Archive

The Webber Quote of the Week was established Thanksgiving 2007 in gratitude to God for the legacy of Robert E. Webber, and to extend, to all who will read, the wisdom and inspiration that is stockpiled in his many books and writings.

The Webber Quote of the Week is a ministry of The Robert E. Webber Institute for Worship Studies. For information on the vision and work of Robert Webber go to the Robert Webber page on the Institute's Web site.

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February 20, 2012

Good art “speaks to me. It makes me listen. It forms me.” . . . Somehow the art in worship surrounds me and gathers me up into itself. Like music, it enters into my soul and abides there. During the week it becomes a dominant image in my experience and pulls me to dwell on the theme and allows the theme to dwell in me. In this way, it forms me and energizes my spiritual pilgrimage.

Robert E. Webber, Worship Is a Verb: Celebrating God's Mighty Deeds of Salvation (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing, 1992), 188-190.

 

February 13, 2012

To insist that art is necessary for worship is to commit aesthetic heresy. Such insistence makes art an idol, an object of our worship. On the other hand, to insist that art is a hindrance to worship is equally dangerous. It denies that the material creation is a worthy vehicle through which God can communicate to us, and we to him.

Robert E. Webber, Worship Is a Verb: Celebrating God's Mighty Deeds of Salvation (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing, 1992), 183.

 

February 6, 2012

By not following the Christian calendar we have come to adopt secular guidelines for our spiritual time. Christ has again become lost in our celebration of time, not because of too many saints’ days and feasts, but because of our celebration in worship of too many other days—national holidays like Independence Day and special events like Mother’s Day.

Robert E. Webber, Worship Is a Verb: Celebrating God's Mighty Deeds of Salvation (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing, 1992), 170.

 

January 30, 2012

Somewhere in my background I picked up the idea that spirituality consists mainly in setting aside a time for morning and evening devotions. . . . But I’ve come to believe there is more to my commitment to Christ than that. And for me, that “something more” is in the personal observance of the church year as a spiritual discipline.

Robert E. Webber, Worship Is a Verb: Celebrating God's Mighty Deeds of Salvation (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing, 1992), 162.

 

January 23, 2012

As Christians, we confess that all time has a center. And that center is Jesus Christ who has redeemed all things. From this center, this kairos event in history, the meaning and significance of all time radiates. It is through the remembrance of the Christ-event in worship that we are able to sanctify all time.

Robert E. Webber, Worship Is a Verb: Celebrating God's Mighty Deeds of Salvation (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing, 1992), 160.

 

January 16, 2012

I have found many pastors today are becoming more concerned about the sense of response that extends into the world from worship, and rightly so. They want their people to feel sent.
. . . “Every service is followed by a comma instead of a period. We worship as pilgrims.”

Robert E. Webber, Worship Is a Verb: Celebrating God's Mighty Deeds of Salvation (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing, 1992), 151.

 

January 9, 2012

Bread and wine, these elements of creation, become the symbols of re-creation. For his body broken for us and his blood spilt for us are the signs of renewal and restoration.

Robert E. Webber, Worship Is a Verb: Celebrating God's Mighty Deeds of Salvation (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing, 1992), 151.

 

January 2, 2012

In the early church it was appropriate to offer the kiss of peace after the prayers. . . . [It] was
a gesture signifying that we are at peace with God and with our neighbors. Because God has reconciled us to the Father through Jesus Christ, we ought to be reconciled to each other. . . . Pass the peace with a handshake or an embrace, and with a real sense of warmth and love, saying, “The peace of the Lord be with you.”

Robert E. Webber, Worship Is a Verb: Celebrating God's Mighty Deeds of Salvation (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing, 1992), 146-147.

 

December 26, 2011

No matter how it is accomplished, congregational response to the Word is a very important means of sealing the Word in this heart and life. . . . The placement of prayer after the word is crucial. . . . In the ancient church pastoral prayer was nonexistent. Prayer belonged to the people and arose out of the congregation.

Robert E. Webber, Worship Is a Verb: Celebrating God's Mighty Deeds of Salvation (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing, 1992), 145.

 

December 19, 2011

The overall purpose for the reading of the Word is to let God speak. It is not, as some might think, the time for educating the people, for long tedious exegetical sermons, or an evangelistic appeal. It is principally an address from God to the congregation that is expressed through reading and preaching his Word and is followed by an appropriate response from the people.

Robert E. Webber, Worship Is a Verb: Celebrating God's Mighty Deeds of Salvation (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing, 1992), 143.

 

December 12, 2011

The overall purpose of the Entrance is not only to begin the service of worship, but to help us, as the people of God, be formed into a distinct community of worshiping people. We need time to collect ourselves, to settle down inwardly, to be reminded of who God is, who we are, and why we have gathered.

Robert E. Webber, Worship Is a Verb: Celebrating God's Mighty Deeds of Salvation (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing, 1992), 142.

 

December 5, 2011

A remedy, I believe, for the performer/audience psychology that we have created in our services is the radical rediscovery of the principle of the priesthood of all believers—a principle that encourages everyone to become involved in a participating manner in offering the worship of praise and thanksgiving of the Father.

Robert E. Webber, Worship Is a Verb: Celebrating God's Mighty Deeds of Salvation (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing, 1992), 133.

 

November 28, 2011

Let’s define congregational participation as worship that involves the action of everyone simultaneously. But it seems to me that congregational action cannot occur without two very basic ingredients: the congregation must understand what they are doing, and they must intend to make the responses that are part of worship. Worship is a verb.

Robert E. Webber, Worship Is a Verb: Celebrating God's Mighty Deeds of Salvation (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing, 1992), 130.

 

November 21, 2011

Although worship dramatizes an event that happened long ago, it brings that event into the present by the power of the Holy Spirit. In each worship experience, I am present in the actual event. . . . On Christmas I am present at the birth of Christ; on Epiphany I am there at the presentation of Christ; on Maundy Thursday I am present at the Last Supper; on Good Friday I am taken to the cross and put into the tomb; on Easter I stand at the empty tomb; and on Pentecost Sunday I receive the Holy Spirit.

Robert E. Webber, Worship Is a Verb: Celebrating God's Mighty Deeds of Salvation (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing, 1992), 119-120.

 

November 14, 2011

Response is not a mere ritual, a mechanical affirmation of what has been said or done. Rather, it arises from the heart, from the innermost part of our being. It is more than a mere intellectual acquiescence. It is a feeling, an emotion that arises from the interior of our person.

Robert E. Webber, Worship Is a Verb: Celebrating God's Mighty Deeds of Salvation (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing, 1992), 119.

 

November 7, 2011

Worship is not for the purpose of remembering the Reformation, hailing the founding of America, saluting mothers, boy scouts, girl scouts, or grandparents. Worship does not celebrate Independence Day, Memorial Day, or Labor Day. No. Worship remembers the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. . . . All that goes into an actual service of worship must pertain to the event of God revealing himself to us, becoming incarnate in our history, and redeeming us from the power of the evil one, setting us free to enjoy him forever.

Robert E. Webber, Worship Is a Verb: Celebrating God's Mighty Deeds of Salvation (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing, 1992), 118.

 

October 31, 2011

Response is always related to something specific and concrete. . . . Worship is a response to someone and something that happened. We respond to God—to who he is and to what he has done for us in Jesus Christ. . . . I respond to God through external rites such as song, prayer, Scripture, and Communion Table. For me, such symbols have the power to recollect a past event. Even as Passover has the power to re-create the Exodus-event for the people of Israel, so our worship today must be characterized by evocative symbols that recollect the Christ-event.

Robert E. Webber, Worship Is a Verb: Celebrating God's Mighty Deeds of Salvation (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing, 1992), 117-118.

 

October 24, 2011

I wonder what would happen in our worship services if we would exercise our imagination a bit—stretch it perhaps to fulfill [the] biblical image that worship is like
the bride coming to the wedding feast to meet the groom. I suspect the nature of our response in worship would change from passive inattention to active participation.

Robert E. Webber, Worship Is a Verb: Celebrating God's Mighty Deeds of Salvation (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing, 1992), 116.

 

October 17, 2011

Response is a necessary element in the communication that takes place at worship. It is the complement to God’s speaking and acting. . . . Response, from the very beginning of worship to the end, must be a powerful inner experience of actually being in the presence of God. . . . New Testament images of our relationship with God in worship teach and advocate a mystical, inner experience of awe and wonder.

Robert E. Webber, Worship Is a Verb: Celebrating God's Mighty Deeds of Salvation (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing, 1992), 110, 114.

 

October 10, 2011

In the process of worshiping, our spiritual education and growth occurs through both word and symbol. By symbolizing what we say, the reality of coming into personal contact with God in worship is experienced. . . . Our whole person is drawn into the very presence of God, and all our being—our bodies, our sight, our hearing, our tasting, and our sense of smell—become alive with worship and praise. We become an “Alleluia” to the Lord, a living experience of “Thanks be to God.”

Robert E. Webber, Worship Is a Verb: Celebrating God's Mighty Deeds of Salvation (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing, 1992), 105.

 

October 3, 2011

Worship forms me spiritually. Worship not only presents Christ, it causes Christ to be formed in my life. The structure of worship is itself the structure of life—words and deeds. When I am thoroughly involved in worship I not only hear and see, but I become. I am to become God’s Word and God’s Bread to the world. To be formed by worship is to take on the characteristics of Christ, to be shaped by his presence within.

Robert E. Webber, Worship Is a Verb: Celebrating God's Mighty Deeds of Salvation (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing, 1992), 105.

 

September 26, 2011

Worship as an act of communication educates me in the Christian life. . . . The full gamut of Scriptures read and preached forms my entire life in the world—personal, family, vocation, ethical. In this way worship sets the world in order, educates me about my place in it, and inspires me to understand God’s ways of dealing with me and with his people.

Robert E. Webber, Worship Is a Verb: Celebrating God's Mighty Deeds of Salvation (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing, 1992), 105.

 

September 19, 2011

Worship as an act of communication evangelizes me. . . . As a worshiper I am being carried through the experience of hearing and seeing Christ proclaimed and acted out. And more, I am called upon to act in constant response to the Good News. Therefore, worship is a continuation of the salvation event; it has the effect of changing our lives, of forming us into the new creation, of giving shape to our Christian world view and of determining our patterns of ethical behavior.

Robert E. Webber, Worship Is a Verb: Celebrating God's Mighty Deeds of Salvation (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing, 1992), 104.

 

September 12, 2011

The dismissal tells a story. It is more than a signal that the time of worship is over. It is the beginning of service in the world. The content of the Dismissal, although brief, should be well thought through. . . . [We] need to give careful thought to the words and actions that send God’s people into the world.

Robert E. Webber, Worship Is a Verb: Celebrating God's Mighty Deeds of Salvation (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing, 1992), 102-103.

 

September 5, 2011

If life and worship are to come together, it is important that in planning our worship we give careful attention to our movement from the point of our deep need to being ready and prepared to hear God’s Word. Every act of preparation should help move us into the adventure of worship—into the story of God at work. And that includes our attitude, our words, and the nonverbal expression of our bodies.

Robert E. Webber, Worship Is a Verb: Celebrating God's Mighty Deeds of Salvation (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing, 1992), 102.

 

August 29, 2011

God wants us to internalize him; to take him into ourself, into our mind, our soul, our spirit, our will. . . . For this reason, it is important for us to take time before worship begins to be quiet, to meditate, and to prepare to meet our God.

Robert E. Webber, Worship Is a Verb: Celebrating God's Mighty Deeds of Salvation (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing, 1992), 101.

