We are called to worship, meaning that we are called to see God seated on a throne, high and lifted up.
If we do not see God high and lifted up, then we shall shortly conceive of ourselves, together with all our opinions, to be high and lifted up. And whenever we do this, especially when we do it in the context of the ruins and rubble of Christian liturgy, we are inviting the living God to slap us down and bring us low. God says repeatedly that He opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.
We cannot be humble unless our service of worship approaches the Lamb on the throne in order to worship Him there. The contemporary demand for a breezy and casual “worship,” with worship in quotation marks, is really a demand to see our God seated on a chair, as though He were one of us. We want Him to sit as though He were tired, and not to sit on a throne because He rules and reigns over every created thing, displaying His glory to that creation in this fashion, and through this figure.
So prepare your hearts for true worship. Prepare yourself to abandon every false notion of worship. And make no mistake – every form of false worship, whether it is will-worship on the one hand, or a truncated overscrupulousness on the other, is a sin at just this point – a sin against the sovereignty of God, and a democratic resistance of a divine throne.