Great Quotes from A Taste of Heaven

I recently had the opportunity to read through almost all of the books of R.C. Sproul. Along the way I built a collection of some of the best quotes from each one of them. Here are 6 of the best from A Taste of Heaven.

The worship to which we are called in our renewed state is far too important to be left to personal preferences, to whims, or to marketing strategies. It is the pleasing of God that is at the heart of worship. Therefore, our worship must be informed at every point by the Word of God as we seek God’s own instructions for worship that is pleasing to Him.

I’ve never been tortured or put on trial for my faith. The persecution I’ve had to endure in this world is minuscule compared to what the heroes of the faith went through. But whatever persecution I have known in my life, the heaviest weight of it has come from the false church, that part of the church that does not believe the gospel and has no heart for worship.

Do we think of our church buildings today in principal terms as being houses of prayer? When we talk as evangelicals about prayer, we can almost assume that the conversation will be about private and personal prayer, quiet times, daily devotions, or perhaps the Wednesday night prayer meeting where we gather with other Christians to pray. But it’s almost completely outside the scope of consideration when we talk about prayer to think about it in terms of the sanctuary. The typical Protestant church building today can hardly be called a house of prayer.

You can grieve for me the week before I die, if I’m scared and hurting, but when I gasp that last fleeting breath and my immortal soul flees to heaven, I’m going to be jumping over fire hydrants down the golden streets, and my biggest concern, if I have any, will be my wife back here grieving. When I die, I will be identified with Christ’s exaltation. But right now, I’m identified with His affliction.

The real crisis of worship today is not that the preaching is paltry or that it’s too drafty in church. It is that people have no sense of the presence of God, and if they have no sense of His presence, how can they be moved to express the deepest feelings of their souls to honor, revere, worship, and glorify God?

It would be the nadir of arrogance to assume that all the good music, the kind that is suitable to be used in the church, has already been composed, and that only the innovations of the past are worthwhile for worship. We can’t determine the aesthetic value of music based upon how long ago it was written or composed. It is also a mistake to think that the only good music is new music, and that if it isn’t new, it isn’t good.