worship

I once heard worship defined as celebrating the availability of God.

The highest form of worship is to answer God's prayer.

The spiritual muscles I hadn't used for decades began to acquire some tone, and since they were Catholic muscles too, it was natural to look for a church to work out in.It was hard. Appalling though the predations exacted on the monastic liturgy were, they were nothing compared to the desecration exacted on the secular. Latin was gone entirely, replaced by dull, oppressive, anchorman English, slavishly translated from its sonorous source to be as plain and "direct" as possible. It didn't seem to have occurred to the well-meaning vandals who'd thrown out baby, bath, and bathwater that all ritual is a reaching out to the unknowable and can be accomplished only by the noncognitive: evocation, allusion, metaphor, incantation__he tools of the poet.

Adoration drives obedience, but throughout history people are prone to forget the faithfulness of God yesterday.

Pray more often and read and obey The Holy Scriptures in The Holy Bible.

Here__ the inevitable truth: our hearts will always find something to worship, and that will motivate how we live.

Any outward acts of worship in a church service must begin in the heart. Right worship starts with right thinking.

God is the greatest thing that exists, ever has existed or ever will_for us to glory in anything else, would be sin, as there is nothing greater than God, there is no calling greater than praising God.

To worship is to quicken the conscience by the holiness of God, to feed the mind with the truth of God, to purge the imagination by the beauty of God, to open the heart to the love of God, to devote the will to the purpose of God.

Philip Yancey sees our blasé attitude toward the faithfulness of God in the waitstaff At Yellowstone. Even when they are finished their chores, they don't look up and marvel at the geiser going off. After all, they see it so often.

The library became the cathedral where I would come to worship amd the stories were as precious to me as prayers.

...small bits of our day are profoundly meaningfulbecause they are the site of our worship. The crucible of our formation is in the monotony of our daily routines.

This child-like spirit soon perceives the grandeur of the Father "in heaven," and ascends to devout adoration, "Hallowed be Thy name." The child lisping, "Abba, Father," grows into the cherub crying, "Holy, Holy, Holy.

A quite specific astonishment stands at the beginning of every theological perception, inquiry, and thought.

The apostle only commands that each action and ceremony of God's worship be decently and orderly performed, but gives us no leave to excogitate [contrive] or devise new ceremonies, which have not been instituted before. He has spoken in that chapter of assembling in the church, prophesying and preaching, praying and praising there. Now let all these things, and every other action of God's worship, ceremonies and all, be done decently and in order.

Where am I?_ you ask. Where you are is where the things you__e denied worshipping have taken you.

Once more, the joyful character of the eucharistic gathering must be stressed. For the medieval emphasis on the cross, while not a wrong one, is certainly one-sided. The liturgy is, before everything else, the joyous gathering of those who are to meet the risen Lord and to enter with him into the bridal chamber. And it is this joy of expectation and this expectation of joy that are expressed in singing and ritual, in vestments and in censing, in that whole 'beauty' of the liturgy which has so often been denounced as unnecessary and even sinful.Unnecessary it is indeed, for we are beyond the categories of the 'necessary.' Beauty is never 'necessary,' 'functional' or 'useful.' And when, expecting someone whom we love, we put a beautiful tablecloth on the table and decorate it with candles and flowers, we do all this not out of necessity, but out of love. And the Church is love, expectation and joy.

Therefore, God elected the people of Israel to reveal authentic worship and the pursuit of ultimate wisdom so he could reinstate order to a chaotic world.