The Highway Forums Announcements What's New on The Highway website? "The Puritan Approach to Worship" by J.I. Packer

It is sometimes said that evangelicals are not interested in worship. If by worship one means the technicalities of liturgical study, this may be true. But I do not suppose that I am the only evangelical who finds that the actual exercise of worship, the deliberate lifting of one’s eyes from man and his mistakes to contemplate God and his glory, grows increasingly precious as the years go by, and brings solace and refreshment to the spirit in a way that nothing else can do. Certainly, this was the experience of the great Puritans; and what I want to do is to allow them to share it with us, and lead us deeper into the enjoyment of it for ourselves. Hence my choice of the word “approach” in my title. We are to follow the Puritans in the approach to worship, which was, as we shall see, itself an approach to God. My main concern is thus not with the controversies about worship which divided the Puritans both from Anglican officialdom and from each other, but rather with the view of the nature of worship, and of the principles from practising it, on which in fact they were all agreed.