Worship # 15

Worship: Its Priority, Principles, and Practice (continued)

4. True spiritual worship will continually increase the holiness of a person's life. It will make him every year more watchful over tongue, and temper, and time, and behavior in every relation of life. The true worshiper's conscience becomes annually more tender. The false worshiper's becomes annually more seared and more hard.

Give me the worship that will stand the test of our Lord's great principle, "By their fruits you will know them." Give me the worship that sanctifies the life, that makes a man walk with God and delight in God's law, that lifts him above the fear of the world and the love of the world, that enables him to exhibit something of God's image and God's likeness before his fellow men, that makes him just, loving, pure, gentle, good tempered, patient, humble, unselfish, temperate. This is the worship that comes down from heaven, and has the stamp and seal and superscription of God.

Whatever men may please to say, the grand test of the value of any kind of worship is the effect it produces on the lives of the worshipers. A man may tell us that what is called Ritualism nowadays is the best and most perfect mode of worshiping God. He may despise the simple and unadorned ceremonial of Evangelical congregations. He may exalt to the skies the excellence of ornament, decoration, and pageantry in our service of God. But I take leave to tell him that Christian men will try his favorite system by its results. So long as Ritualistic worshipers can turn from matins and early communions to race and operas, and can oscillate between the confessional and the ballroom, so long the advocates of Ritualism must not be surprised if we think little of the value of Ritualistic worship.

Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter. The best public worship is that which produces the best private Christianity. The best church services for the congregation are those which make its individual members most holy at home and alone. If we want to know whether our own public worship is doing us good, let us try it by these tests. Does it quicken our conscience? Does it send us to Christ? Does it add to our knowledge? Does it sanctify our life? If it does, we may depend on it, it is worship of which we have no cause to be ashamed.

The day is coming when there shall be a congregation that shall never break up, and a Sabbath that shall never end, a song of praise that shall never cease, and an assembly that shall never be dispersed. In that assembly shall be found all who have "worshiped God in spirit" upon earth. If we are such, we shall be there. Here we often worship God with a deep sense of weakness, corruption, and infirmity. There, at last, we shall be able, with a renewed body, to serve him without weariness, and to attend on him with distraction.

~J. C. Ryle~

(continued with # 16)