Christian worship is the united outpouring of thanks and blessing to God and the Lamb from hearts purified by faith, who have the knowledge of the Father and Son by the power of the Holy Spirit and who therefore draw near in the happy confidence of His love, in the confessed delight and enjoyment of what God is, and in the praise of what He is and of what He is to them.
Any of you, children of God, who are not seeking to take the place given you by the word of the Lord, of true worshippers worshipping the Father, are losing your time upon the earth in forgetfulness of your sweetest privileges. No one dictates to you; you are not advised where to go, what to do, with whom to consort, but this only-consult as to it the Word of God for yourselves. If you be afraid of the test, if you are unwilling to follow its direction, you have not avoided a bad conscience. Remember what you are sanctified for. Let nothing be so prized as the glory of Christ, nothing so authoritative as the revealed will of the Lord.
Let me press this also upon you, as self-evident, that if you are mingled, Christians and non-Christians, men of the world and believers in Christ together, there cannot be worship in spirit and in truth. There never was, since the Lord announced its nature, real Christian worship where such mixture exists. The effect of the attempt is, not that worldly persons are raised upward to the ground and power of worship in spirit and in truth, but that Christians must go down to the atmosphere of the worldly. That is to say, you abandon (and for what? or on whose authority?) all your own proper privileges. [50]