I’m so very thankful to Robert Webber for his Gospel-centered, Christ-exalting viewpoint of worship. He says, “Who can love God with all his heart, mind, and soul? Who can achieve perfect union with God? Who can worship God with a pure and unstained heart? Not me! Not Joe Horness, either. Not you. Not Billy Graham. Not Bill Hybels. Not Matt Redman. Not anybody I know or you know. Only Jesus can. And he does for you and me what neither of us can do for ourselves.” (p130) This is the very heart of the Gospel! Jesus doing what we cannot do for ourselves is at the very heart of what our faith is all about. Robert addresses both issues that I brought up: worshipping God for what He has done (especially in Christ) and also that sin nature affects the very nature of worship (something Best also did a very good job of understanding. As far as questions go, my question is how do we engage a conversation to convince those enthralled with Contemporary worship that is shallow to show them the Christ-centered approach that Webber did so well to describe?
That awesome string of negative statements from Webber reminded me of a text I started writing over the summer. The chorus (about as far as I got) included the line, "You worshiped God when I could not." It was good to hear that that's not exclusive or original to me (since it would probably be heresy).
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