 

August 22, 2011

In worship our focus is not on self, not on our problems, not on other people or circumstances, but on God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. . . . Our calling is to be present to the action that is taking place, to focus on the moment, to center on the Christ whom we have come to celebrate.

Robert E. Webber, Worship Is a Verb: Celebrating God's Mighty Deeds of Salvation (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing, 1992), 99-100.

 

August 15, 2011

Here [is the last of] five practical suggestions that will help Communion become a
more powerful medium for communicating God’s saving work and our appropriation of it.

5. Sing [songs] during Communion that reflect both God’s work and our response. Music itself is both a verbal and symbolic form of communication. . . . What we say and do as a congregation produces a union between Christ’s self-giving and the giving of ourselves in the world. This is ritual communication, which shapes our lives and forms our attitudes and perspectives.

Robert E. Webber, Worship Is a Verb: Celebrating God's Mighty Deeds of Salvation (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing, 1992), 98-99.

 

August 8, 2011

Here [is the fourth of] five practical suggestions that will help Communion become a
more powerful medium for communicating God’s saving work and our appropriation of it.

4. Ask the people to come forward to receive the bread and wine. Since response to Christ is an important element of Communion . . . why not stand, walk the aisle, kneel, receive the bread in the hand and put it into the mouth, and lift the cup to the lips and drink? Are these not external actions that signify the internal reality . . . reaffirming again and again our perpetual yes to his work for us?

Robert E. Webber, Worship Is a Verb: Celebrating God's Mighty Deeds of Salvation (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing, 1992), 98.

 

August 1, 2011

Here [is the third of] five practical suggestions that will help Communion become a
more powerful medium for communicating God’s saving work and our appropriation of it.

3. Use a single loaf and cup. Communion is also a symbol of the church, which is Christ’s body. . . . We are one, one with him and one with each other. Why not communicate this symbolically as well as verbally?

Robert E. Webber, Worship Is a Verb: Celebrating God's Mighty Deeds of Salvation (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing, 1992), 98.

 

July 25, 2011

Here [is the second of] five practical suggestions that will help Communion become a more powerful medium for communicating God’s saving work and our appropriation of it.

2. Increase the frequency of celebrating Christ’s death and resurrection at the Communion Table. It was the norm of the early church to proclaim Christ’s death and resurrection at the Table every Sunday. . . . The testimony of those who have turned to more frequent Communion affirms that it develops, enhances, and encourages a growing relationship with the Lord.

Robert E. Webber, Worship Is a Verb: Celebrating God's Mighty Deeds of Salvation (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing, 1992), 97.

 

July 18, 2011

Here are five practical suggestions that will help Communion become a more powerful medium for communicating God’s saving work and our appropriation of it.

1. Put more stress on what God is doing through Communion and less emphasis on the unworthy state of the worshiper. . . . By overindulging ourselves in a remembrance of our sin, we sometimes get stuck at that point. Then the real message of bread and wine, which is a proclamation of forgiveness and healing, is overshadowed by a preoccupation with sin.

Robert E. Webber, Worship Is a Verb: Celebrating God's Mighty Deeds of Salvation (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing, 1992), 97.

 

July 11, 2011

The importance of the Table of the Lord is that it dramatizes the story of redemption. When Jesus said, “Do this in remembrance of me,” he prescribed a pattern of worship that was meant, like Passover, to symbolically repeat again and again the story of redemption.

Robert E. Webber, Worship Is a Verb: Celebrating God's Mighty Deeds of Salvation (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing, 1992), 96.

 

July 4, 2011

If Scripture is to communicate to us in our worship experience we . . . must personally participate more directly and intimately in the drama of the story-event. . . . We must return Scripture reading to the people. I want to feel and experience the whole drama of redemption in such a way that the story of my own pilgrimage is gathered up into that drama and given meaning. In this way, the Word is not merely words, but life.

Robert E. Webber, Worship Is a Verb: Celebrating God's Mighty Deeds of Salvation (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing, 1992), 93, 95.

 

June 27, 2011

We should be concerned with achieving a balance between the verbal and symbolic means of worship so that the whole person is inspired to worship. We must also respect the fact that some people are more comfortable with verbal communication and others with the symbolic. Since all congregations include both types, and since all people are capable of communication through both methods, improvement of both the verbal and the symbolic methods of communicating Christ in our worship is desirable.

Robert E. Webber, Worship Is a Verb: Celebrating God's Mighty Deeds of Salvation (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing, 1992), 88.

 

June 20, 2011

Congregations that have been willing to take the risk of restoring symbolic language have found an increased aliveness to their worship. Learning to respond to God with hands and feet, eyes and ears, nose and mouth provides a break with an intellectual, head-oriented, passive, and even stuffy approach to worship.

Robert E. Webber, Worship Is a Verb: Celebrating God's Mighty Deeds of Salvation (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing, 1992), 81.

 

June 13, 2011

The church now lives on earth between the historic saving event of the death and resurrection and the future coming of Christ when the transformation of the world will be completed. The church has been entrusted with the meaning of all time. The world does not know the meaning of its own history, but the church does. . . . The purpose of the church is to be a sign of the redemption as it declares the wonderful deeds of God in Christ accomplished in history and fulfilled at the end of time.

Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2004), 26-27.

 

June 6, 2011

We need to come to the Table of the Lord with a sense of anticipation, believing that the Lord will meet us there in a unique way, that he will heal our hurts, bind up our wounds, and minister to our needs.

Robert E. Webber, Worship Is a Verb: Celebrating God's Mighty Deeds of Salvation (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing, 1992), 79.

 

May 30, 2011

Eating and drinking at the Lord’s Table is an experience of God’s work of salvation in Jesus Christ. It proclaims the Gospel through dramatization. It enacts the death and resurrection of Christ in such a way that the senses are engaged [as] the worshiper
. . . sees, tastes, smells, and experiences the symbol of Christ’s death in the bread and wine. In this way, Christ is communicated to the whole person, bringing healing to body, soul, and spirit.

Robert E. Webber, Worship Is a Verb: Celebrating God's Mighty Deeds of Salvation (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing, 1992), 79.

 

May 23, 2011

We need to rediscover the power of God’s Word as God’s speaking and communicating to his church now, today. . . . We must stop treating Scripture reading as a preliminary. In worship there aren’t any “preliminaries.” Every part of worship is an intricate aspect of the whole. Therefore, reading Scripture is not a preliminary—something to “get over with” so we can get on to the sermon.

Robert E. Webber, Worship Is a Verb: Celebrating God's Mighty Deeds of Salvation (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing, 1992), 74.

 

May 16, 2011

The fact that I take and the eat the bread and drink the wine is not nearly so significant as the fact that these are God’s signs through which he communicates his salvation to me. . . . These signs are a comfort to me because they bring me God’s pardon and grace.

Robert E. Webber, Worship Is a Verb: Celebrating God's Mighty Deeds of Salvation (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing, 1992), 70.

 

May 9, 2011

Throughout church history, God’s initiative in grace has always been accompanied by tangible and concrete signs. . . . The significance of a sign is that it is a visible means through which the Gospel of Jesus Christ is proclaimed. All signs are rooted in the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ as their ultimate point of reference. . . . Both the Bible and the Communion Table are means of proclaiming Christ.

Robert E. Webber, Worship Is a Verb: Celebrating God's Mighty Deeds of Salvation (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing, 1992), 66, 70.

 

May 2, 2011

One of the greatest discoveries of my Christian pilgrimage has come with the realization that the primary importance in worship is not what I do but what God is doing. In worship, God is present, speaking to me, and acting upon me. It is in worship that God feeds, nourishes, and cares for me. And it is in worship that he gives me his grace, surrounds me with his love, lifts me up into his arms, affirms me as a member of his community, and sends me forth into the world with a fresh vision of his work and a new concern to live for him.

Robert E. Webber, Worship Is a Verb: Celebrating God's Mighty Deeds of Salvation (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing, 1992), 66.

April 25, 2011

In his resurrection [Jesus] conquered the results of sin—which is death—so that death is not the last word written over our life.

Robert Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2006), 135. 

Bob Webber
(November 27, 1933 - April 27, 2007)

Though deeply missed, his vision thrives.

Whatever thy hand finds to do,
do it with all your might
(Ecclesiastes 9:10).

April 18, 2011

As I contemplated the spiritual journey of Holy Week . . . I knew this was not a week for shopping, vacation, parties, or hilarity. I sensed this was the week that above all weeks was to be set aside for the journey into death. I knew the worship of the church would take me by the hand and lead me step-by-step into the experience of death and rebirth, if I would allow it to do so. I resolved then and there to walk in the way of the cross. I purposed to make this the week God intended it to be for me, a week of intense spiritual struggle—and reward!

Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2004), 118-119.

 

April 11, 2011

There is a reason for the order of Word and Table: It is rooted in the Gospel story, in the rhythm of the dying and rising of Christ; and it re-presents Christ. Consequently, Word and Table together with the rites of Preparation and Dismissal constitute the structure of Christian worship. This is the order of the early church—an order that has found universal acceptance in two thousand years of church history. . . . I hesitate to tell you exactly how you should act out these parts of Christian worship. . . . It is up to your congregation to choose a style that is appropriate for your size and needs.

Robert E. Webber, Worship Is a Verb: Celebrating God's Mighty Deeds of Salvation (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing, 1992), 60-61.

 

April 4, 2011

Perhaps we should be concerned about the apparent failure of our churches to tell the story of Christ through the order of worship. . . . A nonstorytelling from of worship has been frozen in place in many evangelical churches. These haphazard forms are frequently regarded as biblical, even though they don’t tell the story, and relevant, even though they are dull and out of touch with the human need.

Robert E. Webber, Worship Is a Verb: Celebrating God's Mighty Deeds of Salvation (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing, 1992), 57.

 

March 28, 2011

Scripture, history, and theology teach that the common rhythm of the story of God’s saving work in Jesus Christ is fundamental to all Christian worship. It is the framework for free church worship as much as it is the framework for the liturgical churches. There is only one story to be told and acted out. (But there are various styles, formal and informal, in which the story may be told.)

Robert E. Webber, Worship Is a Verb: Celebrating God's Mighty Deeds of Salvation (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing, 1992), 59.

 

March 21, 2011

Worship services that are ordered on the Word of God and the ’s Table are faithful to the way in which God himself has sought after his creation. God first revealed. He spoke and gave witness to himself, revealing his love and concern for humanity. Then, he came. He was born, loved, died, and rose again to accomplish salvation.

Robert E. Webber, Worship Is a Verb: Celebrating God's Mighty Deeds of Salvation (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing, 1992), 57.

 

March 14, 2011

[The] twofold approach of Word and Table is found throughout the history of the church. Of course, there have been times, such as in the medieval era, when the Table has overshadowed the Word. And there have been other times, such as today in many Protestant churches, when the Word has been overemphasized to the neglect of the Table. What we need is balance.

Robert E. Webber, Worship Is a Verb: Celebrating God's Mighty Deeds of Salvation (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing, 1992), 56.

 

March 7, 2011

When I move toward the Table of the Lord, I say yes to all that Jesus Christ has done for me. And, when I stretch forth my hand to receive the broken bread, I confess that I cannot live by bread alone, that I am in great need of my Lord. When the cup is lifted to my lips and I hear the words, “The blood of Christ, the cup of salvation,” I say aloud, “Amen.” I affirm Christ with my heart, my mind, and my whole body; and all my senses—touch taste, smell, sight, and hearing—are evoked into worship. . . . On a weekly basis I’m reminded that God does accept me just as I am, that I am forgiven, loved, and accepted by my heavenly Father. This regular part of my worship has become extremely important to my spiritual experience.

