Truth without emotion produces dead orthodoxy and a church full (or half full) of artificial admirers (like people who write generic anniversary cards for a living). Emotion without truth produces empty frenzy and cultivates shallow people who refuse the disciplines of rigorous thought. But true worship comes from people who are deeply emotional and who love deep and sound doctrine. Strong affections from God rooted in truth are the bone and marrow of biblical worship.”
~ John Piper, in Desiring God (Sisters, OR: Multnomah, 1986), page 76
Worship is the submission of all our nature to God. It is the quickening of conscience by His holiness; the nourishment of mind with His truth; the purifying of imagination by His beauty; the opening of the heart to his love; the surrender of will to His purpose—and all of this gathered up in adoration, the most selfless emotion of which our nature is capable and therefore the chief remedy for that self-centeredness which is our original sin and the source of all actual sin.
~ William Temple, in Readings in St. John’s Gospel, vol. 1 (London: Macmillan, 1939), page 68
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