What shall I say, O my God, my life, my holy joy? What can any man say when
he speaks of you? Silence offers the greatest eloquence, yet woe to him who
does not sing your praise.
From: Saint Augustine
The liturgy cannot fulfill this function if we misunderstand or underestimate the essentially spiritual value of Christian public prayer. If we cling to immature and limited notions of “privacy,” we will never be able to free ourselves from the bonds of individualism. We will never realize how the Church delivers us from ourselves by public worship, the very public character of which tends to hide us “in the secret of God’s face.”
From: Thomas Merton, Seasons of Celebration, p. 27.
Sunrise is an event that calls forth solemn music in the very depths of our nature, as if one’s whole being had to attune itself to the cosmos and praise God for the new day, praise him in the name of all the creatures that ever were or ever will be. I look at the rising sun and feel that now upon me falls the responsibility of seeing what all my ancestors have seen, in the Stone Age and even before it, praising God before me. Whether or not they praised him then, for themselves, they must praise him now in me. When the sun rises each one of us is summoned by the living and the dead to praise God.
From: Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander
The measure of the worth of our public activity for God is the private profound communion we have with Him. Rush is wrong every time, there is always plenty of time to worship God. Quiet days with God may be a snare. We have to pitch our tents where we shall always have quiet times with God, however noisy our times with the world may be. There are not three stages in spiritual life – worship, waiting and work. Some of us go in jumps like spiritual frogs, we jump from worship to waiting, and from waiting to work. God’s idea is that the three should go together. They were always together in the life of Our Lord. He was unhasting and unresting. It is a discipline, we cannot get into it all at once.
From: Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest, January 6.
Adoration is an important aspect of my personal worship of God. This cannot be worked out by any human effort but rather made incandescent by the fire of the Holy Spirit in my life. My worship of God must be the sense of awful wonder and adoration, to love, yearn and wait on God.
From: A W Tozer, My Daily Pursuit
“Adoration is the first and greatest of life’s responses to its spiritual environment; the first and most fundamental of spirit’s movement towards Spirit, the seed from which all other prayer must spring. It is among the most powerful of the educative forces which purify the understanding, form and develop the spiritual life.”
From: Evelyn Underhill
“There might be a time during this journey of ours when our tables are overturned, our money is scattered, feathers fly and we find ourselves scrambling. There might be a time when all we have left is worship with no agenda other than to worship our Lord, and the forming of words in our hearts of “injustice” and “love” by the One who shouted them at us in the marketplace.”
From: Anna Murdock
Please see more of her writings at –
http://www.pewponderings.blogspot.com/2015/03/when-tables-are-overturned-john-213-22.html
Just as worship begins in holy expectancy, it ends in holy obedience. If worship does not propel us into greater obedience, it has not been worship. To stand before the Holy One of eternity is to change. Resentments cannot be held with the same tenacity when we enter his gracious light. As Jesus says, we need to leave our gift at the altar and go set the matter straight (Matthew 5:23, 24). In worship an increased power steals its way into the heart sanctuary, an increased compassion grows in the soul. To worship is to change.
From: Richard J. Foster
If you keep the Sabbath, you start to see creation not as somewhere to get away from your ordinary life, but a place to frame an attentiveness to your life.
From: Eugene H. Peterson
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/e/eugenehpe528434.html
A man can no more diminish God’s glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word ‘darkness’ on the walls of his cell.
From: C. S. Lewis