Robert E. Webber, Worship Is a Verb: Celebrating God's Mighty Deeds of Salvation (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing, 1992), 53-54.

 

February 28, 2011

Like many others, I had grown up with the idea that bread and wine, Communion, taken too frequently would grow old and become a mere ritual. But personal experience has proven just the opposite. I have found the Table, like the Word, to be a satisfying means of nourishment and spiritual growth. Far from becoming routine, it has become like an intimate relationship.

Robert E. Webber, Worship Is a Verb: Celebrating God's Mighty Deeds of Salvation (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing, 1992), 53.

 

February 21, 2011

In most Protestant churches the bread and cup are brought to the people who quietly sit, waiting for the elements. But in the early church the people stood up, walked to the Table, and stood to receive the bread and wind. This action contains a decisional choice that is powerful.

Robert E. Webber, Worship Is a Verb: Celebrating God's Mighty Deeds of Salvation (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing, 1992), 53.

 

February 14, 2011

Worship tells and acts out the Christ-event. In this sense, the order of worship comes from above, and not from below. Worship is patterned after God who revealed and God who become incarnate. Therefore, the twofold focus of worship is the Word (the Bible as the symbol of God speaking) and the Table (bread and wine as the symbol of God acting to save us).

Robert E. Webber, Worship Is a Verb: Celebrating God's Mighty Deeds of Salvation (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing, 1992), 45.

 

February 7, 2011

Worship is the Gospel in motion. Worship celebrates the victory of Christ over the powers of evil. This is the first and most fundamental principle of worship. It declares what worship really is and helps us to focus on the most essential action of what we are called by God to do in worship.

Robert E. Webber, Worship Is a Verb: Celebrating God's Mighty Deeds of Salvation (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing, 1992), 38-39.

 

January 31, 2011

Worship is characterized by a dramatic retelling. . . . [and] by dramatic reenactment. God not only speaks, he also acts. . . . The death and resurrection of Jesus Christ is not an event that we memorialize. Its power, like that of the Exodus, reaches down through history and becomes a present reality to the people who celebrate it in faith.

Robert E. Webber, Worship Is a Verb: Celebrating God's Mighty Deeds of Salvation (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing, 1992), 34, 36, 37-38.

 

January 24, 2011

God’s work in Christ is the focus of worship. . . . Worship itself is a re-presentation of Christ. In this sense, worship is drama as it reenacts the Christ-event— . . . a dramatic representation that symbolically communicates the victory of Christ over all forces of evil. Consequently, when we worship, the conflict between good and evil that we experience in our everyday lives is confronted and resolved. We leave worship once again with the personal assurance that the battle is won—Satan has been, is now being, and will be defeated. Because we are confident in Christ’s victory, we experience a great release from the burden of our sin and we become filled with joy and peace.

Robert E. Webber, Worship Is a Verb: Celebrating God's Mighty Deeds of Salvation (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing, 1992), 30-33.

 

January 17, 2011

In both the Old and New Testaments, worship is rooted in an actual event. The content of Old Testament worship is determined by the Exodus-event, while the content of New Testament worship is determined by the Christ-event. In either case, biblical worship celebrates the event and makes it come alive again. . . . It is not only a past event, but a present reality.

Robert E. Webber, Worship Is a Verb: Celebrating God's Mighty Deeds of Salvation (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing, 1992), 28, 37.

 

January 10, 2011

Since I have come to understand that worship is a celebration of the life, death, and resurrection of Christ . . . I love to be at worship and to experience again and again the reality of Christ. Worship is a celebration that puts me in touch with the truth that shapes my whole life, and I have found it to be a necessary element for my own spiritual formation.

Robert E. Webber, Worship Is a Verb: Celebrating God's Mighty Deeds of Salvation (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing, 1992), 27.

 

January 3, 2011

We are the disciples whom Christ has called in the twenty-first century. . . . We are called to turn away from self-love and self-service, to abandon a life lived for self-gratification or self-glory, and to serve God as an epiphany of the self-giving service of Jesus. True spirituality longs for, seeks for, and wills this abandonment of self so that Christ may become present through our work, our lives, and our relationships, manifesting his power.

Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2004), 88.

 

December 27, 2010

What humans could not attain because they could not raise themselves to God, God attained by descending to humans. . . . There can be no such thing as spirituality without God initiating relationship with human persons, a relationship that is traced back to the momentous event we celebrate as Christmas—God with us. But there is another side to spirituality that issues from the incarnation as well. That is the necessity of the human nature choosing to unite with God.

Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2004), 63.

 

December 20, 2010

The spirituality of Advent calls us to start our journey in expectation of the second coming of Christ. . . . The hope of a world restored under God proclaims that evil is not the final word.
. . . The second coming says that the ultimate word in history is the triumph of God, the reign of God’s kingdom, the eternal and lasting rule of the good. Here is where our Advent meditation rests.

Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2004), 50.

 

December 13, 2010

Advent is a time when we ask, even plead with God not to leave us alone, for when God leaves us to our own choices and turns us over to our own ways, we are certain to drift from him. . . . If we would break away from a spiritual life growing cold and a Christ who is becoming distant, we must be attentive to our spiritual discipline and long for God to break in on us with new life. When we do this, we experience the true meaning of Advent spirituality.

Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2004), 43, 53.

 

December 6, 2010

Advent is the time when God breaks in on us with new surprises and touches us with a renewing and restoring power. . . . We should use the Advent season as a period to identify the matters from which we need to be redeemed. Identify whatever it is that seems to be holding you in its power. . . . Commit it to the one who comes to set the prisoners free, turn it over to Christ in prayer, and ask the one who has come into your life to take this problem up into himself.

Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2004), 38, 51.

 

November 29, 2010

In Christian worship we are not merely asked to believe in Jesus Christ, but to live, die, and be resurrected again with him. Life is not an intellectual construct, but a journey of death and rebirth. When our life story is brought up into the story of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection, it then gains meaning and purpose.

Robert E. Webber, Worship Is a Verb: Celebrating God's Mighty Deeds of Salvation (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing, 1992), 25.

 

November 22, 2010

Worship connects me with the past, gives meaning to the present, and inspires hope for the future as my soul and spirit become blended again into the drama of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection.

Robert E. Webber, Worship Is a Verb: Celebrating God's Mighty Deeds of Salvation (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing, 1992), 23.

 

November 15, 2010

Passive worship assumes that worship is something that somebody else does to you or for you. But active worship, which grows out of our response to divine action, breaks through the barriers of passive worship and returns worship to the people.

Robert E. Webber, Worship Is a Verb: Celebrating God's Mighty Deeds of Salvation (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing, 1992), 17.

 

November 8, 2010

Worship proclaims Christ through the Word and recalls the death and resurrection of Christ at the Table. . . . Worship is the Gospel in motion.

Robert E. Webber, Worship Is a Verb: Celebrating God's Mighty Deeds of Salvation (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing, 1992), 16.

 

November 1, 2010

We need to recognize that the Holy Spirit brings worship renewal. Good worship does not happen because we decide to make it better, more interesting, or more relevant. No! Good worship depends on divine favor, an action “from above.”

Robert E. Webber, Worship Is a Verb: Celebrating God's Mighty Deeds of Salvation (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing, 1992), 15.

 

October 25, 2010

Art in worship is a bit like the ring on the left hand. It’s a vehicle through which a volume is spoken. The baptismal font or pool speaks of repentance, renewal, and entrance into the church; the cross speaks of the eternal and cosmic mystery of our salvation; the candle signifies Christ, the Light of the world. . . . They communicate the gospel in their own way and, in doing so, inspire within us offerings of praise and thanksgiving.

Robert E. Webber, Worship Is a Verb: Celebrating God's Mighty Deeds of Salvation (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing, 1992), 12-13.

 

October 18, 2010

The historic argument for the use of the arts in worship is grounded in the Incarnation. The claim is that God, by becoming a person, sanctified physical and material reality as a vehicle for spiritual presence. He comes to us through flesh and blood. Why, then, shouldn’t we accept appropriate art forms as visible means through which we offer our praise?

Robert E. Webber, Worship Is a Verb: Celebrating God's Mighty Deeds of Salvation (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing, 1992), 12-13.

 

October 11, 2010

I am continually comforted and ministered to by Christ at his Table. I often counsel students and friends who are facing difficult times in their lives to “flee to the Eucharist.” Bread and wine are God’s signs . . . of grace and love toward us. . . . [Those] who have taken this advice have talked to me later about the healing they experienced through these symbols of God’s ministry.

Robert E. Webber, Worship Is a Verb: Celebrating God's Mighty Deeds of Salvation (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing, 1992), 11.

 

October 4, 2010

Christ is presented to us through re-presentation in both the Word and the Table. . . . In our concern for preaching, somehow we have let things get out of balance. We’ve neglected the deep meaning of the Lord’s Table. I believe, however, that as we open ourselves to the gracious working of God at the Lord’s Supper, we will experience a greater balance between the Word of God and the Lord’s Table. And, in turn, we will find a better balance between head and heart, mind and emotion, intellect and feeling.

Robert E. Webber, Worship Is a Verb: Celebrating God's Mighty Deeds of Salvation (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing, 1992), 11-12.

 

September 27, 2010

The God who acted, acts. In worship God is present, loving me, caring for me, bringing me to himself, and offering me the benefits of his work on my behalf. How can I not respond to his work? How can I remain silent, or passive, or indifferent? I can’t. So I respond with an appropriate “Amen” or “Alleluia” and more.

Robert E. Webber, Worship Is a Verb: Celebrating God's Mighty Deeds of Salvation (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing, 1992), 9.

 

September 20, 2010

Worship is a celebration. It is a celebration of the event of Christ—his death and resurrection. To celebrate Christ, not my devotion to him, frees me from having to create or invent my worship. Both preaching and the Lord’s Supper celebrate Christ and through them Christ is given to me. Consequently, I am spiritually nourished by what God is doing for me through the Scriptures and the Communion Table.

Robert E. Webber, Worship Is a Verb: Celebrating God's Mighty Deeds of Salvation (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing, 1992), 9.

 

September 13, 2010

In worship God is speaking and acting, bringing to me the benefits of redemption. Through worship, God works on my behalf. He repairs and renews my relationship with him. Just as he has always sought people out to bring them to himself, so he now seeks me out in worship to bring healing into my life. . . . Worship is an experience I long to have, a necessary part of my spiritual diet, a central source of my spiritual formation.

Robert E. Webber, Worship Is a Verb: Celebrating God's Mighty Deeds of Salvation (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing, 1992), 8.

 

September 6, 2010

The primary work of the church is worship. . . . Evangelism and other functions of ministry flow from the worship of the church. . . . I have discovered in my own life that corporate worship is the taproot of my life. It is the source of my spiritual life and growth.

Robert E. Webber, Worship Is a Verb: Celebrating God's Mighty Deeds of Salvation (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing, 1992), 7-8.

 

August 30, 2010

Secularization has permeated the church . . . in our music. Many of our contemporary popular songs are not directed to God, nor do they glory in the cross of Christ. Rather, they concentrate on personal experience and self-realization. They participate in the narcissism of our culture. . . . Our religion has followed the curvature of a self-centered culture.

Robert E. Webber, Worship Is a Verb: Celebrating God's Mighty Deeds of Salvation (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing, 1992), 6.

