I continue offering some fantastic quotes from the book Whatever Happened to Worship?edited and compiled by Gerald B. Smith (Moody, 1985, 2012). With so many inspiring and moving quotations to be found in the book, a two-part piece was needed to do them all justice. Here then are even more gems from Tozer on this matter of worship:
“I believe a local church exists to do corporately what each Christian believer should be doing individually – and that is to worship God. It is to show forth the excellencies of Him who has called us out of darkness into his marvelous light…We are saved to worship God. All that Christ has done for us in the past and all that he is doing now leads to this one end.” p. 86
“There is no limit to what God can do through us if we are His yielded and purified people, worshipping and showing forth His glory and His faithfulness.” p. 93
“Some people claim to be normal Christians when actually they mean they are nominal Christians. My old dictionary gives this definition as one of the meanings of the word nominal: Existing in name only; not real or actual; hence so small, slight, or the like, as to be hardly worth the name. With that as a definition, those who know who know they are Christians in name only should never make the pretention of being ‘normal’ Christians. Is the Lord Jesus Christ your most precious treasure in this world? If so, you can count yourself among normal Christians.” p. 98
“How can anyone profess to be a follower and a disciple of Jesus Christ and not be overwhelmed by His attributes? These divine attributes attest that He is indeed Lord of all, completely worthy of our worship and praise.” p. 99
“There is grief in my spirit when I go into the average church, for we have become a generation rapidly losing all sense of divine sacredness and reverence in our worship. Many whom we have raised in our churches no longer think in terms of reverence – which seems to indicate they doubt that God’s Presence is there…. Much of the blame must be placed on the growing acceptance of a worldly secularism that seems much more appealing in our church circles than any hungering or thirsting for the spiritual life that pleases God. We secularize God, we secularize the gospel of Christ and we secularize worship. No great and spiritually powerful man of God is going to come out of such a church. No great spiritual movement of believing prayer and revival is going to come out of such a church. If God is to be honored and revered and truly worshipped, He may have to sweep us away and start somewhere else.” p. 110
Whatever Happened to Worship?: A Call to True Worshipby Tozer, A. W. (Author)
“If you cannot worship the Lord in the midst of your responsibilities on Monday, it is not very likely that you were worshipping on Sunday!” p. 114
“I repeat my view on worship – no worship is wholly pleasing to God until there is nothing in me displeasing to God…. That is why I say that your worship must be total. It must involve the whole you. That is why you must prepare to worship God, and that preparation is not always pleasant. There may be revolutionary changes that must take place in your life.” p. 117
“Two of Spurgeon’s greatest sermons were about ‘God in the Silence’ and ‘God in the Storm.’ The heart that knows God can find God anywhere. I surely join with Spurgeon in the truth that a person filled with the Spirit of God, a person who has met God in a living encounter can know the joy of worshipping Him, whether in the silences of life or in the storms of life. There really is no argument. We know what God wants us to be. He wants us to be worshippers!” p. 120
“The purpose of God in sending His Son to die and rise and live and be at the right hand of God the Father was that He might restore to us the missing jewel, the jewel of worship; that we might come back and learn to do again that which we were created to do in the first place–worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness, to spend our time in awesome wonder and adoration of God, feeling and expressing it, and letting it get into our labours and doing nothing except as an act of worship to Almighty God through His Son Jesus Christ. I say that the greatest tragedy in the world today is that God has made man in His image and made him to worship Him, made him to play the harp of worship before the face of God day and night, but he has failed God and dropped the harp. It lies voiceless at his feet.” pp. 129-130
“We’re here to be worshippers first and workers only second. We take a convert and immediately make a worker out of him. God never meant it to be so. God meant that a convert should learn to be a worshipper, and after that he can learn to be a worker… The work done by a worshipper will have eternity in it.” p. 131
“The kingdom of God has suffered a great deal of harm from fighters—men who would rather fight than pray; but the kingdom of God has also been done great harm by men who would rather be nice than be right. I believe that God wants us to be right, though He wants us to be right lovingly.” pp. 133-134
“Why did Christ come? Why was He conceived? Why was He born? Why was He crucified? Why did He rise again? Why is He now at the right hand of the Father?” The answer to all these questions is: ‘In order that He might make worshippers out of rebels; in order that he might restore us again to the place of worship we knew when we were first created.’ Now because we were created to worship, worship is the normal employment of moral beings. It’s the normal employment, not something stuck on or added, like listening to a concert or admiring flowers. It is something that is built into human nature.” p. 141
“Now, worship is the missing jewel in modern evangelicalism. We’re organized; we work; we have our agendas. We have almost everything, but there’s one thing that the churches, even the gospel churches, do not have: that is the ability to worship. We are not cultivating the art of worship. It’s the one shining gem that is lost to the modern church, and I believe that we ought to search for this until we find it.” p. 142
“Worship rises or falls in any church altogether depending upon the attitude we take toward God, whether we see God big or whether we see Him little. Most of us see God too small; our God is too little. David said, ‘O magnify the Lord with me’ (Psalm 34:3), and ‘magnify’ doesn’t mean to make God big. You can’t make God big. But you can see Him big. Worship, I say, rises or falls with our concept of God.” p. 143
“We go to God as we send a boy to a grocery store with a long written list, ‘God, give me this, give me this, and give me this,’ and our gracious God often does give us what we want. But I think God is disappointed because we make Him to be no more than a source of what we want. Even our Lord Jesus is presented too often as ‘Someone who will meet your need.’ That’s the throbbing heart of modern evangelism. You’re in need and Jesus will meet your need. He’s the Need-meeter. Well, He is that indeed; but, ah, He’s infinitely more than that.” p. 146
In closing it should be pointed out that even if there were no other Christians on the planet who needed to hear these things, I most certainly do. I often feel that I am in kindergarten when it comes to worship. So I share these great quotes for myself as much as for anyone else.
