Worship is a Totalizing Activity

“Worship is adoration of, devotion to and complete submission to God. Right worship strives to relate all human desire and activity to God; it is an exercise in reorientation toward one all-sufficient end. All human desires and activities are put into question: How does this love, this commitment, this activity avow or disavow, affirm or disclaim my relationship to God as the fundamental expression of my identity and destiny?

"Worship is therefore a totalizing activity; it demands that everything in a person's life be put in the dock before God, interrogated by one standard and consequently renounced or reordered.

"This is why the form of worship is prayer. In confession we repent of that in us that does not conduce to love of God, and in praise and intercession we reorder our vision and our desires to the love of God. The end of right worship is that everything be taken captive for Christ, that our lives as Christians be the expression of one unceasing prayer to God.”


-- Kent Dunnington. Addiction and Virtue: Beyond the Models of Disease and Choice (Strategic Initiatives in Evangelical Theology) (Kindle Locations 1717-1719). Kindle Edition.