Biblical Worship

In his book, Whatever Happened to Worship?, A.W. Tozer, longtime pastor in Chicago and Toronto and author touches on church members who do not show up for worship or prayer meeting.  Even though Tozer died in 1963 his words still get to the truth of what matters in today’s church:  Worship of Almighty God.  Tozer states -

“We have a lot of men willing to sit on our church boards who have no desire for spiritual joy and radiance and who never show up for the church prayer meeting.  These are the men who often make the decisions about the church budget and the church expenses…. They are the fellows who run the church, but you cannot get them to the prayer meeting because they are not worshipers . . . .  It seems to me that it has always been a frightful incongruity that men who do not pray and do not worship are nevertheless actually running many of the churches and ultimately determining the direction they will take.

It hits very close to our own situations, perhaps, but we should confess that in many “good” churches, we let the women do the praying and let the men do the voting. . . .

I would rather worship God than to do anything else.  You may reply, “If you worship God you do nothing else.”  But that only reveals that you have not done your homework.  The beautiful part of worship is that it prepares you and enables you to zero in on the important things that must be done for God.

Listen to me! Practically every great deed done in the church of Christ all the way back to the Apostle Paul was done by people blazing with the radiant worship of their God.  A survey of church history will prove that it was those who were the yearning worshipers who also became the great workers.  Those great saints whose hymns we so tenderly sing were active in their faith to the point that we must wonder how they ever did it all.

The great hospitals have grown out of the hearts of worshiping men.  The mental institutions grew of out of the hearts of worshiping and compassionate men and women.  We should say, too, that wherever the church has come out of her lethargy, rising from her sleep and into the tides of revival and spiritual renewal, always the worshipers were back of it.

We will be making a mistake if we just stand back and say, “But if we give ourselves to worship, no one will do anything.”  On the contrary, if we give ourselves to God’s call to worship, everyone will do more than he or she is doing now. Only, what he or she does will have significance and meaning to it.  It will have the quality of eternity in it - it will be gold, silver, and precious stones, not wood, hay and stubble.”  (A.W. Tozer, Whatever Happened to Worship? Christian Publications, 1985, ISBN 0-87509-367-1, p. 17-19)