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Messages by Desiring God

Worship Is an End in Itself

Messages by Desiring God

Desiring God

Sermons, Religion & Spirituality/christianity, 163859, Desiring God, John Piper, Preaching, Christianity, Messages, Religion & Spirituality

4.71.7K Ratings

🗓️ 13 September 1981

⏱️ 28 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Only worship is an end in itself. Only worship should not be done as a means to achieving something other than itself.

Transcript

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0:00.0

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

0:08.6

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

0:21.8

as a means to achieving anything other than worship.

0:26.0

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

0:39.3

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

0:47.0

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.

0:57.5

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

1:06.2

to Jesus should be.

1:10.1

Now I remember giving myself this answer.

1:13.0

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

1:20.0

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

1:27.4

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

1:36.4

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

1:41.6

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

1:44.8

That's the purpose of recruiting people.

1:48.3

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

2:00.3

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

2:07.0

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

2:17.0

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

2:20.0

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

2:29.2

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

2:39.5

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

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