“The single most important activity of your life is to worship God. You were made for this – to offer your whole life, in all its parts, as a hymn of praise to the Lord. When the psalmist says: “Praise the Lord, O my soul; all my inmost being, praise His holy name” (Ps. 103:1), he is speaking as a spiritual athlete in peak condition; his entire life is unreservedly directed to the Lord in praise; whole-heartedness of devotion to God is his most obvious characteristic.”
” I am struck by the lack of biblical literacy from virtually every voice in this discussion. Let me start with Christians. It seems that we have little sense about what politics does and does not achieve. My brothers and sisters, “we won” is not an appropriate response. Patting ourselves on the back is silly. Moving forward with anything less than continual proclamation of the gospel of the Kingdom of Jesus Christ with the somber realization of the lostness we face is simply missing the point. Politics does not bring victory over sin, death, hell, and the grave – Jesus does. Laws do not change people’s hearts – the Spirit of Christ does. Elections will not bring this country to be a picture of God’s Kingdom – God the Father and his electing purposes will do so when he sends his Son to restore all things at the end of the age. Don’t get me wrong, we ought to vote in a way that reflects God’s Kingdom, and in doing so perhaps some will be confronted with the reality of God and his created order. But please don’t act like temporal laws in a temporal government will ever bring about the true spiritual change that’s needed to redeem hearts, minds, souls, and bodies for Christ.”
When it comes to a waste of beauty, I can think of many examples. One would be the dismantlement and disappearance of the The Phelps Organ in Christ Chapel,
At the time it was installed in 1978, the organ was the largest mechanical action organ in the United States. It was a massive instrument that thundered and whispered with power and beauty.
In 1998 after water and neglect had damaged the organ, there was a move to repair it and then:
“On December 2, 1998, twelve years of silence ended as the organ sounded once again during chapel amidst cheers from the student body. (Mr.) Tracy Russell, the new organist, accompanied the singing of the hymn that morning: Amazing grace, how sweet the sound.
“I’m very thrilled to see it and hear it being used again,” Celestino said. “From the beginning,” when plans to make repairs were announced, “the reaction from the students has been very positive,” he said. In talking with students, he added, “some thought (the organ) was for visual benefit only, because they’d never heard it. It never dawned on them that it made music.” (Story Link)
Never dawned on them that it made music? University, right?
Nine years later in 2007, pictures showed the organ hidden behind banners and a massive video projection screen. When I was there last February it was no where to be seen. Blue curtains and bland panels covered the space and the grand organ was said to have been dismantled, put into storage and put on sale.
Bill McConnell was chapel organist for the 1999-2000 school year while he was full-time Minister of Music at St. Dunstan’s Episcopal Church in Tulsa and teaching part-time at ORU. He says:
I don’t know that the instrument has been dismantled (it might have been, I just don’t know for sure). It just makes me very sad that funds were spent to build this magnificent instrument, it was allowed to deteriorate once and then restored, and then was allowed to deteriorate again. It is an incredibly poor example of stewardship to use funds for a project of this size and complexity that you haven’t made any plans to sustain.
Shame.
Such a stunning work both visually and acoustically traded in for what? Bands playing the song of the week.
The video below is a nice piece on a young man who discovered what an organ could offer and plays regularly at his church.
“God did not ordain the cross of Christ or create the lake of fire in order to communicate the insignificance of belittling his glory. The death of the Son of God and the damnation of unrepentant human beings are the loudest shouts under heaven that God is infinitely holy, and sin is infinitely offensive, and wrath is infinitely just, and grace is infinitely precious, and our brief life — and the life of every person in your church and in your community — leads to everlasting joy or everlasting suffering. If our preaching does not carry the weight of these things to our people, what will? Veggie Tales? Radio? Television? Discussion groups? Emergent conversations?God planned for his Son to be crucified (Revelation 13:8; 2 Timothy 1:9) and for hell to be terrible (Matthew 25:41) so that we would have the clearest witnesses possible to what is at stake when we preach. What gives preaching its seriousness is that the mantle of the preacher is soaked with the blood of Jesus and singed with fire of hell. That’s the mantle that turns mere talkers into preachers. Yet tragically some of the most prominent evangelical voices today diminish the horror of the cross and the horror of hell — the one stripped of its power to bear our punishment, and the other demythologized into self-dehumanization and the social miseries of this world.4
Oh that the rising generations would see that the world is not overrun with a sense of seriousness about God. There is no surplus in the church of a sense of God’s glory. There is no excess of earnestness in the church about heaven and hell and sin and salvation. And therefore the joy of many Christians is paper thin. By the millions people are amusing themselves to death with DVDs, and 107-inch TV screens, and games on their cell phones, and slapstick worship, while the spokesmen of a massive world religion write letters to the West in major publications saying, “The first thing we are calling you to is Islam . . . It is the religion of enjoining the good and forbidding the evil with the hand, tongue and heart. It is the religion of jihad in the way of Allah so that Allah’s Word and religion reign Supreme.”5 And then these spokesmen publicly bless suicide bombers who blow up children in front of Falafel shops and call it the way to paradise. This is the world in which we preach.
And yet incomprehensibly, in this Christ-diminishing, soul-destroying age, books and seminars and divinity schools and church growth specialists are bent on saying to young pastors, “Lighten up.” “Get funny.” “Do something amusing.” To this I ask, Where is the spirit of Jesus? “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 16:24–25). “If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell” (Matthew 5:29). “Any one of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:33). “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26). “Follow me, and leave the dead to bury their own dead” (Matthew 8:22). “Whoever would be first among you must be slave of all” (Mark 10:44). “Fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matthew 10:28). “Some of you they will put to death . . . But not a hair of your head will perish. By your endurance you will gain your lives” (Luke 21:16-19).
Would the church-growth counsel to Jesus be, “Lighten up, Jesus. Do something amusing.” And to the young pastor: “Whatever you do, young pastor, don’t be like the Jesus of the Gospels. Lighten up.” From my perspective, which feels very close to eternity these days, that message to pastors sounds increasingly insane.”
John Piper - Why Expositional Preaching Is Particularly Glorifying to God (2006).
The Christianity which is from the Holy Spirit will always have a very deep view of the sinfulness of sin. It will not merely regard sin as a blemish and misfortune, which makes men and women objects of pity, and compassion. It will see in sin the abominable thing which God hates, the thing which makes people guilty and lost in his Maker’s sight, the thing which deserves God’s wrath and condemnation. It will look on sin as the cause of all sorrow and unhappiness, of strife and wars, of quarrels and contentions, of sickness and death – the curse which cursed God’s beautiful creation, the cursed thing which makes the whole earth groan and struggle in pain. Above all, it will see in sin the thing which will ruin us eternally, unless we can find a ransom, – lead us captive, except we can get its chains broken, – and destroy our happiness, both here and hereafter, except we fight against it, even unto death.
“If you find me short in things, impute that to my love of brevity. If you find me besides the truth in anything, impute that to my infirmity. But if you find anything here that serves to your furtherance and joy of the faith, impute that to the mercy of God bestowed on you and me. Yours to serve you with what little I have.”
18. May, 2012 
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When it comes to a waste of beauty, I can think of many examples. One would be the dismantlement and disappearance of the 
From the 
