True Worshipers: Seeking What Matters To God by Bob Kauflin is an easy book to recommend. It may be a book about worship, but, it isn't just a book for pastors and worship leaders. It is a book that every Christian could benefit from reading.
Why? Because worship isn't about Sunday morning--or Sunday evening--worship services, church services. Yes, worship includes meeting together with other believers in the church. But worship is so much more than that. Worship is also so much more than singing: either singing hymns or singing praise and worship songs.
Kauflin shares with readers what worship is: what true worship is. Here is the table of contents to give you a glimpse of what to expect:
- True Worshipers Matter: Worship and Reality
- True Worshipers Receive: Worship and Our Inability
- True Worshipers Exalt: Worship and Humility
- True Worshipers Gather: Worship and Community
- True Worshipers Edify: Worship and Maturity
- True Worshipers Sing: Worship and Music
- True Worshipers Keep Singing: Worship and Perseverance
- True Worshipers Encounter: Worship and the Presence of God
- True Worshipers Anticipate: Worship and Eternity
I loved reading this one. I thought it was well-written, well-organized. I loved how scriptural it was. I loved how it was about so much more than music and music styles.
Favorite quotes:
The ability and desire to worship God is something that God himself gives us. But there’s another aspect to that gift. In the process of drawing and enabling us, God reveals himself to us. He tells us who he is. Not only are we unable to worship God apart from his grace; we don’t even know who it is we’re worshiping. God has to tell us. And he’s done that in the Bible.
If God didn’t reveal himself to us, we wouldn’t know who to trust, who to obey, who to thank, or who to serve. We wouldn’t know what God is like, what he has commanded, or what he has promised. Most importantly, we wouldn’t know how he brought us near to himself and into his family through the substitutionary sacrifice of his Son on the cross. And all those truths are necessary to know if we want to worship God for who he is. True worship is always a response to God’s Word.
If we want to grow as true worshipers of God, we won’t simply listen to more music— we’ll seek to encounter him in our Bibles.
Unless we read our Bibles well, we won’t know the God we’re worshiping. When we fail to be specific about who God is and what he’s done, we’re really saying we want our own God. But true worship isn’t based on our personal opinions, ideas, experiences, best guesses, or some lowest common denominator.
God has removed every hindrance to having a relationship with him. If we come by his grace, there is nothing that need stand in the way of our worshiping him. Nothing.© Becky Laney of Operation Actually Read Bible
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