I read two striking pieces this morning. The first is a quote from A. W. Tozer:
When the church is acting like the church, God is being exalted among the nations. For some reason, the church has grown bored with this. It is hard to explain why, but we have succumbed to the lowly concept of God expressed in religion. Where once we had a high and lofty perception of God, we have allowed, for some reason, the world to redefine our God for us. Instead of taking our God to the world, the world is bringing a god to us that is acceptable to them.
Delighting in God cited in The Quotable Tozer, p. 275.
In my work in the so-called field of “church revitalization,” I have spent much time researching, considering, and teaching course corrections for churches. I am convinced that the first and foremost correction lies in the worship of the living God. I say this because the cultural pressure is for the church to present an emotional event. This isn’t a recent cultural pressure by the way. In my view, it can be seen in the revival movements of the mid-twentieth century. We may laud God’s use of crusades and televangelists (and we should), but on the other side of the coin, such strategies also gave rise to polished presentation and consumer satisfaction. For more on the intersection of religion and entertainment, no book is more insightful than the 1985 work Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman. It is profoundly prescient and shines much light on how we got to our current cultural moment. Let me get to my point.
For any church to remain focused, the first component must be an absolute and unwavering commitment to the worship of God.
For any church to remain focused, the first component must be an absolute and unwavering commitment to the worship of God.
Unfortunately, our culture has developed such a self-help tendency that we remain “curved in on ourselves” (incurvatus in se) (Augustine). Turning outward toward the Creator does not come naturally (cf. Romans 1:18ff). The classic concept of the goal as the beatific vision (the beholding of God) has virtually been erased from ecclesiological discourse. Instead, we talk strategies and trends and relevance. Yet, the great desire of the human heart lies in knowing God (cf. John 17:3; also Augustine’s opening paragraph in Confessions). Until the worship of God is nonnegotiable and all the clamoring of consumer preferences, political agendas, national holidays is seen as an attempt to subvert the worship of God, the church will remain on shaky footing. We must reject “the lowly concept of God” and return to “a high and lofty perception of God.”
The second piece comes from a book about the medieval mystics Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross. The context of the following quotation is in a discussion of creation and meditation, where both creation and meditation are viewed as “means to an end”—namely, the end/goal of beholding and knowing and communing with God.
Because creation shouts the Creator to the attentive heart, the man or woman who sets out on a serious pursuit of Go uses the finite as a stepping-stone to the infinite…. [St.] John [of the cross] sees created splendor as normally enkindling a great love in the human person, a love that is soon thirsting for a far greater vision of and immersion in to the divine beauty than finite reality can possibly trigger. Discursive meditation, then, is to lead one rapidly to so penetrating a yearning for the Beloved’s presence that nothing short of Him can cure her grief. Nothing worldly satisfies one who has tasted the divine.”
Thomas Dubay, Fire Within: St. Teresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross, and the Gospel on Prayer, pp. 50-51.
I won’t belabor this point because the above quote is powerful on its own. Let me just say that here we see what Christians have been saying for two millenia—the goal of human existence is communion with the triune God. The furious pursuit of that goal will satisfy us like nothing else. And this isn’t merely an individual affair. The gathered worship of the church must be focused toward the same end. When a church gathers to worship, it does not do so for a show but for an opportunity to worship the living God as the people of God and perhaps to catch a purifying glimpse of the eternal God. Or, as the psalmist said it: “One thing have I asked of the Lord, that will I seek after: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord and to inquire in his temple” (27:4).