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

Most missions leaders define a people group as “reached” when there is an indigenous church able to evangelize the group. This is because the New Testament clearly teaches that a people must continue to be evangelized once the missions task is complete.

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

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.

For example, in Romans 1:9, he says, “I serve [or worship, latreuo] [God] with my spirit in the gospel of his Son.” In Philippians 3:3, Paul says that true Christians “worship by the Spirit of God . . . and put no confidence in the flesh.” And in Romans 12:1, Paul urges Christians, “Present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to

The answer is that Christ died for us so that we would not have to die for sin, not so that we would not have to die for others.

So the truth is reaffirmed: God has given us prayer because Jesus has given us a mission. We are on this earth to press back the forces of darkness, and we are given access to headquarters by prayer to advance this cause. When we try to turn it into a civilian intercom to increase our conveniences, it stops working, and our faith begins to falter.

3. A third implication of saying that the essence of worship is satisfaction in God is that this essence protects the primacy of worship by forcing us to come to terms with the fact that worship is an end in itself. If the essence of worship is satisfaction in God, then worship can’t be a means to anything else. We simply can’t say to God, “I want to

Worship Let’s begin with a startling fact, namely, that the epistles of the New Testament contain very little instruction that deals explicitly with corporate worship—what we call worship services. Not that there were no corporate gatherings for worship. First Corinthians 14:23 speaks of “the whole church” assembling together, Acts 2:46 speaks of