Revelation 4-5 describe a vision of God’s throne around which are crowded a host of worshipers.  In speaking of this passage and its image of worship, Eugene Peterson puts these thoughts out there…

“In worship God gathers his people to himself as center.  Worship is a meeting at the center so that our live 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 spectres 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.” (taken from “Reverse Thunder”, p. 60)

Worship as more than ritual, music, or sermon… Eugene, surely you jest!  No, surely you’re dead on!  And I need some of that in my life pretty much every day I wake up.

On the other days, I can get by without it.