Ch3 - worship.

Reading this chapter on worship has left me feeling partly somber and partly refreshed. It starts off with the encounter of Jesus with a Samaritan woman at a well, found in John 4. In verses 13-14, Jesus says to the woman, "Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life."
I definitely know what it feels like to thirst. Especially with the sickness I've been nursing for the past 3 weeks, I wake up with a mouth that feels like I'd been eating cotton balls all night, and a tongue of sandpaper. Throughout the day, sips of water soothe my throat and suppress my rattling cough. The word I use most often to describe this state is parched. Not just dry... but cracked, withered... desperate for a drink of water.
Even though I told this story before at Bible Summer camp, I felt more involved when I was reading it this time. I could identify a lot more with the Samaritan woman... I could see myself in her shoes, talking with Jesus, bluntly thinking about literal water, when all the time, the Son of Man is trying to tell me about eternal life. And then what joy she must have felt when she realized!
How I would like to long for a drink of Living Water. I am familiar with physical thirst, and now also recognize the spiritual thirst in my life. My soul is not quite panting after the Lord right now... But I'll get there.

The lowest stage of worship--where all genuine worship starts, and where it often returns for a dark season--is the barrenness of the soul that scarcely feels any longing, and yet is still granted the grace of repentant sorrow for having so little love... God surely is more glorified when we delight in His magnificence than when we are so unmoved by it that we scarcely feel anything and only wish we could. Yet He is also glorified by the spark of anticipated gladness that gives rise to the sorrow we feel when our hearts are lukewarm. Even in the miserable guilt we feel over our beastlike insensitivity, the glory of God shines.

-John Piper