#worship

Do not say, 'But it is hypocritical to thank God with my tongue when I don't feel thankful in my heart.' There is such a thing as hypocritical thanksgiving. Its aim is to conceal ingratitude and get the praise of men. That is not your aim. Your aim in loosing your tongue with words of gratitude is that God would be merciful and fill your words with the emotion of true gratitude. You are not seeking the praise of men; you are seeing the mercy of God. You are not hiding the hardness of ingratitude, but hoping for the in-breaking of the Spirit. Thanksgiving with the Mouth Stirs Up Thankfulness in the Heart Moreover, we should probably ask the despairing saint, 'Do you know your heart so well that you are sure the words of thanks have no trace of gratitude in them?' I, for one, distrust my own assessment of my motives. I doubt that I know my good ones well enough to see all the traces of contamination. And I doubt that I know my bad ones well enough to see the traces of grace. Therefore, it is not folly for a Christian to assume that there is a residue of gratitude in his heart when he speaks and sings of God's goodness even though he feels little or nothing. To this should be added that experience shows that doing the right thing, in the way I have described, is often the way toward being in the right frame. Hence Baxter gives this wise counsel to the oppressed Christian: 'Resolve to spend most of your time in thanksgiving and praising God. If you cannot do it with the joy that you should, yet do it as you can. You have not the power of your comforts; but have you no power of your tongues? Say not that you are unfit for thanks and praises unless you have a praising heart and were the children of God; for every man, good and bad, is bound to praise God, and to be thankful for all that he hath received, and to do it as well as he can, rather than leave it undone.... Doing it as you can is the way to be able to do it better. Thanksgiving stirreth up thankfulness in the heart. ↗

— John Piper

#thankfulness #experience

This is so American, man: either make something your God and cosmos and then worship it, or else kill it. ↗

— David Foster Wallace

#cosmos #either #else #god #kill

I don't like LA. The majority just seem to be so artificial. Look at how they worship everything they think is fashionable. Isn't it sick? ↗

— Billie Joe Armstrong

#everything #fashionable #how #i #just

Indian religion has always felt that since the minds, the temperaments and the intellectual affinities of men are unlimited in their variety, a perfect liberty of thought and of worship must be allowed to the individual in his approach to the Infinite. ↗

— Sri Aurobindo

#allowed #always #approach #felt #his

God created us for this: to live our lives in a way that makes him look more like the greatness and the beauty and the infinite worth that he really is. This is what it means to be created in the image of God. ↗

— John Piper

#worship #beauty

Whatever you may think of the proposed mosque and community center, lost in the heat of the debate has been a basic question: Should government attempt to deny private citizens the right to build a house of worship on private property based on their particular religion? ↗

— Michael Bloomberg

#based #basic #been #build #center

I was not comfortable worshipping another Jew. ↗

— Lionel Blue

#comfortable #i #jew #worshipping

Cricket to us was more than play, it was a worship in the summer sun. ↗

— Edmund Blunden

#more #play #summer #sun #than

Worship means reverence and humility it means revering your real self and humbling delusions. ↗

— Bodhidharma

#delusions #humbling #humility #means #real

For a long time on Earth humans didn't worship good gods; that's a new idea. The ancient Greek gods, the Hindu gods, are fairly amoral, most of them. We get stuck when we insist that God be both good and all-powerful. ↗

— Barbara Ehrenreich

#amoral #ancient #both #earth #fairly