The Place of Jesus Christ in Worship

With the unmistakable emphasis that the letter to the Colossians has on Jesus Christ (as we have seen at THE VILLAGE), i thought i would share something that was transformational in my understanding of worship. If you ever have an opportunity to pick up the book WORSHIP, COMMUNITY & THE TRIUNE GOD OF GRACE (by James B. Torrance), it's well worth the read. But here's a brief section from the introduction that was invaluable to me:

"Our chief end is to glorify God and creation realizes its own creaturely glory in glorifying God through human lips. But nature fails in its realization because of our human failure. Instead of singing songs of joy, the whole creation groans in universal travail, waiting for the fulfillment of God's purposes in human lives. Does God then abandon his purposes for humanity and for all his creatures? Does God leave all nature to be subject to vanity and futility - to be ruthlessly exploited and abused - and forget he has made us in his image for a life of communion and shared stewardship? The good news is that God comes to us in Jesus to stand in for us and bring to fulfillment his purposes of worship and communion. Jesus comes to be the priest of creation to do for us, men and women, what we failed to do, to offer to the Father the worship and the praise we failed to offer, to glorify God by a life of perfect love and obedience, to be the one true servant of the Lord. In him and through him we are renewed by the Spirit in the image of God and in the worship of God in a life of shared communion. Jesus comes as our brother to be our great high priest, to carry on his loving heart the joys, the sorrows, the prayers, the conflicts of all his creatures, to reconcile all things to God, and to intercede for all nations as our eternal mediator and advocate. He comes to stand in for us in the presence of the Father, when in our failure and bewilderment we do not know how to pray as we ought to, or forget to pray altogether. By his Spirit he helps us in our infirmities. As the head of all things, by whom and for whom all things were created, he makes us his body, and calls us to be a royal priesthood offering spiritual sacrifices. He calls us that we might be identified with him by the Spirit, not only in his communion with the Father, but also in his great priestly work and ministry of intercession, that our prayers on earth might be the echo of his prayers in heaven. Whatever else our worship is, it is our liturgical amen to the worship of Christ...Christian worship is, therefore, our participation through the Spirit in the Son's communion with the Father, in his vicarious life of worship and intercession"(p. 13-15, italics added).