Good morning to create a consciousness in our church that is in you who are the church that

worship is an end in itself. I want us to have this conviction that worship should never be pursued

as a means to achieving anything other than worship.

Worship is not a step up to any other experience. It's not a door through which we pass through to anything

other than worship. I remember one night during my senior year at Wheaton in St Hall on the third floor.

I just visited that room on the way down home on vacation and stood there and had all kinds of goosebumps thinking about what that room had meant to me.

One of the things it meant was on a night my senior year I was struggling with the question of what the motive for winning people

to Jesus should be.

Now I remember giving myself this answer.

Well, I ought to win people to the Lord so that they could win others.

And then I felt so uncomfortable with that answer as I turned it into a real live

witnessing encounter and heard a thoughtful person come back and say, hmm, well now that's strange. You want me to

become a Christian so that I can recruit others, so that they can recruit others,

so that they can recruit others, so that they can recruit others.

That's the purpose of recruiting people.

And it hit me how miserably empty and mechanical my life with Christ had become that I could give such a shallow

answer. That's not the reason that we try to win people to Christ. We try to win people

to Christ so that they might bring honor to God and enjoy the experience of trusting his promises.

We do not recruit people, to recruit people, to recruit people,

we recruit people for God. And for the joyful experience of ascribing Him glory. So

evangelism is not an end in itself. And from that point on, all of my thoughts about the church

revolved around this unique place of worship in the life of the church, namely as an end in itself.

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