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Daily Devotionals
Music For the Soul
Devotional: February 8th

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WORSHIP GOD

Give unto the Lord the glory due unto His Name: bring an offering, and come before Him: worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness. - 1 Chronicles 16:29

ASK yourselves, not whom do you worship before the eyes of men, but who is the God that in your inmost heart you bow down before? What do you do in the dark? That is the question. Whom do you worship there? The other thing is not worship at all.

And do not forget that all such diversion of supreme love and dependence from God alone is like the sin of the men in Ezekiel’s vision (Ezek. 8), that it is sacrilege. They had taken a chamber in the very Temple, and turned that into a temple of the false gods. Who is your heart made to shrine? Why! every stone, if I may so say, of the fabric of our being bears marked upon it that it was laid in order to make a dwelling-place for God. Who are you meant to worship, by the witness of the very constitution of your nature and make of your spirits? Is there anybody but One that is worthy to get the priceless gift of human love absolute and entire? Is there any but One to whom it is aught but degradation and blasphemy for a man to bow down? Is there any being but One that can still the tumult of my spirit, and that can satisfy the immortal yearnings of my soul? We were made for God; and whensoever we turn the hopes, the desires, the affections, the obedience, and that which is the root of them all, the confidence that ought to fix and fasten upon Him, to other creatures, we are guilty, not only of idolatry, but of sacrilege. We commit the sin of which that wild reveler in Babylon was guilty, when, at his great feast, in the very madness of his presumption, he bade them to bring forth the sacred vessels from the Temple at Jerusalem: "And the king and his princes and his concubine drank in them, and praised the gods." So we take the sacred chalice of the human heart, on which there is marked the sign-manual of heaven, claiming it for God’s, and fill it with the spiced and drugged draught of our own sensualities and evils, and pour out a libation to vain and false gods. Render unto Him that which is His; and see, even upon the walls, scrabbled all over with the deformities that we have painted there, lingering traces, like those cf some dropping fresco in a roofless Italian church, which suggest the serene and perfect beauty of the image of the One whose likeness was originally traced there, and for whose worship it was all built.

The imitation of the object of worship has always been felt to be the highest form of worship. Many an ancient teacher, beside the Stoic philosopher, has said, " He who copies the gods worships them adequately."

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