 

August 23, 2010

Worship is a verb. It is not something done to us or for us, but by us.

Robert E. Webber, Worship Is a Verb: Celebrating God's Mighty Deeds of Salvation (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing, 1992), 2.

 

August 16, 2010

I am convinced that the practice of Christian time—personally and in the church—will establish a rhythm of time that will free us. It will release us from time as an evil power that tyrannizes our lives to a time that frees us to live in the rhythm of the death and resurrection of Jesus—a pattern that will keep us in an unceasing spirituality.

Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2004), 181.

 

August 9, 2010

Advent is a time to wait. Christmas is a time to rejoice. Epiphany is a time to witness. Lent is a time for repentance and renewal. The Great Triduum is a time to enter death. Easter is a time to express the resurrected life. After Pentecost is a time to study and evangelize. Of course we are to do all of these Christian practices all of the time. But a rule of thumb is that a specific time set aside for each facilitates and empowers our Christian experience at all times.

Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2004), 180.

 

August 2, 2010

Sunday . . . is the eighth day, the day when God both rests from his work of creation and the day we celebrate the new beginning God gives the creation as it moves toward its final moment of redemption in the second coming. So Sunday is the day to not only pause to remember but to actually proclaim and enact God’s mighty deeds of salvation to the glory of God. For through this day all time and all history is given meaning.

Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2004), 180.

 

July 26, 2010

What if the principle of the early church was translated to form our day into a conscious Christian rhythm of daily devotion? By remembering the work of Christ on the cross at 9 am [he was nailed], noon [darkness], and 3 pm [he died], we would experience each day in the rhythm of the most central event of human history. Add to those hours the remembrance of creation on rising and an anticipation of the new heavens and the new earth at the coming again upon retiring and the rhythm of the day will express the contours of all history.

Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2004), 180. 

July 19, 2010

While extraordinary time celebrates a specific saving event in the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, the Sundays of ordinary time celebrate the saving events of God in their entirety. Worship planners and preachers need to reflect on how each Sunday serves the whole story yet also teaches a particular theme arising from the story. A conscious, deliberate, and intentional reflection on the whole story and a part of the story, celebrated in the same service, impacts the worshipers’ spiritual formation.

Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2004), 176.

 

July 12, 2010

Sundays of ordinary time are not so ordinary. They do truth. They do world history. They do the meaning of human existence. In this doing, we are spiritually formed and shaped by the story that is above all stories through the remembrance of God’s mighty acts of salvation, the experience of God’s presence through signs and symbols, and the anticipation of a good end to history.

Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2004), 174.

 

July 5, 2010

God’s story has a happy ending. It is in fact the drama of human existence. It is not only the story of God who creates and of God who becomes involved in creation to rescue it through the life, death and resurrection of Christ, it is also the story of the end of history and the forever thereafter. . . . Sunday worship that is true to what the Christian faith is points to the hope of the world—the expectancy that Christ will come to deliver the ultimate blow to all the powers of evil, destroying them forever. He will establish the new heavens and new earth. He will reign forever over his redeemed creation. His shalom will rest over all he has made.

Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2004), 173-174.

 

June 28, 2010

The presence of God is always manifested in visible and tangible signs. Our calling in worship is to be open and vulnerable to God’s presence so that it becomes embodied in our lives. . . . The first sign of [the Spirit’s] presence in Sunday worship is the assembled people. . . . God’s presence is known in the visible, tangible sign of the minister among us. . . . Through the Bible God takes up a visible and tangible presence among us. . . . God is also made present through the signs of water, of oil, and of bread and wine.

Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2004), 172-173.

 

June 21, 2010

Worship does truth. It tells and enacts God’s story—how God rescues creatures and creation. . . . Sunday worship, every Sunday, is a celebration of God’s story. And the constant bathing of our worship in this story—songs, preaching, baptism, Eucharist, and the Christian-year celebrations—form and shape our conscious and unconscious living in this theatre of God’s glory!

Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2004), 171.

 

June 14, 2010

I am of the personal opinion that the true meaning of Sunday worship has been lost in many of our churches. . . . Historically Sunday worship expresses three truths: It remembers God’s saving action in history; it experiences God’s renewing presence; and it anticipates the consummation of God’s work in the new heavens and the new earth.

Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2004), 169.

 

June 7, 2010

The early church fathers saw “relationship” written in large letters over baptism and the Eucharist. . . . Baptism is our marriage while Eucharist is the kiss of love. . . . We tend to see baptism and Eucharist as our signs of devotion to God. In the ancient church baptism was first God’s sign of our union with him and then our sign of embracing this union and its calling to live in the pattern of death and resurrection. Eucharist is also God’s sign—a kind of affirmation of Jesus’ death for us and his resurrection for us. . . . Through bread and wine [the Spirit] continually nourishes us in the pattern of death and resurrection spirituality first confirmed at our baptism.

Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2004), 156-157.

May 31, 2010

The Christian church . . . has always been committed to a triune experience and understanding of God, but most preachers seldom preach on this subject. The discipline of addressing the congregation once a year on the meaning of triune faith and worship is helpful and necessary. . . . Christians need to know . . . the spiritual understanding of the self made in the image of God and the significance of Christian community that mirrors the eternal, communal relationship of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2004), 175.

May 24, 2010

Pentecost Sunday ends the extraordinary season that began on the first Sunday of Advent. In approximately six months the church has been carried through all the saving events of God—his incarnation, manifestation to the world, life, death, resurrection, and ascension as well as the coming of the Holy Spirit. All these crucial events form faith and the spiritual life. . . . In a clear, directed, and evangelical practice of the Christian year, there is no missing of the point.

Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2004), 163.

May 17, 2010

We now live in the final days, the time between the coming of the Holy Spirit, and the return of our Lord. Therefore, Pentecost is an essential moment in God’s saving time, the moment in which we now live, awaiting the return of our Lord.

Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2004), 162.

May 10, 2010

If Jesus ascended into heaven, has he left any signs of his presence among us? . . . If we wish to form congregational and personal spirituality, we will call attention to the ascended Lord who eternally intercedes for us and is always with us through the church and the signs of our identity with him (water) and of his continual nourishment (bread and wine).

Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2004), 160-161.

 

May 3, 2010

Worship is God’s doing. . . . It is performative. That is, it does something for those who do the work of proclaiming and enacting God’s work. It transforms them. . . . Every Sunday is a “little Easter.” Every Sunday of the year is a celebration of the Easter event. The work of the people in “doing the Christ event” through memory and hope is the source for personal and corporate formation into resurrection spirituality.

Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2004), 152-153.

April 26, 2010

In tribute to our founder and friend, Bob Webber.
Though deeply missed, his vision thrives.
(November 27, 1933 - April 27, 2007)

Whatever thy hand findeth to do,
do it with all thy might
(Ecclesiastes 9:10).

In his resurrection [Jesus] conquered the results of sin—which is death—so that death is not the last word written over our life.

Robert Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2006), 135.

 

April 19, 2010

Worship is the constant celebration of the Easter event. It is in worship that resurrection spirituality is learned and experienced. . . . Worship is a symbolization whereby we proclaim (yes, words are used), sing (no explanation needed), and enact (yes, dramatize) the original event that forms and shapes us into the pattern of his death and resurrection.

Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2004), 151.

April 12, 2010

The primary metaphor for the Easter season is the church as the resurrected people living a resurrected spirituality. Because of Easter we are in union with Christ and are called to live in our baptismal identity in his resurrection. This essential theme of Easter cannot be communicated in a day. It takes a season. . . . It is in worship that resurrection spirituality is learned and experienced.

Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2004), 148-151.

April 5, 2010

The biblical metaphor for Easter spirituality is found in baptism. The baptized life is a life that is lived in the pattern of death and resurrection. . . . The message of Easter is that the way of being in Jesus, the way of living the new resurrected life, is through participation. . . . We participate in Christ by living the life of our baptism into his death and resurrection. This is a daily, existential, moment-by-moment experience as we choose in this or that situation to die to the sins for which Christ died and choose the life of the Spirit for which Christ was raised to a new life.

Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2004), 146-147.

March 29, 2010

As I contemplated the spiritual journey of Holy Week . . . I knew this was not a week for shopping, vacation, parties, or hilarity. I sensed this was the week that above all weeks was to be set aside for the journey into death. I knew the worship of the church would take me by the hand and lead me step-by-step into the experience of death and rebirth, if I would allow it to do so. I resolved then and there to walk in the way of the cross. I purposed to make this the week God intended it to be for me, a week of intense spiritual struggle—and reward!

Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2004), 118-119.

March 22, 2010

Lent is the time to identify a power working against us and crucify it with Christ and bury it in the tomb, never to be raised again. . . . [Fasting] controls the passion for food in order to deal with a passion of another sort that holds us in its grip. The purpose of the ascetical fast is to liberate us from the power that flesh holds over the spirit. . . . For example, a person may fast as a means to experience victory over jealousy, envy, anger, lust, lack of integrity. . . . God works in conjunction with our will. Consequently, the ascetical fast that deals with an issue of character development requires choice and intention on our part. We have to exercise the power of our own will over against the powers of evil that continually draw us into habits of life that are contrary to the gospel.

Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2004), 114-115.

March 15, 2010

There is no narrative that begins to compare with the Christian narrative—in which God enters our suffering to deliver us from sin and death, and to deliver the world from the domain of darkness. It doesn’t get any better than that! . . . Jesus is Lord! And this truth will make you free.

Robert E. Webber, Who Gets to Narrate the World? Contending for the Christian Story in an Age of Rivals (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 137.

March 8, 2010

Who gets to narrative the world? is not a mere academic question. If Christians are to witness to God’s mission to restore the world, to recover the Garden, to establish once again the communion of God’s creatures within the communion and fellowship of the triune God, then we must know the narrative, proclaim it and live it—to the death if necessary. Surely, this is the most pressing issue of our time.

Robert E. Webber, Who Gets to Narrate the World? Contending for the Christian Story in an Age of Rivals (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 132-133.

March 1, 2010

Pragmatism always asks, Does it work? Does it produce? Is it effective? Pragmatism has moved the church toward a business model. This follows, of course, the consumer approach to the faith. Jesus becomes the product marketed to people—the consumers—to satisfy their needs.
. . . An overemphasis on pragmatism has led to the loss of God’s narrative for the world. I’m calling . . . for the recovery of God’s narrative and for the role the church plays as the witness to God’s narrative.

Robert E. Webber, Who Gets to Narrate the World? Contending for the Christian Story in an Age of Rivals (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 132.

February 22, 2010

Worship has become narcissistic, focusing on me and my praise of God; and spirituality has turned toward a preoccupation with my journey of faith and my spiritual condition and experience. . . . When we become narcissistic, the place of worship and spirituality in God’s narrative is lost and worship and spirituality become subject to the whims of culture.

Robert E. Webber, Who Gets to Narrate the World? Contending for the Christian Story in an Age of Rivals (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 131.

February 15, 2010

The church as a living witness to God’s narrative became the place where the consumer could buy a product that fulfilled his or her needs. Of course, the church does fulfill needs, but they must be placed within the cosmic narrative, thereby reducing the individual’s focus on self and turning his or her contemplation to God’s saving deeds, whereby the whole world is made right.

Robert E. Webber, Who Gets to Narrate the World? Contending for the Christian Story in an Age of Rivals (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 131.

February 8, 2010

Narrative thinking reverses the world’s way of doing things. . . . We must stop standing outside the narrative and judging it by human reason or any other intellectual discipline. Such an approach makes God and God’s narrative an object of investigation. We become the arbiter of its truthfulness. Instead, we must stand inside the narrative. God is not an object within the narrative. When we stand inside the narrative by faith, we stand under, not over, him, and we see the world through the narrative, not the other way around.

