Sublime

You might think of Augustine as offering a hitchhiker’s guide to the cosmos for wandering hearts.

For a wise articulation of this point, see Michael Horton, Ordinary: Sustainable Faith in a Radical, Restless World (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2014).

Worship isn’t just something we do; it is where God does something to us. Worship is the heart of discipleship because it is the gymnasium in which God retrains our hearts.

I want to supplement Willard’s emphasis on the individual practice of the spiritual disciplines with what might be a counterintuitive thesis in our “millennial” moment: that the most potent, charged, transformative site of the Spirit’s work is found in the most unlikely of places—the church!

The soul’s hunger for peace is a longing for a kind of rest from anxiety and frantic pursuits—it is to rest in God.

Liturgy is the way we learn to “put on” Christ (Col. 3:12–16).

All of the features of classic style pertain: the motive is truth, the purpose is presentation, the scene is informal, language is adequate, truth can be known, speaker and hearer are competent, and so on.

the tangible practices of Christian worship paint the picture, as it were—in the metaphors of the biblical story, the poetics of the Psalms, the meter of hymns and choruses, the tangible elements of bread and wine, the visions painted in stained glass—all of which works on our imaginations, teaching us to want.

That doesn’t mean there’s no room for faithful innovation in worship; it just means that creativity and novelty in worship are not goods in and of themselves. We inherit a form of worship that should be received as a gift.