Do not flatter yourselves: if you go to places of worship merely to look about you or to hear music, you are not worshipping God.
Interpretation
Superficial engagement with worship is not true worship.
This quote by Charles Spurgeon emphasizes the importance of sincerity in worship. It suggests that attending places of worship for entertainment or aesthetic pleasure, rather than genuine devotion and reverence towards God, detracts from the true purpose of worship and renders it meaningless.
In practice
During a sermon on genuine devotion, this quote could illustrate the importance of heartfelt worship.
Amusement should be used to do us good “like a medicine”: it must never be used as the food of the man...Many have had all holy thoughts and gracious resolutions stamped out by perpetual trifling. Pleasure so called is the murderer of thought. This is the age of excessive amusement: everybody craves for it, like a babe for its rattle.
When you see no present advantage, walk by faith and not by sight. Do God the honor to trust Him when it comes to matters of loss for the sake of principle.
It is far easier to fight with sin in public than to pray against it in private.
You will never glory in God till first of all God has killed your glorying in yourself.
After faith comes repentance, or, rather, repentance is faith's twin brother and is born at the same time.
["All the paths of the Lord are mercy and truth unto such as keep his covenant."] The original Hebrew word that has been translated "paths" means "well-worn roads' or "wheel tracks," such ruts as wagons make when they go down our green roads in wet weather and sink in up to the axles. God's ways are at times like heavy wagon tracks that cut deep into our souls, yet all of them are merciful.
I am and always will be a Muslim. My religion is Islam.
I have no other wish in this world but to find light and joy and peace through Hinduism.
Let us love God my brothers, let us love God. But let it be with the strength of our arms and the sweat of our brow.
For every Christian, the proclamation and witnessing of the Gospel are never an isolated act. This is important. For every Christian the proclamation and witnessing of the Gospel are never an isolated or group act, and no evangelizers acts, as Paul VI reminded very well, "on the strength of a personal inspiration, but in union with the mission of the Church and in her name"
When you leave a man alone with his Bible and the Holy Ghost inspires him, he's going to be a Catholic one way or another, even though he knows nothing about the visible church. His kind of Christianity may not be socially desirable, but will be real in the sight of God.
The fact that I am a woman does not make me a different kind of Christian, but the fact that I am a Christian makes me a different kind of woman.
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