"

1. Behold the throne of grace!
The promise calls me near;
There Jesus shows his smiling face;
And waits to answer prayer.

2. That rich atoning blood
Which, sprinkled round, I see,
Provides for those who come to God
An all-prevailing plea.

3. My soul, ask what thou wilt,
Thou canst not be too bold;
Since his own blood for thee he spilt,
What else can he withhold?

4. Beyond thy utmost wants
His love and power can bless
To praying souls he always grants
More than they can express.

"

"This is the story of the Bible, not you or me. It is God and God alone, God’s name and namesake alone. The point of everything is God’s glory alone so that to God alone will be the glory. It is God who is deep in riches, God who is deep in wisdom, God who is deep in lovingkindness, and God who is deep in glory. Not us. This is the message of the Bible."

"The gospel is cause for confidence because it distills the kept promises of God into an eternal righteousness credited as our own. The Scriptures are brimming with the promises of God to us. He promises to supply all our needs. He promises to prosper us. He promises to give us hope. He promises to relent in anger. He promises to pass over former sins and remember them no more. He promises to keep his covenant. He promises to deliver us. He promises joy. He promises favor. He promises to cover our shame. He promises eternal life.

The promises go on and on. God is constantly promising something. Yet he owes us nothing. We deserve not only the absence of these things, but their opposites."

"Christ Jesus is both the author and the finisher of our faith. It is God who commands the land to separate from the sea. It is God who calls out to Adam and Eve as they cower in the bushes. It is God who summons Abraham and marks him out. It is God who interrupts Moses with fire. It is God who gives dreams and visions, God who anoints, God who declares, God who spans, God who commands, God who reigns. We do not summon the king; the king summons us. He breathes life into us. It is God who speaks light into the darkness; it is God who commands into the tunnel, ‘Lazarus, come forth!’ And it is we who respond.

What would our worship in music look like if we entered the sanctuary wakened to this divine summons, acknowledging that God has already ‘shown up’ in creation, that he has already ‘shown up’ in the incarnation, that he has already ‘shown up’ in the crucifixion and resurrection? What if we came in confessing that although he wants our worship, he does not need it? What would it look like if we sang and played and knelt and raised hands like we are dust and he is the breath of life, instead of the other way around?"

"Christian, you are a Christian. You have a new identity. You are in Christ, and Christ is in you (John 15:4). Let your doing emerge from your being. It will not work the other way around."

"Christ satisfies the demands of the law completely; therefore, when we receive his righteousness through faith - not through our obedience - we receive a complete satisfaction of what the law demands of us."

"The danger we face when we worship is coming into the experience assuming we are summoning God. We assume that worship is our initiative. There are of course plenty of examples in the Scriptures of a worshiper asking God to ‘draw near’ or come by,’ but the tenor of so much of our worship does not reflect scriptural worship, which presupposes no one seeks God whom God has not sought. Yet much of evangelical worship implicitly assumes we are the ones in control, that we are bringing the best of ourselves and our holy desire to worship, when the reality is that worship does not begin with the worshiper. It begins with God. It is a response to God’s calling upon us."

"In the evangelical subculture we are used to thinking about worship in terms of music, particularly a kind of music that is employed for church worship services (but has recently become a veritable genre for radio and retail). But this compartmentalization is foreign to the biblical view of worship. There are certainly worship songs in the Bible, songs that were sung at corporate gatherings of worship, but when we look at the Psalms, for instance, we see that many of them arise from life outside the gathering. The Psalms run the gamut of human emotion and experience, highs and lows, good and bad. But the bottom and upward line through them all is worship of the God who is sovereign over everything.

No, the Bible does not show us worship as what we do when we sing, but as what we do when our hearts are tuned to God. The constant conflict throughout the scriptural narrative is the draw of God and the inner pull of idolatry. We are tuned to idols or we are tuned to God; there is no halfway. When Jesus issues the great commandment, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind’ (Matt.22:37), he is referring to holistic worship. Every part of us, all our affections - all entrusted to and deposited with God."