A Quote by Simone Weil
One has only the choice between God and idolatry. There is no other possibility. For the faculty of worship is in us, and it is either directed somewhere into this world, or into another.
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The chief difficulty is that God demands of us that we live by faith: faith in God, God's sovereignty over the future, God's sufficiency for the present; while, on the other hand, the various other gods whom we can serve appeal to us in terms of the things which we can see and the forces which we can calculate. The choice between the life of faith and the life of sight is a choice between a God whom only faith can apprehend and gods whom one has only to see to understand.
There is a choice before us as people who live in a great world, so knit together that even America cannot stand quite outside it, or act as though it were situated somewhere on the moon! That choice is a choice - let me put it quite brutally - between heaven and hell. ... But it is not a choice between a heaven or a hell beyond the grave; it is a choice between making heaven or making hell on this side of the grave, and in this world, here and now.
I don't think God wants to be worshiped. I think the only pure worship of God is by loving one another, and I think all other forms of worship became a substitute for the love that we should show one another.
It's either good, bad or somewhere in between. It's either ying, yang or it's a combination. You're either male, female or somewhere in between. You've got to be somewhere on the map.
Do you know of any more overwhelming and humbling expression for God's condescension and extravagance towards us human beings than that He places Himself, so to say, on the same level of choice with the world, just so that we may be able to choose; that God, if language dare speak thus, woos humankind - that He, the eternally strong one, woos sapless humanity? Yet, how insignificant is the young lover's choice between her pursuers by comparison with this choice between God and the world.
Worship is yet another paradox of the religious life: it is simultaneously the greatest duty and the greatest pleasure of faith. Worship is the act of truly loving God. Believe in this brilliant Being, this magnificent "higher power," who not only created us but nurtures us with care and intelligence beyond our imagination, and obviously we are called to worship Him.
I believe it is quite possible for us to obtain an outer peace at the present time. Historically speaking, when human beings are faced with the choice between destruction and change, they are apt to choose change, and it's about the only thing that will make them choose change. So we have the possibility at the present time to take a different direction in the world - the possibility exists!
Worship helps us find who we are and why God has placed us here on the earth. When we bow in God's presence with worship, only then are we made complete.
Enoch predicted that "the demons and the spirits of the angelic apostates would turn into idolatry all the elements, all the adornment of the universe, and all things contained in the heaven, the sea, and the earth, that they might be consecrated as God in opposition to God." All things, therefore, does human error worship, except the Founder of all himself. The images of those things are idols; the consecration of the images is idolatry.
Worship is not music. We can certainly worship Him without musicians and without a song. And by the way, God does not actually seek worship. The Word tells us that He seeks worshippers. He's not looking for those who make the most beautiful music. He's looking for those who worship in spirit ... and in truth. Music is only one of the ways that he has ordained for us to express our worship. Yet too many worship leaders today spend more time honing their craft and planning / rehearsing their worship sets, than they spend on their face, alone in worship.
Orthodoxy is idolatry if it means holding the 'correct opinions about God' - 'fundamentalism' is the most extreme and salient example of such idolatry - but not if it means holding faith in the right way, that is, not holding it at all but being held by God, in love and service. Theology is idolatry if it means what we say about God instead of letting ourselves be addressed by what God has to say to us. Faith is idolatrous if it is rigidly self-certain but not if it is softened in the waters of 'doubt.
300 years after the rise of Islam there were Zoroastrians in Iran. The Muslim armies never forced people to accept Islam. It was only within Arabia that God ordered the idolaters to have a choice of either embracing Islam or fight against Muslims, because He wanted to remove this terrible idolatry that exited there. But outside Arabia where Islam met Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians and Hindus, they were given a choice by and large. That's why many Christians and Jewish communities survived in the Muslim world, but gradually many of them embraced Islam for different reasons.
Those reformers who preach against image-worship, or what they denounce as idolatry - to them I say "Brothers, if you are fit to worship God-without-form discarding all external help, do so, but why do you condemn others who cannot do the same?"
The ultimate goal of theology isn't knowledge, but worship. If our learning and knowledge of God do not lead to the joyful praise of God, we have failed. We learn only that we might laud, which is to say that theology without doxology is idolatry. The only theology worth studying is a theology that can be sung!
Part of what my work has always been about is to show that the apocalyptic character of the gospel makes the everyday possible. It gives us the time that lets us care for one another as we are ill, helps us care for one another as we experience broken relationships, and helps us take the time to worship God in a world of such violence.
Worship is a meeting at the center so that our lives are centered in God and not lived eccentrically. We worship so that we live in response to and from this center, the living God. Failure to worship consigns us to a life of spasms and jerks, at the mercy of every advertisement, every seduction, every siren. Without worship we live manipulated and manipulating lives. We move in either frightened panic or deluded lethargy as we are, in turn, alarmed by specters and soothed by placebos. If there is no center, there is no circumference.
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