text: The Uniqueness of Worship as an End in Itself From that point on, all my thinking about the church revolved around the uniqueness of worship. Of all the activities in the church, only one is an end in itself: worship. Horizontal fellowship among believers is not an end in itself. Fellowship in Scripture is considered to be very largely for the purpose of encouraging faith and stirring up love: "Let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another all the more as you see the Day drawing near." It is right to seek fellowship specifically with the aim of being encouraged in faith and stirred up to love. But even though a genuine experience of worship can produce those same results (of stronger faith and zeal to love), yet the genuineness and authenticity of our worship is threatened if we treat it as a means to some other experience.
  True Worship: An Affair of the Heart Jesus quotes from Isaiah 29:13 in order to express the root problem with the Pharisees' way of life. "This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me. In vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the precepts of men." The first thing I want us to see from these two verses is that the parallel between "this people honors me" in verse 8 and "they worship me" in verse 9 shows that at the essence of all worship is the act of honoring God. That does not mean making God honorable. We don't improve upon God in the least when we worship him. Honoring God means recognizing his honor, feeling the worth of it, and ascribing it to him in all the ways appropriate to his character. "Honor and majesty are before him, strength and beauty are in his sanctuary. Ascribe to the Lord, O families of the peoples, ascribe to the Lord glory and strength! Ascribe to the Lord the glory due his name" (Psalm 96:6–8). That is the first thing I want us to see: that worship involves an act of reflecting back to God in praise the glories emanating from his presence.
  The Feelings That Are the Substance of Worship I feel right now in an almost impossible pastoral position. What I want to say can be so easily categorized and dispensed with as emotionalism on the one hand or dead decency on the other, depending on your personality and experience. We live in a peculiar time. On the one hand, fascination with feelings is rampant. Psychology is the science of our era. Book after book helps us analyze our emotions and cope with their ups and downs. On the other hand, there is a widespread suspicion of emotion and embarrassment about expressing feelings, especially in the mainline churches (like ours). In response to this situation I want to say, first, that genuine worship is based on the mind's perception of historical and biblical truth. It has solid intellectual content. It is not the frenzied emotional product of manipulation or gimmickry. But that is not our problem. We are not in danger of emotionalism. Far from it. Our problem—and not ours only, but the problem of our Conference and of most evangelicals nationwide—is that we do not realize that there is no genuine worship where feelings for God are not quickened. There is not true worship where the heart is far from God. But the heart's approach to God happens in the quickening of our feelings for God. Therefore, where feelings are dead, so is worship.
  Feelings Are Not Stepping Stones to Another End And now perhaps, coming full circle, it is clearer why I must say true worship is an end in itself. If that which turns habitual forms into true worship is the quickening of these feelings in the heart, then true worship cannot be performed as a means to some other experience. Feelings are not like that. Genuine feelings cannot be manufactured as stepping stones to something else. If the telephone rings and the voice on the other end says, "Johnny, this is Bob, good buddy; your mother and dad were in a serious bus accident. Your mom didn't make it, and your dad is hurt bad," you don't sit down and say, "Now to what end shall I feel grief? What can I accomplish if I cry for the next half-hour?" The feeling of grief is an end in itself. It is not performed as a means to anything.
  Authentic Worship and Worship Services And now to go back and pick up our earlier question: if fellowship, preaching, and giving of offerings are not ends in themselves, why are they integral parts of our worship service, since worship is an end in itself? The answer is this: what makes a worship service authentic and genuine and pleasing to God is the quickening of our hearts with appropriate emotions. But this quickening does not happen in a vacuum. On the one side, it is caused by true perceptions of God's manifold glories. And so there must be substantial theological content in the service: in the lyrics of our hymns, in the prayers, in the Scripture, the sermon. And right here is where the communion of the saints plays a crucial role. A heart-quickening truth may be heard from a hymn but perceived with power when seen in the face of a sister or a brother across the room. So on the one side, there are elements of a worship service which are necessary in order to help the heart perceive the life-quickening reality of God. On the other side, the heart quickened with feeling for God must often express itself. And, therefore, our worship service must include vehicles of that expression: opportunities to give, sing, recite, pray, and probably a good bit more that we have never tried.