This past Sunday, we worked through Hannah’s song (or prayer) in 1 Samuel 2:1–11.  And in doing so we began to unpack the nature of worship – specifically the fact that all of us are created as worshipers.  At the outset of the sermon, I referenced one (of what I think) is the most helpful books I’ve read on the nature of spiritual formation (i.e. discipleship) entitled You Are What You Love.  

In it - Author James K.A. Smith unpacks this spiritual reality that exists in all of us: that we are created to love ultimately and what we love ultimately is what we worship.  The following are a few quotes and excerpts from this book that are immensely helpful and vital for understanding who we are as worshipers but how we’ve been created specifically to worship One thing…or person…Jesus.

“Our wants and longings and desires are at the core of our identity, the wellspring from which our actions and behaviour flow.  Our wants reverberate from our heart, the epicenter of the human person (Prov. 4:23)...So discipleship is more a matter of hungering and thirsting than of knowing and believing.  Jesus’s command to follow him is a command to align our loves and longings with his–to want what God wants, to desire what God desires, to hunger and thirst after God and crave a word where he is all in all–a vision encapsulated by the shorthand ‘the kingdom of God.’  Jesus is a teacher who doesn’t just inform our intellect but forms our very loves.  He isn’t content to simply deposit new ideas into your mind; he is after nothing less than your wants, your loves, your longings.”

“To be human is to be a lover and to love something ultimate.  But we will only fully appreciate the significance of this for discipleship if we also recognize that such love is a kind of subconscious desire that operates without our thinking about it…love as our most fundamental orientation to the world–is less a conscious choice and more like a baseline inclination, a default orientation that generates the choices we make...In short, if you are what you love, and love is a habit, then discipleship is a rehabituation of your loves.  This means that discipleship is more a matter of reformation than of acquiring information.”

“Yes, Christian formation is a life-encompassing, Monday through Saturday, week in and week out project; but it radiates from, and is nourished by, the worship life of the congregation gathered around Word and Table.  There is no sanctification without the church, not because some building holds a superstitious magic, but rather because the church is the very body of Christ, animated by the Spirit of God and composed of Spirited practices.”

“Worship isn’t just something we do; it is where God does something to us.  Worship is the heart of discipleship because it is the gymnasium in which God retrains our hearts.”

“You could have Bible ‘inputs’ every day and yet still have a household whose frantic rhythms are humming along with the consumerist myth of production and consumption.  You might have Bible verses on the wall in every room of the house and yet the unspoken rituals reinforce self-centeredness rather than sacrifice.  Thus each household and family does well to take an audit of its daily routines, looking at them through the liturgical lens.  What Story is carried in those rhythms?  What vision of the good life is carried in those practices?  What sorts of people are made by immersion in these cultural liturgies…Having critically assessed the routines we’re caught up in, we can then attend ore intentionally to recalibrating countermeasures.”

“Worship ends with sending: we are gathered by the grace of our (re)creating God in order to become the image bearers he created us to be, precisely so we can be sent into his world as ambassadors of reconciliation (2 Cor. 5:17-20).  The God who is love reorders our loves, bending our deepest desires back toward himself, so that we might rightly love our neighbors for his sake.”