Pastoral Resources

When we really worship anything, we love not only its clearness but its obscurity. We exult in its very invisibility.

Jealousy - that jumble of secret worship and ostensible aversion.

It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God - but to create him.

Was the real Jesus of history one and the same as the Christ of faith whom we read about in the New Testament and worship in the church? Was Jesus really raised from the dead? Is he really the divine Lord of lords?

Could the one whom Christians worship be merely a mythological creation, or is he real? These questions have exercised many great minds and have been the dominant issue in New Testament studies during this century.

Great masters neither want nor need your worship. Your greatest gift to them and yourself is to emulate their divinity by claiming it as your own.

The worst vice of the solitary is the worship of his food.

It is only when men begin to worship that they begin to grow.

The self is just not a worthy enough vehicle to worship.

I'm a committed Christian. I worship in my own way. That's my business. That's not the business of the pharisees who are going to preach to me about what I do and then do something else.

I worship impersonal Nature, which is neither 'good' or 'bad', and who knows neither love nor hatred.

Man is made to adore and to obey: but if you will not command him, if you give him nothing to worship, he will fashion his own divinities, and find a chieftain in his own passions.

Men do not accept their prophets and slay them, but they love their martyrs and worship those whom they have tortured to death.

Man, so long as he remains free, has no more constant and agonizing anxiety than find as quickly as possible someone to worship.

Ancestor worship, or filial piety so characteristic of Asian cultures, for example, does not really resonate with Americans who favor children, not grandparents.

I'm a practicing Christian - and I'm going to keep practicing till I get it right - but I don't feel everyone has to practice the same religion that I do. You have a right to worship who you choose and how you choose to.

America tends to worship the modest talent because it doesn't put us in an uncomfortable position vis-a-vis the artist.

The result has been that although few conservative Presbyterian churches actually worship in the Puritan way, the Puritan theology of worship remains the standard orthodoxy among them. This discrepancy sometimes leads to guilty consciences.

We must be both more conservative and more liberal than most students of Christian worship: conservative in holding exclusively to God's commands in Scripture as our rule of worship, and liberal in defending the liberty of those who apply those.

Martin Luther King said, and it is sadly still true, that one of the most segregated times in America is the hour of worship.