Robert E. Webber, Who Gets to Narrate the World? Contending for the Christian Story in an Age of Rivals (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 129-130.

February 1, 2010

God’s narrative is the one true story of the world. The church’s mission is to be a witness to God’s narrative of the world (missio Dei). Theology is the church’s corporate reflection on God’s narrative. Worship sings, proclaims and enacts God’s narrative to the glory of God. Individual spirituality is the personal embodiment of God’s narrative in all of life. Collective spirituality is the church’s embodied life in the world.

Robert E. Webber, Who Gets to Narrate the World? Contending for the Christian Story in an Age of Rivals (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 124.

 

January 25, 2010

The church has become a business that sells Jesus—the culture of consumerism. Theology has become an analytical discipline that scientifically examines propositions—the culture of reason. Worship has become an entertaining program that presents Jesus in a winsome way—the culture of entertainment. Spirituality has become an experience of transcendence achieved through Christian technique—the New Age culture of generic spirituality. The church’s life in the world is to do good so people can see that Jesus is all about being nice and helpful—the culture of humanism.

Robert E. Webber, Who Gets to Narrate the World? Contending for the Christian Story in an Age of Rivals (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 123-124.

 

January 18, 2010

Evangelicals [should] turn away from forms of worship that focus on God as a mere object of the intellect or that assert the self as the source of worship. Such worship has resulted in lecture-oriented, music-driven, performance-centered and program-controlled models that do not adequately proclaim God’s cosmic redemption. Therefore, we call evangelicals to recover the historic substance of worship of Word and Table and to attend to the Christian year, which marks time according to God’s saving acts.

Robert E. Webber, Who Gets to Narrate the World? Contending for the Christian Story in an Age of Rivals (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 121.

 

January 11, 2010

My initial impetus toward relearning God’s narrative took shape as a response to the postmodern rejection of all universal narratives (or metanarratives). As I became more and more conscious of the rejection of metanarratives, I became more keenly aware that this is exactly what the Christian message is—a single, universal narrative of everything. . . . Christians must . . . return to the ancient way of approaching God’s truth as the narrative of the world.

Robert E. Webber, Who Gets to Narrate the World? Contending for the Christian Story in an Age of Rivals (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 118.

 

January 4, 2010

For the past thirty years or so the church has been plagued by innovation . . . a philosophy that moves forward without regard for the past. . . . With an antihistorical attitude and the constant desire for what’s new, faith is reduced to style. . . . Eventually the overemphasis on style results in an underemphasis on substance, and then style overtakes substance. The words of the narrative—creation, fall, incarnation, death, resurrection, second coming—may continue to be used, but without the appropriate depth and cosmic substance. . . . We must recover the profound original interpretation of God’s narrative—that of the early church.

Robert E. Webber, Who Gets to Narrate the World? Contending for the Christian Story in an Age of Rivals (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 116-117.

 

December 28, 2009

God’s purpose for us and for the world . . . is a loving invitation to fellowship and communion with the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and to a purposeful life of making the world a habitation of his glory. However, we have failed and continue to fail to do God’s purpose. So God in Christ has accomplished what we could not do. And God invites us to enter into his narrative by faith and live out his vision of the world.

Robert E. Webber, Who Gets to Narrate the World? Contending for the Christian Story in an Age of Rivals (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 116.

 

December 21, 2009

In almost every religion the quest is to find a way to transcend the pain and suffering of life, and get connected with the powers of the other world that will help us endure this world. Current magazines, movies and spiritual gurus pitch the supernatural. But in these religions we never hear that God himself has entered our history and our suffering to redeem us for life in the world.

Robert E. Webber, Who Gets to Narrate the World? Contending for the Christian Story in an Age of Rivals (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 95.

 

December 14, 2009

God’s narrative stands on its own as the truth about the world. We don’t ask God to conform to our narrative, to our reason, scientific findings, philosophy or anthropology. No, God invites us to live in his narrative and to see all life from inside the lens of creation, incarnation and re-creation.

Robert E. Webber, Who Gets to Narrate the World? Contending for the Christian Story in an Age of Rivals (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 87.

 

December 7, 2009

Historic Christianity is not a reflection on an individual’s narrative but a reflection on and contemplation of God’s mighty deeds of salvation for the life of the world. . . . However, . . . [a] shift to experience has led to the demise of the narrative of God. God rescues the entire created order, and those who know this rescue are to live collectively in the world and express God’s redemption in all of life. This narrative has been lost and replaced with a focus on “my journey.”

Robert E. Webber, Who Gets to Narrate the World? Contending for the Christian Story in an Age of Rivals (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 86.

 

November 30, 2009

Social action is an essential aspect of the church’s work in the world—peace and justice and caring for the poor, widows, orphans, the disenfranchised, and the marginalized arise from true faith. But these actions are to result from the embodiment of God’s full narrative, not from a Christianity accommodating itself to Western culture’s doctrine of progress and utopia.

Robert E. Webber, Who Gets to Narrate the World? Contending for the Christian Story in an Age of Rivals (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 85.

 

November 23, 2009

The ancient church understood the impact of creation, incarnation and re-creation on all of creation, and that is why Christians were the leaders in the arts, in learning and in the sciences. The Christian faith narrates the world and gives shape to culture-making and to all of civilization.

Robert E. Webber, Who Gets to Narrate the World? Contending for the Christian Story in an Age of Rivals (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 75-76.

 

November 16, 2009

The biblical and historical understanding of the incarnation is that God becomes creation. He takes into himself all the effects of fallen humanity spread throughout his creation. He assumes all of creation in the womb of Mary in order to reverse the effects of sin and “bring it into the glorious freedom of the children of God” (Rom 8:21). The death and resurrection of God in Christ is . . . a second act of creation, the redemption of the whole created order. . . . God, in the incarnation, took up into himself the entire creation, so that the creation redeemed by God himself is now to be once again, as in the Garden, the theatre of his glory.

Robert E. Webber, Who Gets to Narrate the World? Contending for the Christian Story in an Age of Rivals (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 75-76.

 

November 9, 2009

Why did the West, which was once so thoroughly influenced by the Christian faith, fall prey to secularization and privatism? . . . The key factor is the historical split between the secular and the sacred. This split occurred because the understanding of the incarnation was reduced from God who became the created order to God who stepped into the creation.

Robert E. Webber, Who Gets to Narrate the World? Contending for the Christian Story in an Age of Rivals (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 74-75.

 

November 2, 2009

Christians must go back to the Garden of Eden and reclaim God’s original purposes for creatures and creation. We are the image-bearers of God, and we have been given the task of making this world the theatre of God’s glory. It is not only the inner chamber of the heart that should glow with the presence of God, but our culture too—our cities, our civilization, the whole of life.

Robert E. Webber, Who Gets to Narrate the World? Contending for the Christian Story in an Age of Rivals (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 71.

 

October 26, 2009

One of the major problems the church faces today is that the Christian faith has been reduced from its public engagement of civilization to a private relationship with God. . . . There is more to Christianity than the personal side of the faith—there is the cosmic side, the claim of Jesus Christ to be Lord of the universe—Creator, Redeemer and Ruler of all. What I am asking of us all is to think through what it means to proclaim “Jesus is Lord.”

Robert E. Webber, Who Gets to Narrate the World? Contending for the Christian Story in an Age of Rivals (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 70.

 

October 19, 2009

Within God’s narrative the doctrine that has had the greatest influence on civilization is the incarnation. If God unites with his creation in order to re-create it himself, then there can be no distinction between the secular and the sacred. All creation is rendered holy by the incarnation. All creation is lifted through the humanity of Jesus to union with the divine. The center from which this doctrine should radiate in all the cities, towns and villages is the worship of the church. The church building, the liturgy itself, with all of its attending signs and symbols and especially the words of the Eucharistic prayer, clearly portray who gets to narrate the world.

Robert E. Webber, Who Gets to Narrate the World? Contending for the Christian Story in an Age of Rivals (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 68.

 

October 12, 2009

Ancient Christianity was not the privatized faith it has become today. Today the influence of secularization has pushed the Christian narrative away from public matters. Christian faith, having become private and narcissistic, has very little influence in the university, the marketplace, law, politics and even ethics. It no longer plays a significant role in the foundational matters of Western civilization. . . . The western church has lost its divine narrative, turning toward a Christianity of cultural accommodation.

Robert E. Webber, Who Gets to Narrate the World? Contending for the Christian Story in an Age of Rivals (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 67, 69.

 

October 5, 2009

Christians in the Roman world found themselves in a cultural setting of moral decadence, philosophical relativism and religious pluralism. However, they narrated the world in a new way. They did not accommodate the faith to culture but set forth the faith in a countercultural way. In a world that had no set beliefs they proclaimed, “We believe.” In a world that had no ethic, they proclaimed, “We behave.” In a world where there was no belonging, they declared, “We belong.”

Robert E. Webber, Who Gets to Narrate the World? Contending for the Christian Story in an Age of Rivals (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 51.

 

September 28, 2009

It is in Jesus’ life, the early Christians argued, that we see what humanity was created to be. For God in Christ, who became one of us for our salvation, also became one of us to model what true humanity looks like. Jesus himself is our ethic. We are to follow him, to do what he did.

Robert E. Webber, Who Gets to Narrate the World? Contending for the Christian Story in an Age of Rivals (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 47.

 

September 21, 2009

The incarnation is the missing key in evangelical thought. The incarnate Word does not merely “step into history.” The Word becomes humanity, time, space, and history to rescue creatures and creation. . . . There is no story in all the universe comparable to the narrative of the biblical God who enters our suffering and death to overcome it and win back his creation. It is a story worth dying for.

Robert E. Webber, Who Gets to Narrate the World? Contending for the Christian Story in an Age of Rivals (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 38.

 

September 14, 2009

We are also in a struggle for the soul of the church in America, a struggle between God’s narrative, with God at the center, and my narrative, with the self at the center. The narrative of American narcissism tells us that nothing is more important than the self. By contrast, God’s narrative tells us that we will only become what we are meant to be when we submit ourselves to his story.

Robert E. Webber, Who Gets to Narrate the World? Contending for the Christian Story in an Age of Rivals (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 37.

 

September 7, 2009

[Jesus] demonstrated what life looks like for a human being who is in full communion with God. Yet he came to do more than show us this life. He came to be that very life, to lift humanity into his own humanity and do for us what we are unable to do for ourselves. . . . Nailed to the cross of his own creation, he took into his own body and into his divine being the suffering and alienation of all humanity, reconciling God to humanity and humanity to God. . . . On the hard wood of the cross he stretched forth his hands of love in a saving embrace of all.

Robert E. Webber, Who Gets to Narrate the World? Contending for the Christian Story in an Age of Rivals (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 33.

 

August 31, 2009

God chooses to restore humanity not by a decree of reconciliation, not by a sentimental forgiveness, not by a soft love, but by entering into union with humanity. In Jesus, God comes in human skin to reverse the human condition and reconcile humanity to the Father. . . . In his humanity as Jesus, God took into himself the rebellion of the first Adam and the consequence of his sin, which was death for us all.

Robert E. Webber, Who Gets to Narrate the World? Contending for the Christian Story in an Age of Rivals (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 32-33.

 

August 24, 2009

We are all part of the problem, but there is only one man who is the solution. His name is Jesus. . . . He is the one who reverses the entire human situation. The first Adam plunged the human race into rebellion against God. Humanity has made a mess of this world (not only human beings, but the whole world), so God became incarnate, uniting himself to humanity, so that God himself in perfect union with humanity could reverse the human plight caused by Adam and perpetuated by every one of us. So God in Christ not only rescues us, he rescues the whole creation.

