51 Inspiring Worship Quotes

Are you seeking a source of inspiration to enhance your spiritual journey? Worship quotes hold the power to uplift, motivate, and deepen your connection with the divine. In this exploration, we delve into a curated collection of 51 inspiring worship quotes that resonate with the essence of praise and devotion. Whether you're seeking to enrich your personal prayer routine, encourage your faith community, or simply find solace in moments of solitude, these quotes offer timeless wisdom and profound insights. Join us as we embark on a journey through words that illuminate and elevate the spirit, offering a wellspring of encouragement and reflection.

1. “The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful.” - Edward Gibbon

2. “Our great mistake in education is, as it seems to me, the worship of book-learning–the confusion of instruction and education. We strain the memory instead of cultivating the mind. The children in our elementary schools are wearied by the mechanical act of writing, and the interminable intricacies of spelling; they are oppressed by columns of dates, by lists of kings and places, which convey no definite idea to their minds, and have no near relation to their daily wants and occupations; while in our public schools the same unfortunate results are produced by the weary monotony of Latin and Greek grammar. We ought to follow exactly the opposite course with children–to give them a wholesome variety of mental food, and endeavor to cultivate their tastes, rather than to fill their minds with dry facts. The important thing is not so much that every child should be taught, as that every child should be given the wish to learn. What does it matter if the pupil know a little more or a little less? A boy who leaves school knowing much, but hating his lessons, will soon have forgotten almost all he ever learned; while another who had acquired a thirst for knowledge, even if he had learned little, would soon teach himself more than the first ever knew.” - John Lubbock

3. “The Seven Social Sins are: Wealth without work. Pleasure without conscience. Knowledge without character. Commerce without morality. Science without humanity. Worship without sacrifice. Politics without principle.From a sermon given by Frederick Lewis Donaldson in Westminster Abbey, London, on March 20, 1925.” - Frederick Lewis Donaldson

4. “To hate man and worship God seems to be the sum of all the creeds.” - Robert Ingersoll

5. “Worship is not love.” - Donald Hall

6. “It does not answer the aim which God had in this institution, merely for men to have good commentaries and expositions on the Scripture, and other good books of divinity; because, although these may tend, as well as preaching, to give a good doctrinal or speculative understanding of the word of God, yet they have not an equal tendency to impress them on men's hearts and affections. God hath appointed a particular and lively application of his word, in the preaching of it, as a fit means to affect sinners with the importance of religion, their own misery, the necessity of a remedy, and the glory and sufficiency of a remedy provided; to stir up the pure minds of the saints, quicken their affections by often bringing the great things of religion in their remembrance, and setting them in their proper colours, though they know them, and have been fully instructed in them already. ” - Jonathan Edwards

7. “If there is no laughter, Jesus has gone somewhere else. If there is no joy and freedom, it is not a church: it is simply a crowd of melancholy people basking in a religious neurosis. If there is no celebration, there is no real worship.” - Steve Brown

8. “(Life) it was a little bit nearer than God, but no less powerful and terrible. Yes, it was something, perhaps, that one did not wish to understand because one feared it, something to which one paid tribute lest it should feel offended and seize one, body and soul.” - Arthur Holitscher

9. “God created us for this: to live our lives in a way that makes him look more like the greatness and the beauty and the infinite worth that he really is. This is what it means to be created in the image of God.” - John Piper

10. “It was not intended as a compliment. It was a confession. Now that I have made it, something seems to have gone out of me. Perhaps one should never put one's worship into words.” - Oscar Wilde

11. “With their backs to the sunrise they worship the night.” - Robert G. Ingersoll

12. “The glory of God is the living man, but the life of man is the vision of God', says St. Irenaeus, getting to the heart of what happens when man meets God on the mountain in the wilderness. Ultimately, it is the very life of man, man himself as living righteously, that is the true worship of God, but life only becomes real life when it receives its form from looking toward God.” - Pope Benedict XVI (Joseph Ratzinger)

13. “Worship is the proper response of all moral, sentient beings to God, ascribing all honor and worth to their Creator-God precisely because he is worthy, delightfully so.” - D.A. Carson

14. “The happiest man is he who learns from nature the lesson of worship” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

15. “Many Spirit-filled authors have exhausted the thesaurus in order to describe God with the glory He deserves. His perfect holiness, by definition, assures us that our words can't contain Him. Isn't it a comfort to worship a God we cannot exaggerate?” - Francis Chan

