Let the Nations Be Glad!

In the Gospels, Jesus was present in visible form to fall before, so the word proskyneo is used often. In the Book of Revelation, the act of bowing down usually happens before God’s manifestation in heaven or before false gods on the earth. Therefore, the word proskyneo is widely used in Revelation too. But in the epistles something very different

All of creation, all of redemption, all of history is designed by God to display God. That is the ultimate goal of the church.

Jesus strips proskyneo of its last vestiges of localized and outward connotations.5 It will not be wrong for worship to be in a place or to use outward forms, but he makes explicit and central that this is not what makes worship worship. What makes worship worship is what happens “in spirit and truth”—with or without a place and with or without out

Missions is not God’s ultimate goal, worship is. And when this sinks into a person’s heart everything changes. The world is often turned on its head, and everything looks different—including the missionary enterprise.

The call to suffer with Christ is not a call to bear our sins the way he bore them but to love the way he loved.

God is glorified precisely when we are satisfied in him—when we delight in his presence, when we like to be around him, when we treasure his fellowship. This is an utterly life-changing discovery. It frees us to pursue our joy in God and God to pursue his glory in us because they are not two different pursuits.

I do not want prosperity preachers to stop calling people to maximum joy. On the contrary, I appeal to them to stop encouraging people to seek their joy in material things. The joy Christ offers is so great and so durable that it enables us to lose prosperity and still rejoice.

Missions is not a recruitment project for God’s labor force. It is a liberation project from the heavy burdens and hard yokes of other gods (Matt. 11:28–30).

The frontline work of missions is the preaching of the Word of God, the gospel. If this public act is displaced by prayer, the supremacy of Christ in the mission of the church will be compromised.