Robert E. Webber, Who Gets to Narrate the World? Contending for the Christian Story in an Age of Rivals (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 26-27.

 

August 17, 2009

The fullness of God’s story is captured in the three words—creation, incarnation, re-creation.
. . . These words constitute a connecting symbol for the whole story of God
.

Robert E. Webber, Who Gets to Narrate the World? Contending for the Christian Story in an Age of Rivals (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 26.

 

August 10, 2009

“God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ” (2 Cor 5:19). What does this mean? It means that God’s story is cosmic; it has to do with the whole world and all of history. . . . This story even includes you. God, the divine narrator, is saying: I have a purpose for humanity and a purpose for creation and history. I am not asking for permission to join your narrative (although I do); I am asking you to join my narrative of the world, of human existence, and of all history.

Robert E. Webber, Who Gets to Narrate the World? Contending for the Christian Story in an Age of Rivals (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 24-25.

 

August 3, 2009

I am convinced that the people of God, whose faith has been undermined by cultural accommodation, have not been adequately trained in the spiritual discipline of God’s narrative and the Christian heritage of the church. . . . The rediscovery of God’s narrative and its implications for ministry are the most pressing spiritual issues facing the church at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Robert E. Webber, Who Gets to Narrate the World? Contending for the Christian Story in an Age of Rivals (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 19-20.

 

July 27, 2009

The consumer model has especially affected worship, which is the true measure of the church. Jesus has become a product to sell, and worship is the primary channel for sales. . . . The substance of worship—remembering God’s saving deeds in the past, culminating in Jesus Christ, and anticipating the overthrow of all evil at Christ’s coming—has been lost.

Robert E. Webber, Who Gets to Narrate the World? Contending for the Christian Story in an Age of Rivals (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 18.

 

July 20, 2009

One of the major reasons why the church has fallen prey to a cultural accommodation is that it has become disconnected from its roots in Scripture, in the ancient church and in its heritage through the centuries. . . . If it is true that the road to the future lies in the past, it is also true that when the past has been lost or neglected there is no certain future. . . . When the past is lost, as it now is in our Western world, there is nothing left to focus on except the self.

Robert E. Webber, Who Gets to Narrate the World? Contending for the Christian Story in an Age of Rivals (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 16-17.

 

July 13, 2009

[In] preaching . . . we proclaim God’s story, remembering his mighty deeds of salvation. In the Eucharist we enact or dramatize God’s story and its anticipated future, and in doing so, we are actually ushered into God’s kingdom in a momentary, existential experience of the kingdom to come.

Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 177.

 

July 6, 2009

I once understood the gospel as God asking me to let him into my narrative, to find room for him in my heart and life. But now I realize that God bids me to find my place in his narrative. In God’s story, he, with his own two hands—the incarnate Word and the Holy Spirit—recapitulated and reversed the human situation so I can now live in him.  Through him I can live in the expectation of a restored world without the presence of evil. Here and now, because God became incarnate and recapitulated all things, I live in him, in his narrative, and he lives in my life, which is to be a witness to his narrative for the world.

Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 174-175.

 

June 29, 2009

Our era has affinities with the Roman era. The issues we must deal with today include widespread war, the breakdown of morality, and pluralism of philosophy and religion (especially Gnosticism). Just as the [early church] fathers interacted with powers and principalities of their time, so also we must interact with the powers and principalities of our time. In order to confront the powers of our day, we would do well to recover the ancient framework of Scripture and restore the emphasis on Christus Victor.

Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 171.

 

June 22, 2009

The missing link in Western theology is a deep appreciation for the incarnation and subsequent Christus Victor theme of how God incarnate won a victory over sin and death. . . . Christus Victor was the primary atonement view of the early church fathers (this view does not in any way deny the sacrifice of Christ).

Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 170.

 

June 15, 2009

If you want to do ancient-future worship, learn God's story and do it in Word and Table and use hymns and songs for responses not only from the great treasury of the church through the centuries but also from music that is current.

Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 168.

 

June 8, 2009

If you want a definition of ancient-future worship, it is this: the common tradition of the church’s worship in Word, Table, and song, practiced faithfully and communicated clearly in every context of the world.

Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 168.

 

June 1, 2009

The church and its theology are not to be reinvented every generation. The church may need to be inspired, perhaps contextualized, but never trashed to start again.

Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 167.

 

May 25, 2009

It is a paradigm shift to think and then to practice all of worship as a prayer in which we actually lift God’s own story up to him as a prayer.  I don’t doubt that some congregations pray their songs. . . . For many of these congregations worship is described as singing. I have pointed out, however, that the ancient church saw all of worship, from beginning to end, as the lifting up to God his own story in praise and thanksgiving. This is the shift that requires a new or, rather, old way of worshiping. In worship we do God’s story as the prayer of God and his church for the whole world.

Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 165.

 

May 18, 2009

Because the church prays God’s story in the language of God’s voice, our contemplation is always anchored in the public voice of the church. Our personal contemplation is dependent on the faithfulness of the church to articulate for us what we can only say in a fumbling way.

Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 164.

May 11, 2009

The public worship of the church is a prayer of praise and thanksgiving directed, not to people, but to God. This approach is a paradigm shift from the current presentational notion of worship. Today worship is frequently seen as a presentation made to the people. . . . But the ancient church did not design (a contemporary word) worship to reach people, to educate people, or to heal people. Yet in their worship, which was a prayer of praise and thanksgiving offered to God, people were indeed led into contemplation of God’s mighty acts of salvation and stimulated to live a life of participation in the life of God in the life of the world. The point is, of course, that how we pray shapes who we are.

Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 161-162.

May 4, 2009

[A] review of the ancient prayers of worship strongly reveals that worship not only contains prayer but is the prayer of the church for the life of the world and for the welfare and salvation of all its inhabitants. God’s story, revealing the two hands of God through which the world is redeemed by Jesus and the Spirit, is the content and prayer of ancient worship.

Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 161.

April 27, 2009

In tribute to our founder and friend, Bob Webber.
Though deeply missed, his vision thrives.
(November 27, 1933 - April 27, 2007)

Whatever thy hand findeth to do,
do it with all thy might
(Ecclesiastes 9:10).

In his resurrection [Jesus] conquered the results of sin—which is death—so that death is not the last word written over our life.

Robert Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2006), 135.

 

April 20, 2009

Worship as public prayer may be described as follows: Public prayer lifts up all creation to the Father through Jesus Christ by the Spirit in praise and thanksgiving for the work of the Son, who has reconciled creatures and creation to God. . . . Worship prays God’s story.

Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 151.

 

April 13, 2009

The nature of worship has shifted from corporate prayer to platform presentational performance. Worship, instead of being a rehearsal of God’s saving actions in the world and for the world, is exchanged for making people feel comfortable, happy, and affirmed.

Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 151.

 

April 6, 2009

The celebration of bread and wine is no abstract object out there, no thing to be observed as an object of interest, no mere ritual to be taken in a perfunctory or mechanical way. No. We move from a delightful contemplation of all that bread and wine disclose to a participation in God’s story by continually affirming in bread and wine that Jesus is given anew and poured out again to the world through our individual lives and through the community of the people of God, the church, who manifest God’s purposes for the world in the worship of our lips and lives.

Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 147.

 

March 30, 2009

What nourishes and transforms us at bread and wine is the disclosure of the whole story of God—creation, incarnation, re-creation—which takes up residence inside of us as we take and eat, take and drink. For in this symbol a reality is present—the divine action of God redeeming his world through Jesus Christ. . . . We become what we eat—living witnesses to Christ who lives in us.

Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 146.

 

March 23, 2009

The one true fulfilled and meaningful life is not the life of acquisition, power, fame, sexual freedom, consumerism, or materialism but the cruciform life. The spiritual life is lived out of the crucifixion. It is a willing, voluntary choosing to give oneself to others, to endure suffering for the needs of others, even, if necessary, to the point of death. Table worship nourishes this commitment because it discloses the meaning of life as the act of giving up self in order to do the will of God for others.

Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 143-144.

 

March 16, 2009

While the Bible discloses the story of the world in words, the same story is enacted at bread and wine. Rationalism cannot embrace this, for it only sees bread as food that is eaten and wine as drink that is imbibed. But when we come to the Table with the eyes of faith, we experience the burning conviction that we live in a supernatural world. . . . At bread and wine we see creation, fall, incarnation, death, resurrection, ascension, church, the kingdom, and the promise of the new heavens and new earth and our own transfiguration accomplished through God’s union with us established through Jesus by the Spirit.

Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 141.

 

March 9, 2009

At bread and wine God discloses his whole story for those who know how to see. Yes, bread and wine are symbols, but they are not empty. The ancient fathers taught that symbols participate in the reality they re-present. . . . Bread and wine signify and perform God’s story and communicate the benefits of God’s story to us.

Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 141.

 

March 2, 2009

Enlightenment rationalism has succeeded in taking the focus off what God does at bread and wine and placing it on what I do at bread and wine. In rationalism, I must make Table worship a source of spiritual nourishment by what I do. I must remember. The more intense my remembrance, the more my spiritual life is nourished. . . . The early church fathers . . . approached bread and wine with a clear sense of the supernatural.

Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 137.

 

February 23, 2009

A study of contemporary worship songs demonstrates that the current view of worship is not situated in God’s supernatural story.  Instead, worship is situated within the worshiper and is offered by the worshiper to God, who often remains unnamed in the song lyrics. . . . This divorce of worship and spirituality from God’s story of creation, incarnation, and re-creation has resulted in a new kind of Gnostic worship and spirituality.

Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 135.

 

February 16, 2009

How should we approach the crisis of evangelical doubt, the failure to affirm the communication of Christ at Table worship? The primary way to see the crisis at Table worship is to place it in the larger process of the desupernaturalization of the entire Christian story at the hands of Enlightenment rationalism. . . . By not affirming a complete supernaturalism in which God is always and everywhere present in creation, evangelicals are in danger of the eventual breakdown of all supernaturalism and possible retooling of the faith to not only look like the culture but even embrace a new form of secularized Christianity.

Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 134-135.

 

February 9, 2009

I believe music-centered worship has indeed become a common way of thinking about the presence of God. However, it is an extremely limited understanding of God’s presence. . . . The church has always believed not only that God is everywhere but also that he is made intensely present to his church at worship. God is there in the gathering of the assembly, in song, in Scripture reading, in prayer, and especially at bread and wine. Jesus told his disciples that there is a way to remember him (the force of anamnesis is “to make me [Christ] present”). He is right there at broken bread and poured-out wine.

Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 133-134.

 

February 2, 2009

The Bible reads me. . . . To read the Bible Christologically is to let it read us and the world. . . . Is it possible to pick up the Bible and say, “I’m going to read about myself and my world”? Is it possible to say, “I identify with this person; my world is like this”? . . . Can the Bible be read as our own story from Genesis to Revelation? . . . When we read and preach the Bible as a history present, we get inside of it, and it reads us and our world.

Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 130.

 

January 26, 2009

In the church God’s presence is in the assembled people, in their song, Scripture, water, bread, wine, and oil. God is not an absent, ethereal essence who sits in the sky and demands worship. God is the God who acts, who lives and moves and has his being in the world and among the people. Affirm that all of life, not just part of life, is sacred. Affirm that God is disclosed in every detail of human existence. Then, stand inside the Bible and God’s story and let it teach you to look out into the creation where God is signified everywhere yet particularized in Jesus, the ultimate icon of God.

Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 126.

