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Soul-worship!
What is most needed in all religious exercises
is the motion and exercise of the soul.
'Soul-worship' is the soul of worship, and
if you take away
the soul from the worship, you have killed the worship;
it becomes dead and barren.
There are 'professors' who are perfectly content if they have
gone through the 'mechanical' part of public devotion. If they
have occupied their seats, joined in the hymns and the prayers,
and listened to the preaching, they go away quite content and easy.
They would not like to be absent from the solemn assembly, and
their conscience would prick them if they neglected the outward
ordinances, but having gone through them, and complied with the
'expected form', they are perfectly content with themselves,
and think they have done that which is lawful and right, lovely
and excellent.
Now, it is never so with the child of God.
If his soul is awakened from the torpor of death, and his
sensibilities quickened into the vigor of life, he will feel
that, unless in the song he has really praised God in strains
of gratitude with emotions of thankfulness, he has rather
mocked his heavenly Father than acceptably adored him.
He knows that prayer, if it is not the soul that speaks with God,
is but the 'carcass of prayer', destitute alike of the sweet savor
which can find acceptance with God, and of the sweet satisfaction
that can bring refreshment to one's own breast.
When he hears the word preached, he longs to feel it penetrate
his heart, even as the rain soaks into the soil.
Beloved, in our public services we ought to account nothing
truly and rightly done which is not done with the heart.
Heartless worship is unacceptable to God- He cannot receive it.
If we have not thrown our heart into it, depend upon it God
will never take it to his heart and be pleased with it.
Only that prayer which comes from our heart can get to God's heart.
If we pray only from the lips, or from the throat, and not low down
from the very affections of our nature, we shall never reach the
affections of our Father who is in heaven.
I am afraid we may get satisfied with ourselves, especially if we
are regular in private Scripture reading, private prayer, family
prayer, and public prayer, while instead of being satisfied with
these exercises we ought to be weeping over them and deploring the
formal and heartless manner in which we are prone to discharge them.
Be it always recollected that we do not pray at all, unless
the soul is drawn out in pleading and beseeching the Lord.
With every kind of religious exercise, 'the soul' is the
standard of the whole compass of worship.
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