD and most worthy of praise; his greatness no one can fathom.
— Psalm 145:3
thought
Great is Yahweh! His greatness is humanly unfathomable. His greatness is in who He is. So little time do we devote to just reflecting upon His greatness. It is that reflection that generates heart worship.
prayer
O God, You are great, great beyond my ability to grasp, but I worship You, O Lord!
https://cmalliance.org/devotionals/tozer/
In the love which any intelligent creature feels for God there must always be a measure of mystery.
It is even possible that it is almost wholly mystery, and that our attempt to find reasons is merely a rationalizing of a love already mysteriously present in the heart as a result of some secret operation of the Spirit within us, "working like a miner, toiling unseen in the depths of the earth?(Fenelon).
But so far as reasons can be given, they would seem to be two: gratitude and excellence. To love God because He has been good to us is one of the most reasonable things possible. The love which arises from the consideration of His kindness to us is valid and altogether acceptable to Him.
It is nevertheless a lower degree of love, being less selfless than that love which springs from an appreciation of what God is in Himself apart from His gifts. Thus the simple love which arises from gratitude, when expressed in any act or conscious utterance, is undoubtedly worship.
But the quality of our worship is stepped up as we move away from the thought of what God has done for us and nearer the thought of the excellence of His holy nature. This leads us to admiration.
verse
Come, let us bow down in worship, let us kneel before the LORD our Maker
— Psalm 95:6
thought
What do we know of worship ? worship true and pure? We give God thanks for what He does and what He gives but seldom for who He is.
prayer
Thank You, Lord, for the gifts I receive from You. But I want to worship You, the Giver. Apart from any gifts You give, You are worthy to be worshiped.
https://cmalliance.org/devotionals/tozer/
In worship several elements may be distinguished, among them love, admiration, wonder and adoration.
Though they may not be experienced in that order, a little thought will reveal those elements as being present wherever true worship is found. Both the Old and the New Testament teach that the essence of true worship is the love of God. Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might. Our Lord declared this to be the sum of the Law and the Prophets. Now, love is both a principle and an emotion; it is something both felt and willed. It is capable of almost infinite degrees.
Love in the human heart may begin so modestly as to be hardly perceptible and go on to become a raging torrent that sweeps its possessor before it in total helplessness. Something like this must have been the experience of the apostle Paul, for he felt it necessary to explain to his critics that his apparent madness was actually the love of God ravishing his willing heart. It is quite impossible to worship God without loving Him. Scripture and reason agree to declare this. And God is never satisfied with anything less than all: all thy heart . . . all thy soul . . . all thy might.
This may not at first be possible, but deeper experience with God will prepare us for it, and the inward operations of the Holy Spirit will enable us after a while to offer Him such a poured-out fullness of love.
verse
"Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength." The second is this: "Love your neighbor as yourself." There is no commandment greater than these.
— Mark 12:30-31
thought
God has designed us to be loving worshipers ? to love Him with all our heart, soul, mind and strength. Only by His Spirit within can we grow to love Him and people with all we are.
prayer
O God, fill me with Your love. My love is so superficial. Teach me to love with all I am.
https://cmalliance.org/devotionals/tozer/