Tonight our A Way of Life class is discussing the chapter from the first manual on worship.
This reminded me that I have Mark Labberton’s book “The Dangerous Act of Worship: Living God’s Call to Justice” on my shelf. So I opened it up and started to read …
Whoa ...
I am going to share some of his thoughts over the next few days.
Expect to be disturbed, but in a good way.
Labberton is the new President at Fuller Seminary and I have loved everything I have seen from him. He has a huge heart for Jesus, for the church, and for the radical demands of the Gospel.
Here are some of his opening thoughts:
“When worship is our response to the One who alone is worthy of it – Jesus – then our lives are on their way to being turned inside out. Every dimension of self-centered living becomes endangered as we come to share God’s self-giving heart.
Worship exposes our cultural and even spiritual complacency toward a world of suffering and injustice.
In Jesus Christ, we are called into a new kind of living. Through the grace of worship, God applies the necessary antidote to what we assume is merely human – our selfishness.
Worship sets us free from ourselves to be free for God and God’s purposes in the world.
The dangerous act of worshipping God in Jesus Christ necessarily draws us into the heart of God and sends us out to embody it, especially toward the poor, the forgotten and the oppressed.”
Well now … Do you think his definition of worship might be just a tad bigger than ours?