 

January 19, 2009

As pastors of the Word, there is a strong need to soak ourselves in the Triune story of God with its detailed exposition of the central role of Christ in the greatest drama of human history—the drama of God who becomes one of us to rescue the world.  This theme of God’s rescue of us all—not inspirational topics, motivational speakers, or massive therapy sermons—needs to be recovered as the central message of our church.

Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 121.

 

January 12, 2009

The apostolic way of reading and preaching Scripture is to see Jesus Christ as the subject of the entire Bible, the subject of all history. He is the single overarching story of all time. He is the meaning of the entire narrative of human history. He is seen everywhere. He is in every event. . . . The Bible nourishes us . . . because it reveals Jesus Christ . . . who now lives in us and calls us into the new humanity.

Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 119-120.

 

January 5, 2009

Ancient worship . . . does truth. All one has to do is to study the ancient liturgies to see that liturgies clearly do truth by their order and in their substance. This is why so many young people today are now adding ancient elements to their worship. . . . This recovery of ancient practices is not the mere restoration of ritual but a deep, profound, and passionate engagement with truth—truth that forms and shapes the spiritual life into a Christlikeness that issues forth in the call to a godly and holy life and into a deep commitment to justice and to the needs of the poor.

Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 109.

 

December 29, 2008

The biblical teaching that Jesus is our worship dispels all notions of self-generated worship. . . . Worship discloses the work of Jesus Christ. He himself is the eternal leiturgia (liturgy) of God. . . . Jesus Christ does for us what we cannot do for ourselves. As God incarnate, he is our obedience, he is our faith, he is our new life, and he is our eternal intercession before the Father. . . . So what then is the worship that the people of God do? We remember God’s saving deeds and anticipate his vision, his final rule over all creation.

Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 108-109.

 

December 22, 2008

The ancient order of worship was Word and Table. Worship is ordered by revelation and incarnation. God is first disclosed to the world through revelation. Then God becomes incarnate in the world in Jesus Christ, who accomplishes our salvation. This order of revelation-incarnation is not coincidental; it is fundamental to the outworking of God’s story. God’s story is proclaimed in Word and Table. We hear God’s story; we see God’s story.

Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 106.

 

December 15, 2008

Worship does truth. The ancient church captured how worship does truth in the phrase lex orandi; lex credendi; est. . . . [One] way to state the essence of this Latin phrase is to say, “Show me how you worship and I’ll show you what you believe.” If how we worship shapes what we believe, then it is imperative that we pay attention to how we worship.  If worship is shaped by culture, it will result in a culturally conditioned faith. If worship is shaped by narcissism, it will result it a me-oriented consumer faith.

Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 104.

 

December 8, 2008

[Worship] sings, tells, and enacts God’s story, not my story. The primary focus of worship . . . is not me, the worshiper, but God, who redeems the world. Worship does God’s story, and God, who is the subject of worship, repeats, so to speak, his own story. God, through worship, works on me through his story to elicit praise on my lips and obedience in my living. When this happens, worship takes place.

Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 97-98.

 

December 1, 2008

Worship nourishes the spiritual life . . . because it discloses Christ as the one who does for me what I can’t do for myself and “compels” me to doxology on my lips and to live in the pattern of death and resurrection.

Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 94.

 

November 24, 2008

Worship is not that which I do, but that which is done in me. That is, worship, which reveals Christ, forms me by making me aware that Jesus is my spirituality and that worship is to form my spiritual life into the pattern of living into the death and resurrection of Jesus.

Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 93.

 

November 17, 2008

If it is acknowledged that the content of worship is remembrance and anticipation, it should be an easy step to take to see that the structure of worship serves the content of worship. The Word remembers and the Eucharist anticipates. . . . The style of doing Word and Table is a matter of making the content and structure of worship indigenous to the local setting.

Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 91.

 

November 10, 2008

Seeker-oriented contemporary churches argue that worship does not need to present the whole gospel. The purpose of worship, they say, is to get people in the door. Then, after they have gained a hearing, they present the gospel in small-group settings. This argument may be good marketing, but it fails to understand the biblical purpose of worship. Worship brings glory to God because it remembers God’s saving deeds in the past and anticipates God’s culmination of his saving deeds in the new heavens and new earth.

Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 85.

 

November 3, 2008

One does not need to become liturgical to become more biblical in worship. Remembrance of God’s actions in history to save the world can be effectively done in a spontaneous way as well. When planning worship ask, “Does the service connect creation with God’s involvement in the history of Israel, with his incarnation, death, resurrection, ascension, eternal intercession, and coming again to establish his rule over all creation?” If you can answer “Yes” to that question you are well on your way into worship that has the biblical content of remembrance and anticipation.

Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 70-71.

 

October 27, 2008

God’s vision for the world is remembered and anticipated in worship. Worship is all about how God, [who] with his own two hands—the incarnate Word and the Holy Spirit—has rescued the world. . . . The centerpiece of his saving action is the incarnation, death, and resurrection, where sin and death have been defeated and where the deliverance of creatures and creation, which will be consummated at the end of history, will begin. In the meantime, worship is the witness to this vision.

Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 66.

 

October 20, 2008

Holy living . . . is to be a direct outcome of worship and an anticipation of life in God’s eschatological domain. . . . The ethical life of the church is an eschatological witness to the world of how people should be living and how the world will be under the reign of God.

Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 65-66.

 

October 13, 2008

The purpose of the Genesis account of creation is doxology (right praise); it calls us to a posture of praise. Doxology is our response to God’s story. . . . Doxology is the way to momentarily experience the eternal kingdom of God’s perfection over all creation.

Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 60-61.

 

October 6, 2008

Worship should do God’s narrative and point to the future when creation, delivered from sin, will be restored to God’s original design. In this world there is always a witness to the restoration of the world, and you should be able to find it in the worship of the church.

Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 60.

 

September 29, 2008

Biblical remembering makes the power and the saving effect of the event present to the worshiping community. . . . God loves our worship when we remember his saving deeds in Jesus Christ. Our worship tells that old, old, story. That’s the story God gave the world, and that story is the content of worship. Through worship the world learns its own story. And how will others hear unless we do God’s story in worship, calling people to remember God’s story? . . . Forgetting brings death, but remembering brings life.

Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 43-44.

 

September 22, 2008

Here is what biblical worship does: It remembers God’s work in the past, anticipates God’s rule over all creation, and actualized both past and future in the present to transform persons, communities, and the world.

Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 43.

 

September 15, 2008

What does it mean to say, “Worship does God’s story?” It is this: Worship proclaims, enacts, and sings God’s story. Worship is not a program. Nor is worship about me. Worship is a narrative—God’s narrative of the world from its beginning to its end. How will the world know its own story unless we do that story in public worship?

Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 39-40.

 

September 8, 2008

In the incarnation, God unites with our humanity in Jesus Christ. . . . Reflection on the incarnation and its connection to every aspect of God’s story is the missing link in today’s theological reflection and worship. The link is found in these words: God does for us what we cannot do for ourselves. . . . God himself, the incarnate Word, takes up residence (unites) with our fallen self so that he, God, now as a man, can reverse the human condition.

Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 35-36.

 

September 1, 2008

I am concerned over how worship has become a program, a show, and entertainment. Once again the problem is a self-centered and presentational approach to worship. If we think worship is about me, or if we are trying to sell people on worship and lure them to receive Jesus into their lives, then I can see the value of all entertaining programs. But once again, presentational worship turns true worship on its head. If worship is truly doing God’s story and calling people to find their life and story by entering God’s story, then the style of worship is prayer.

Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 25.

 

August 25, 2008

In worship we remember God’s story in the past and anticipate God’s story in the future.

Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 23.

 

August 18, 2008

A dominant error of some Christians is to say, “I must bring God into my story.” The ancient understanding is that God joins the story of humanity to take us unto his story. There is a world of difference. One is narcissistic; the other is God-oriented. It will change your entire spiritual life when you realize that your life is joined to God’s story.

Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 23.

 

August 11, 2008

What should be the content of Table worship? We remember the death (Lord’s Supper); we celebrate the Resurrection (breaking of bread); we enter into intimate relationship with the resurrected Christ at his Table (communion); and we give thanks for the work of Christ (Eucharist).

Robert E. Webber, Planning Blended Worship: the Creative Mixture of Old and New. (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1998), 131.

 

August 4, 2008

One of the main requirements of the worshiper is to seek connections in God’s Word. . . . This will require attentiveness. . . . In order for the Word to take up residence within the person, it is furthermore necessary to hear with an intent or resolve. Resolve is the will by which we choose to let God inform and form our lives. When God speaks, we not only hear God, we also act on what we hear.

Robert E. Webber, Planning Blended Worship: the Creative Mixture of Old and New. (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1998), 89.

 

July 28, 2008

Any church’s worship is only a formal, empty ritual if the worshipers do not respond with intentionality. Intention in worship is achieved when the heart knows its need and becomes open and vulnerable to God’s action through a virtual abandonment. An abandoned spirit listens for God’s Word to speak into the individual’s own life.

Robert E. Webber, Planning Blended Worship: the Creative Mixture of Old and New. (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1998), 46.

 

July 21, 2008

Worship leaders need to be guided by three central questions as they consider the content of worship: 1) How does this worship speak to God’s glory in heaven and God’s saving actions on earth? 2) How does this worship help people identify their dislocation? 3) How does this worship lead people into a relocation with God?

Robert E. Webber, Planning Blended Worship: the Creative Mixture of Old and New. (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1998), 42.

 

July 14, 2008

The underlying conviction of Christian worship is that we are all in a state of dislocation. We are dislocated from God, from self, from neighbor, and from nature. But God has entered into our history in Jesus Christ to bring relocation. . . . In true worship our relationship to God is established, maintained, repaired, and transformed.

Robert E. Webber, Planning Blended Worship: the Creative Mixture of Old and New. (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1998), 41, 45.

 

July 7, 2008

Worship is the center of the hourglass, the key to forming the inner life of the Church. Everything the Church does moves toward public worship, and all its ministries proceed from worship.

Robert E. Webber, Planning Blended Worship: the Creative Mixture of Old and New. (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1998), 29.

 

June 30, 2008

In contemporary society the heart is reached through participation, and all approaches to worship—traditional, contemporary, or blended—need to relearn how to achieve services characterized by immersed participation.

Robert E. Webber, Planning Blended Worship: the Creative Mixture of Old and New. (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1998), 29.

 

June 23, 2008

Congregations . . . should recognize the difficulty of leading contemporary worship.  One cannot simply pick up a guitar, assemble contemporary instruments, pick out the right songs, and expect it to go well.  Worship leading requires certain skills, a good grasp of how to accomplish the transitions from one phase to another, an ability to make the right connecting comments between songs, a strong bond with the congregation, and a heart in tune with the Spirit.

Robert E. Webber, Worship Old and New: A Biblical, Historical, and Practical Introduction, rev. ed. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing, 2004), 160.

 

June 16, 2008

Me-oriented worship is the result of a culturally driven worship. When worship is situated in the culture and not in the story of God, worship becomes focused on the self. It becomes narcissistic. . . . Much of our worship has shifted from a focus on God and God’s story to a focus on me and my story (231).

Robert E. Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2006), 231.

 

June 9, 2008

The true love of God and the true experience of God are not found in the languages of experience. . . . We do not contemplate our own experience of God or the romantic feelings we may experience. We contemplate the wonder, the marvel, the mystery, the glory of God creating and becoming incarnate to re-create the whole world and bring it back to himself. Worship is not measured by the depth of my feelings but the deep wonder of the God whose story is so marvelous that it does in fact create feelings of love and gratitude.

