If believers worship with gladness and passion, anyone not yet a part of the community certainly will be attracted to the One who is the object of their worship.

Sabbath ceasing means to cease not only from work itself, but also from the need to accomplish and be productive, from the worry and tension that accompany our modern criterion of efficiency, from our efforts to be in control of our lives as if we were God, from our possessiveness and our enculturation, and, finally, from the humdrum and meaninglessness that result when life is pursued without the Lord at the center of it all.

The Christian life consists in what God does for us, not what we do for God.

This sense of being made in God's image calls us all constantly to look for it in others and to do what we can to help them acknowledge it and to realize it by joining in worship. We thereby carry to others the answer to their inmost longing, a yearning for union with the Trinity, a thirst to respond with adoration to the God who made them.

Without the emotion and willingness of Spirit, our music becomes dry and dusty—without life. Without doctrinal bones as a skeleton, the Body is not enfleshed in a healthy way.

If the Christ we follow sent out his disciples with no extra possessions (Luke 9:1-6 and 10:1-12) and warned would-be devotees that he had nowhere to lay his head (see Luke 9:57-62), then we must recognize that it is extremely difficult to live in a Christian way in a consumer culture.

Let us make sure that the worship services we plan and conduct present that Truth in all its clarity and beauty and goodness.