Wednesday, September 4, 2019
Commemoration of Birinus, Bishop of Dorchester (Oxon), Apostle of Wessex, 650

But what is worship? What ought to result from it? What is the point and peak and heart and centre of it? Is it the offering we bring to God of praise and adoration, of thanksgiving and sacrifice, our praise, our sacrifice to Him? That has its place, not legitimate only, but imperative. And yet to put that in the foreground is to make the service fundamentally man-centered and subjective, which, face to face with God, is surely almost unthinkably unseemly. Or is the ideal we should hold before us that other extreme, so ardently pressed on us these days, that, face to face with the Lord God Almighty, High and Holy, it is for us to forget ourselves and, leaving behind our petty little human joys and needs and sins, rising above thanksgiving and petition and confession, to lose ourselves in an awed adoration of God’s naked and essential being, blessing and praising Him, not even for what he has done for us, and been for us, but for what, in Himself, He is.

To me, that seems not an advance, but a pathetic throw-back to the primitive of Brahmanism. We shall not learn to know God better, nor how to worship Him more worthily, by careful rubbing out from memory every item of the wonder of Christ’s revelation of Him. [Continued tomorrow]

... A. J. Gossip (1873-1954), Experience Worketh Hope, Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1945, p. 24 (see the book; see also John 14:7; Ps. 85:8; 96:8-9; Isa. 29:13; Gal. 5:24; Heb. 13:15-16; more at Christ, Forget, Offering, Praise, Revelation, Sacrifice, Thanksgiving, Worship)

 
Compilation Copyright, 1996-2024, by Robert McAnally Adams,
        Curator, Christian Quotation of the Day,
        with Robert Douglas, principal contributor
Logo image Copyright 1996 by Shay Barsabe, of “Simple GIFs”, by kind permission.
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Last updated: 09/03/19

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