Robert E. Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2006), 95.

June 2, 2008

In the early church the public worship of the church was a prayer of praise and thanksgiving directed not to the people but to God. Seeing worship as prayer is a paradigm shift from the current presentational notion of worship. . . . Worship as prayer shapes who we are.

Robert E. Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2006), 234-235.

May 26, 2008

There really is no such thing as an empty symbol or empty language. Language and symbols perform. They say, they do, they act, they communicate, they express the language of the heart. . . . Baptism says what it does, and it does what it says. It discloses our union with Jesus Christ, an embrace that establishes a new identity and opens the window on God’s vision for our life in God’s world.

Robert E. Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2006), 155.

May 19, 2008

The spiritual life is a passionate participation in God imitating the one and only human being fully united to God, Jesus. . . . Since God has already accepted us in Christ, who lifted our humanity up into his, and by the Spirit has done everything necessary to make us acceptable to God, the spiritual life is a freedom to participate in God, not a duty. In Jesus we are born again to become fully human, to be what God created us to be in the first place. So the spiritual life, this marriage we have with God, is an embodied union with God and with his vision for the world revealed to us in Jesus by the Spirit. Our spiritual life, then, is not just a feeling, an idea, or a spiritual romance. No! It is an embodiment of God’s vision for humanity clearly spoken in the words of Jesus and visualized in concrete ways in his action.

Robert E. Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2006), 174-175.

May 12, 2008

Worship does God’s story. It proclaims God’s story in the reading and preaching of the Word; in prayer, the church prays for the world God has reclaimed; in the Eucharist, the church ascends into the heavens and experiences the consummation of God’s story in the new heavens and the new earth.

Robert Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2006), 233.

May 5, 2008

Biblical worship tells and enacts [God’s] story. Narcissistic worship, instead, names God as an object to whom we offer honor, praise, and homage. Narcissistic worship is situated in the worshiper, not in the action of God that the worshiper remembers through Word and table.

Robert Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2006), 232-233.

April 28, 2008

If God is the object of worship, then worship must proceed from me, the subject, to God, who is the object. . . . If God is understood, however, as the personal God who acts as subject in the world and in worship rather that the remote God who sits in the heavens, then worship is understood not as the acts of adoration God demands of me but as the disclosure of Jesus, who has done for me what I cannot do for myself. In this way worship is the doing of God’s story within me so that I live in the pattern of Jesus’s death and resurrection.

Robert Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2006), 232.

April 21, 2008

There is no story but God’s; no God but the Father, Son and Spirit; and no life but the baptized life.

Robert Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2006), 243.

In tribute to our founder and friend, Bob Webber
(November 27, 1933 - April 27, 2007)

Whatever thy hand findeth to do,
do it with all thy might
(Ecclesiastes 9:10).

April 14, 2008

The church needs to be realigned to the intent of Christ, but it does not need to be reinvented. Reinventing the church is what we do when we allow the culture to shape the church. . . . Obviously the church must speak to the culture. It only speaks authentically and with integrity, however, when speaking out of the story of God. The moment the church capitulates to the culture and speaks out of one or more of the culture’s stories and not out of the story of God, the church loses its nature and mission and ceases to be salt and light to the world.

Robert Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2006), 229.

April 7, 2008

Christ is the embodied story of God, the one in whom God became human and showed us what humanity was intended to be. The faithful life is the life that seeks to live the Jesus way.  [Such devotion] means you can count on me to be Jesus to you. And when I fail, which we all do, you can count on me to repent and return to my intent to be faithful to living in the pattern of death and resurrection.

Robert Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2006), 205.

March 31, 2008

Consumers want programs. . . . But nowhere in the Epistles do you find the apostolic writers urging the church to develop programs. Instead all the teaching is about a way of life, and that way of life is taught and caught in the church as it sees itself as the continuation of God’s story in the world. For example, in the spirit of Paul calling us to be imitators of Christ daily, one might ask, “Who am I discipling? Who is discipling me? Am I a disciple of Jesus Christ?”

Robert E. Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2006), 228.

March 24, 2008

The biblical metaphor for Easter spirituality is found in baptism. The baptized life is a life that is lived in the pattern of death and resurrection. . . . The message of Easter is that the way of being in Jesus, the way of living the new resurrected life is through participation. . . . We participate in Christ by living the life of our baptism into his death and resurrection. This is a daily, existential, moment-by-moment experience as we choose in this or that situation to die to the sins for which Christ died and choose the life of the Spirit for which Christ was raised to a new life.

Robert Webber, Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2004), 146-147.

March 17, 2008

Jesus Christ alone provides the solution for which the whole world groans. God defeats evil on the cross for us. He wins a great victory over evil for us. In his resurrection he conquered the results of sin—which is death—so that death is not the last word written over our life. “‘Death, has been swallowed up in victory.’ ‘Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?’ The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God! He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Cor. 15:54-57).

Robert E. Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2006), 135-6.

March 10, 2008

Here then is Christian spirituality: We are spiritual because of God’s divine embrace of humanity and all creation. By his own two hands—the incarnate Word and the Spirit—God’s divine embrace has restored our union with himself for us. He has done for us what we cannot do for ourselves—re-establish the connection with God that we ourselves broke in our rebellion.

Robert E. Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2006), 142.

March 3, 2008
The current crisis of the church is that many define it out of the world’s narrative. In recent years the church has become a business, with Jesus as the commodity to be marketed and advertised. . . . While [this approach] has resulted in numbers, it struggles to form depth. . . . Churches formed by culture will nourish culturally formed Christians. . . . A people shaped by the embrace of God, then, is the alternative to a people shaped by culture."

Robert E. Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2006), 221-222.

February 25, 2008
With whom do you identify? Are you committed to follow the nature of rebellion against God’s purposes for life inherited from Adam, or are you willing to say, “I need to have my nature formed by the second Adam, the one who is in full union with the purpose God has for his creatures and the world”? The question is “With whom do you identify—Adam or Jesus?”  To enter God’s embrace means a continuous turning from Adam-identity to Jesus-identity.

Robert E. Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2006), 151.

February 18, 2008

"Lent is the time to identify a power working against us and crucify it with Christ and bury it in the tomb, never to be raised again. . . . [Fasting] controls the passion for food in order to deal with a passion of another sort that holds us in its grip. The purpose of the ascetical fast is to liberate us from the power that flesh holds over the spirit. . . . For example, a person may fast as a means to experience victory over jealousy, envy, anger, lust, lack of integrity. . . . The ascetical fast that deals with an issue of character development requires choice and intention on our part. We have to exercise the power of our own will over against the powers of evil that continually draw us into habits of life that are contrary to the gospel."

Robert Webber, Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2004), 114-115.

February 11, 2008

“We are not spiritual because we practice the disciplines or use pious words but because we are united to Jesus who has restored our union with God. So our goal is never to become spiritual but to live out the spirituality we have in Jesus through the choices that spring forth from continually living in God’s embrace affirmed in baptism. Look at [the] disciplines . . . not as sources of spirituality but as disciplines that help us fulfill the spiritual life to which we have been called in Christ."

Robert E. Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2006), 207.

February 4, 2008

“Lent . . . calls us back to God, back to basics, back to the spiritual realities of life. It calls on us to put to death the sin and the indifference we have in our hearts toward God and our fellow persons. And it beckons us to enter once again into the joy of the Lord—the joy of a new life born out of a death to the old life. This is what Ash Wednesday is all about—the fundamental change of life required of those who would die with Jesus and be raised to a new life in him.”

Robert Webber, Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2004), 99-100.

January 28, 2008

“Christian spirituality is not a journey into self as if spirituality is found in the deep recesses of our nature, hidden inside of us, waiting for release. No, true Christian spirituality is the embrace of Jesus, who, united to God, restores our union with God that we lost because of sin. This is how the ancient church understood God’s embrace.”

Robert E. Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2006), 127.

January 21, 2008

When someone asks me the question, “Do you have a personal relationship with God?” I always answer, “You’re asking the wrong question. What is important here is not that I in and of myself achieve or create a personal relationship with God, but that God has a personal relationship with me through Jesus Christ, which I affirm and nourish.”

Robert E. Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2006), 89.

January 14, 2008

“We are the disciples whom Jesus has called . . . to turn away from self-love and self-service, to abandon a life lived for self-gratification or self-glory, and to serve God as an epiphany of the self-giving service of Jesus. True spirituality longs for, seeks for, and wills this abandonment of self so that Christ may become present through our work, our lives, and our relationships, manifesting his power.

Robert Webber, Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2004), 88.

January 7, 2008

“Between the wedding feast in Cana and the impending death of Jesus, a progressive unveiling of his glory will appear. The season of Epiphany . . . celebrates this progressive unveiling of God’s glory manifest in Jesus and invites us to order our spiritual journey around the Christ manifest in history, manifest in us. . . . Spirituality is Christ living his life in us and through us.  The manifestation of the glory of God made present in Jesus is to continue in his followers.”

Robert Webber, Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2004), 85-86.

December 31, 2007

Bob recounts attending his first Epiphany service: “I realized that an epiphany was occurring for me right there in the service of worship.  I was seeing the glory of God in Christ face-to-face. This manifestation, this epiphany, was not to be a thing of the past, something that happened two thousand years ago, but was to be an appearance now in the body of Christ assembled, an epiphany in me.  I had been called from light to darkness, and now I was to be a manifestation of Christ.  My part was to respond, to say yes to the calling, to commit my life to be a center through which the Epiphany could be extended beyond the crib to the world of my everyday experience."

Robert Webber, Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2004), 79.

December 24, 2007

“The incarnation is the starting point for our spirituality. . . . God united himself with humans in order for men and women to be united with God. The incarnation is not something unrelated to us; it has everything to do with our spirituality—for the incarnation not only brings God to human nature but brings human nature to God."

Robert Webber, Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2004), 62.

December 17, 2007

“Advent is the time when God breaks in on us with new surprises and touches us with a renewing and restoring power. . . . We should use the Advent season as a period to identify the matters from which we need to be redeemed. Identify whatever it is that seems to be holding you in its power. . . . Commit it to the one who comes to set the prisoners free, turn it over to Christ in prayer, and ask the one who has come into your life to take this problem up into himself."

Robert Webber, Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2004), 38, 51.

December 10, 2007

“God’s story is the brief interpretation of everything. It is . . . a true picture of the world and our place in it. And through this picture we hear the voice of God who says . . . “I opened the way for you to live in my embrace of you and the world. Through my Son Jesus and by my Spirit I have embraced you so that now, united with me, you may embrace me as a child learns to embrace a mother because the mother first embraced the child. Now go and live the spiritual life, embrace me and my purpose in creating you and putting you in this world to be the priests of my creation. Make your life and this world the theater of my glory”

Robert E. Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2006), 142.

December 3, 2007

"Experience in worship is not my immediate pleasure or even my immediate response. The focus of experience is not on my experience of God but on how God as the subject of worship forms me through word and sacrament and thereby changes my life. I have been in one too many worship services where the focus was cheerleading for Jesus. . . . Worshipers are not a cheering section for God. The problem with this kind of worship is not only that it is an accommodation to culture but that it is also a severe example of self-situated spirituality."

Robert E. Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2006), 94-95.

November 26, 2007

“The heart of biblical and ancient Christian spirituality is our mystical union with God accomplished by Jesus Christ through the Spirit. God unites with humanity in his saving incarnation, death, and resurrection. We unite with God as we receive his new life within us."

Robert E. Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2006), 16.

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The Robert E. Webber Institute for Worship Studies
Forming servant leaders in worship renewal

151 Kingsley Avenue  ? Orange Park, FL 32073
Phone 800.282.2977