"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?"

"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."

"Praying Scripture means that church leaders might want to consider preparing their prayers in advance rather than place such a high premium on that quintessential virtue of Romanticism (and not the Bible) – spontaneity."

"…you will not find a single verse in the Bible that commends drawing outsiders toward God’s people through anything other than the gospel or a gospel-changed life. As the adage goes, what you win them with, you win them to."

"You cannot create true worship in peoples’ hearts by placing them in the right surroundings…Worship, very simply, is born of repentance. It’s the result of a Word- and Spirit-induced change of nature. The unrepentant, by definition, neither worship nor experience worship."