Quoting from THE DANGEROUS ACT OF WORSHIP
Worship names what matters most: the way human beings are created to reflect God's glory embodying God's character in lives that seek righteousness and do justice.
Worship turns out to be the dangerous act of waking up to God and to the purposes of God in the world, and then living lives that actually show it.
Worship can name a Sunday gathering of God's people, but it also includes how we treat those around us, how we spend our money, and how we care for the lost and the oppressed.
Scripture indicates that worship is meant to be the tangible embodiment of God's hope in the world. Conversely, the Bible also teaches that the realities of oppression, poverty and injustices can be both a call to worship and an indictment of our failure to do so.
When worship is our response to the One who alone is worthy of it - Jesus Christ - then our lives are on their way to being turned inside out.
...The VBS production featured everything money and time could buy and was so central and primary that the gospel felt small and incidental in comparison.
...The privileges of churches like these can shroud the gospel in such middle- and upper-class consumer-oriented style and content that salvation subtly becomes more about providing a warm blanket of cultural safety than about stepping out into the bracing winds of spiritual sacrifice.
One-sixth of the world's population lives in absolute poverty, and nearly a million children each year are sold or forced into the sex-trafficking trade. But this is not just about statistics--it's about real lives. People with names and families are living daily without food or water, in sickness and oppression. ...they are circumstantially without hope. Every day.
...where is the evidence that through worship our lives have actually been redefined and realigned with God's heart for justice in the world?
...worship services that offer little more than comfort food: the baked potatoes of love, the melting butter of grace, with just enough bacon and chives of outreach to ease the conscience. All this becomes a churchly anesthetic.
Waking up is the dangerous act of worship.
God's criticism of Israel was that it professed what it failed to live.
"What does the LORD required of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God? Micah 6:8
Faithful worship means finding our life in God and practicing that life in the world, especially for the sake of the poor, the oppressed and the forgotten.
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I actually started to reread this book - this time with a highlighter. Please hang in there with me while I summarize each chapter here so I can first of all, let it sink in a little more and second of all, have a handy summary for myself.
Reawakening to the hope there is -
Jah
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