16. “Sometimes I go to God and say, "God, if Thou dost never answer another prayer while I live on this earth, I will still worship Thee as long as I live and in the ages to come for what Thou hast done already. God’s already put me so far in debt that if I were to live one million millenniums I couldn’t pay Him for what He’s done for me.” - A.W. Tozer

17. “I can safely say, on the authority of all that is revealed in the Word of God, that any man or woman on this earth who is bored and turned off by worship is not ready for heaven.” - A.W. Tozer

18. “The Christian religion is a parody on the worship of the sun, in which they put a man called Christ in the place of the sun, and pay him the adoration originally payed to the sun.” - Thomas Paine

19. “It’s not the art, it’s the heart. What [God] reads during our worship is the inner attitude. Worship is spiritual; it’s organic; it’s relational.” - LaMar Boschman

20. “And don't waste time worshipping Harmony. Doing good was the worship.” - Brandon Sanderson

21. “Every source of blessing is a point of attack.” - David McGee

22. “Without art, we should have no notion of the sacred; without science, we should always worship false gods.” - W.H. Auden

23. “When we dedicate our talent to serving a neighbor, it is possibly one of the highest forms of worship; something sacred transpires when we sacrifice our time and dedicate our God-given loves and talents to one another.” - Matt Litton

24. “You never go away from us, yet we have difficulty in returning to You. Come, Lord, stir us up and call us back. Kindle and seize us. Be our fire and our sweetness. Let us love. Let us run.” - St. Augustine of Hippo

25. “Oh thrice fools are we who like new-born princes weeping in the cradle know not that there is a kingdom before them then let our Lord's sweet hand square us and hammer us and strike off the knots of pride self-love and world-worship and infidelity that He may make us stones and pillars in His Father's house.” - Samuel Rutherford

26. “You will never cease to be the most amazed person on earth at what God has done for you on the inside.” - Oswald Chambers

27. “I didn't just hear music. It seemed as if I were part of the music.” - Don Piper

28. “Submission, when it is submission to the truth — and when the truth is known to be both beautiful and merciful — has nothing in common with fatalism or stoicism as these terms are understood in the Western tradition, because its motivation is different. According to Fakhr ad-Din ar-RazT, one of the great commentators upon the Quran: The worship of the eyes isweeping, the worship of the ears is listening, the worship of the tongue is praise, the worship of the hands is giving, the worship of the body is effort, the worship of the heart is fear and hope, and the worship of the spirit is surrender and satisfaction in Allah.” - Fakhr ad-Din ar-Razi, Gai Eaton

29. “Aeneas' mother is a star?""No; a goddess."I said cautiously, "Venus is the power that we invoke in spring, in the garden, when things begin growing. And we call the evening star Venus."He thought it over. Perhaps having grown up in the country, among pagans like me, helped him understand my bewilderment. "So do we, he said. "But Venus also became more...With the help of the Greeks. They call her Aphrodite...There was a great poet who praised her in Latin. Delight of men and gods, he called her, dear nurturer. Under the sliding star signs she fills the ship-laden sea and the fruitful earth with her being; through her the generations are conceived and rise up to see the sun; from her the storm clouds flee; to her the earth, the skillful maker, offers flowers. The wide levels of the sea smile at her, and all the quiet sky shines and streams with light..."It was the Venus I had prayed to, it was my prayer, though I had no such words. They filled my eyes with tears and my heart with inexpressible joy.” - Ursula K. Le Guin

30. “Long looking with admiration produces change. From your heroes you pick up mannerisms and phrases and tones of voice and facial expressions and habits and demeanors and convictions and beliefs. The more admirable the hero is and the more intense your admiration is, the more profound will be your transformation. In the case of Jesus, he is infinitely admirable, and our admiration rises to the most absolute worship. Therefore, when we behold him as we should, the change is profound.” - John Piper

31. “Although there are things that can be done to enhance corporate worship, there is a profound sense in which excellent worship cannot be attained merely by pursuing excellent worship. In the same way that, according to Jesus, you cannot find yourself until you lose yourself, so also you cannot find excellent corporate worship until you stop trying to find excellent corporate worship and pursue God himself. Despite the protestations, one sometimes wonders if we are beginning to worship worship rather than worship God. As a brother put it to me, it’s a bit like those who begin by admiring the sunset and soon begin to admire themselves admiring the sunset.” - D.A. Carson

