In his great book, Let The Nations Be Glad, John Piper opens with this statement:
Missions is not the ultimate goal of the church. Worship is. Missions exists because worship doesn’t. Worship is ultimate, not misisons, because God is ultimate, not man. When this age is over and the countless millions of the redeemed fall on their faces before the throne of God, missions will be no more. It is a temporary necessity. But worship abides forever.
God will exist forever and worship of God will exist forever, but the mission to the lost will not exist forever. One day, the world as we know it will end, time will be no more, and God will be all in all. At that moment, he alone will receive our attention. Faith will become site, hope will be realized, and only love will remain and the most admirable love is the love we show toward the heavenly Father and the love he shows to himself within the Trinity.
On hearing of a guy complaining in a church recently about the length of the worship service, my wife said, “He’s gonna have a tough time in heaven.” Many of us have reduced the church to be about something other than God. We often even reduce Christianity to be about something other than God. It may be dress, or language, or a specific Bible translation, but ultimately it is often simply about us. We focus on our priorities rather than on God’s directives. But, much more is necessary.
We are created to worship, and we all worship something. The question is whether or not we worship God or ourselves. The Bible gives us a picture of heaven, there, all is about God and all the saints fall down before him in worship. It is beautiful, and as members of God’s kingdom here on earth, we too should seek, in all that we do, to honor and worship God. Everything else we do–missions, evangelism, social action–should be driven by a conviction that God is worshiped and glorified through our activities.
