“In worship God gathers his people to himself as center. Worship is
meeting at the center so that our lives are centered in God and not lived
eccentrically. We worship so that we live in response to and from this
center, the Living God. Failure to worship consigns us to a life of spasms
and jerks, at the mercy of every advertisement, every seduction, every
siren. Without worship we live manipulated and manipulating lives. We
move in either frightened panic or deluded lethargy as we are, in turn,
alarmed by specters and soothed by placebos. If there is no center, there is
no circumference. People who do not worship are swept into a vast
restlessness, epidemic in the world, with no steady direction and no
sustaining purpose…Life lurches from on partial satisfaction to another,
interrupted by ditches of disappointment. Motion is fueled by the
successive illusions that purchasing this wardrobe, driving that car, eating
this meal, drinking that beverage will center life and give it coherence.”
Eugene Peterson, Reversed Thunder, 60