Pursuit

I have kept for some time the bulletin/flyer from a conference at our church last fall at which D.A. Carson was the main speaker. Inside this bulletin are several quotes (excerpts) from his book Worship by the Book. I will share them below, but I wish first to liken them and their content to that of grace, and faith. These are things which one cannot pursue per se, for in the very pursuing of them, that is directly, they are very elusive - they are things which one desires, but they are the fruit of something else; the correlation is indirect. Of course this doesn't mean you don't try to a certain degree; and certainly we pray for grace, faith, etc. But you can't really "make" these things happen by pursuing them the way you can many other things. For example, if you want to have good friends, you first learn to be a good friend. The having comes from the being. Grace comes through faith and is not earned but given. Faith is received often through trials and depending on God more than it is by any direct action on our part. So without any further ado . . . . here are Carson's words on worship.

Worship is the proper response of all moral, sentient beings to God, ascribing all honor and worth to their CreatorGod precisely because He is worthy, delightfully so.

What ought to make worship delightful to us is not, in the first instance, its novelty or its aesthetic beauty, but its object: God himself is delightfully wonderful, and we learn to delight in him.

Although there are things that can be done to enhance corporate worship, there is a profound sense in which excellent worship cannot be attained merely by pursuing excellent worship. In the same way that, according to Jesus, you cannot find yourself until you lose yourself, so also you cannot find excellent corporate worship until you stop trying to find excellent corporate worship and pursue God himself.

If you wish to deepen the worship of the people of God, above all deepen their grasp of his ineffable majesty in his person and in all his works.