Microscopic vs. Telescopic Worship

"But there are two entirely different ways of magnifying God, one of which exalts him and the other demeans him. First, you can magnify God the way a microscope does by focusing on something quite small, most often invisible to the naked eye, and causing it to look much, much, bigger than it really is. this is magnification by distortion! This is not how we are to magnify God! Tragically though, that's how many Christians think of God and how they are to worship him. They think that in their lives and in their prayers and in their praise they are causing God to look bigger and greater and more glorious than he really is, in and of himself. Worship is not like blowing up a balloon. God is not honored by human inflation, as if the breath of our praise enhances and expands his visibility and worth. To think that apart from our praise God remains shrunken and shriveled is to dishonor him who "gives to all mankind life and breath and everything" (Acts 17:25).

But you can also magnify God the way a telescope would. A telescope helps people who are small and distant to see something indescribably huge and massive by making it to appear as it really and truly is. A telescope peers into the distant realms of our universe and displays before our eyes the massive, unfathomable, indescribable dimensions of what is there. Only in this latter sense are we called to magnify the Lord."

Sam Storms, For the Fame of God's Name: Essays in Honor of John Piper. p.58

Looking Outward

"The evangelical orientation is inward and subjective. We are far better at looking inward than we are at looking outward. Instead, we need to expend our energies admiring, exploring, expositing, and extolling Jesus Christ."

--Sinclair Ferguson

Praise--The Completion of Delight

Piper:

 "We praise what we enjoy because the delight is incomplete until it is expressed in praise. If we were not allowed to speak of what we value and celebrate what we love and praise what we admire, our joy would not be full. So if God loves us enough to make our joy full, He must not only give us Himself; he must also win from us the praise of our hearts--not because He needs to shore up some weakness in Himself or compensate for some deficiency, but because He loves us and seeks the fullness of our joy that can be found only in knowing and praising Him, the most magnificent of all Beings. If He is truly for us, He must be for Himself!"

Desiring God p.49

Defiant Grace

"Like a bad back that needs to return repeatedly to the chiropractor for straightening out, our understanding of Jesus needs to be straightened out over and over again as our poor spiritual posture throws our perception of him out of line--domesticating him and conforming him to our image, rather than transforming us into his."

-Dane Ortlund, Defiant Grace

Recipe for Worship

1) Attempt to understand the unfathomable holiness of God.

2) Understand how utterly far we are from reaching that holiness (and once we think we know how bad we are, in reality we are WAY worse than we know)

3) Mix those. Result: Ephesians 2 deadness.

4) Enter Jesus. Examine God's relentless pursuit of us sinners through the person and work of Christ.

5) Combine all other steps with the cross. The cross is where God's holiness and wrath meet his compassion and mercy. What he demands from us (holiness) he provides for us in Christ. Once we realize 1) how holy God really is and 2) how really really unholy we are, the work of Jesus and the agony he experienced is heightened and vivified.

6) Justification--------> Repentance---------->Worship

Idolatry

"The opposite of worship is idolatry. Every human being—at every moment of their life, today and into eternity—is unceasingly doing either the former or the latter"


--- Mark Driscoll