32. “Most of the church landscape in my lifetime has been heavily invested in trying to do something for Jerry or Sherri or some other icon of unchurchness. The problem is that they have been only about themselves from the moment they could wail for their mothers, and the decision to give them at church what they can find in any self-help book appears now as a choice to abandon the One in whose honor the church gathers. What they need is to be set free from themselves with finality and to be lost in the awesome wonder of the manifest presence of God. It was never God’s desire that He would sit on the sideline and watch us frantically devise impressive ways to reach people or simply hold the line on orthodoxy as though faithfulness can exist in a vacuum apart from fruitfulness. God is the Matter of first importance! Can you say that about your current weekly encounter with church?” - James MacDonald

33. “Let God Himself be the main attraction at church again, and let us be tireless in our insistence that church is for God, about God, through God, and to the glory of His great Son.” - James MacDonald

34. “Christians—who have no patience with Darwinistic materialism—often sound as progressive as the most ardent evolutionist. They look for “new” theologies, “new” ways of worship, and “new” music, being quite willing to toss out their entire “old-fashioned” Christian heritage.” - Gene Edward Veith

35. “I always have the feeling we are merely fearfully trying to save room for God; I would rather speak of God at the center than at the limits, in strength rather than weakness, and thus in human life and goodness rather than in death and guilt.” - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

36. “Every man becomes the image of the God he adores.He whose worship is directed to a dead thing becomes dead.He who loves corruption rots.He who loves a shadow becomes, himself, a shadow. He who loves things that must perish lives in dread of their perishing.” - Thomas Merton

37. “God thundered again and again through the prophets that worship in the context of mistreatment of the poor and disadvantaged is an outrage.” - Ronald J. Sider

38. “Jesus lived a life of deep meditation. If thoughts and words were physical objects, meditation would be the act of holding, examining, taking apart, tasting, smelling, listening to, and savoring in order to study and become one.” - amy litzelman

39. “They no longer wanted to entice anyone; all they wanted was to catch a glimpse for as long as possible of the reflected glory in the great eyes of Odysseus” - Franz Kafka

40. “The noise around us determines how we speak. And how we listen. Just as a conversation suffers in a war zone, art suffers in a culture built on noise. So does our enjoyment of it.” - Michael Gungor

41. “Let us be so taken up with the knowledge of God's goodness and the desire to fellowship with Him that our emotions are warmed and our outer man reflects great love. Although we must not seek emotional experiences for their own sake, we must not shun them merely because others misuse them or ignore God's instructions on worship.” - Elyse Fitzpatrick

42. “...is worship too strong a word? yes, I worship you - to worship is to give worth to something – isn’t that what love is all about?...” - John Geddes

43. “...why do people venerate Einstein or Bill Gates? Clive Bell explains: Genius worship is the inevitable sign of an uncreative age....” - John Geddes

44. “Worship is giving God the best that He has given you. Be careful what you do with the best you have, Whenever you get a blessing from God, give it back to Him as a love gift. Take time to meditate before God and offer the blessing back to Him in a deliberate act of worship.” - Oswald Chambers

45. “God directs his people not simply to worship but to sing his praises “before the nations.” We are called not simply to communicate the gospel to nonbelievers; we must also intentionally celebrate the gospel before them.” - Timothy Keller

46. “Earlier in this century someone claimed that we work at our play and play at our work. Today the confusion has deepened: we worship our work, work at our play, and play in our worship.” - Leland Ryken

47. “The solution to our human frailty is not to try harder, but to turn Godward.” - Dillon Burroughs

48. “Our worship of God is not a part of our lives; worship is our lives.” - Dillon Burroughs

49. “It is when we experience God most closely that our hearts burn most passionately to show his compassion to others.” - Dillon Burroughs

50. “Divine worship means the same thing where time is concerned, as the temple where space is concerned. "Temple" means... that a particular piece of ground is specially reserved, and marked off from the remainder of the land which is used either for agriculture or habitation... Similarly in divine worship a certain definite space of time is set aside from working hours and days... and like the space allotted to the temple, is not used, is withdrawn from all merely utilitarian ends.” - Josef Pieper

51. “The vacancy left by absence of worship is filled by mere killing of time and by boredom, which is directly related to inability to enjoy leisure; for one can only be bored if the spiritual power to be leisurely has been lost. There is an entry in Baudelaire... "One must work, if not from taste then at least from despair. For, to reduce everything to a single truth: work is less boring than pleasure.” - Josef Pieper