NJHD - 126, 129 - Real Worship

NJHD 126

it is believed by many,
that to renounce the world,
and to live in the spirit and not in the flesh,
is to reject worldly things,
which are chiefly riches and honors;
to be continually engaged
in pious meditation concerning God,
concerning salvation, and concerning eternal life;
to lead a life in prayers,
in the reading of the Word and pious books;
and also to afflict one's self:
but this is not renouncing the world;
but to renounce the world
is to love God and to love the neighbor;
and God is loved
when a person lives
according to His commandments,
and the neighbor is loved
when a person performs uses.
Therefore in order
that a person may receive the life of heaven,
it is altogether necessary
that he should live in the world,
and in offices and business there.
A life abstracted from worldly things
is a life of thought and faith
separate from the life of love and charity,
in which life the will of good and the doing of good
to the neighbor perishes.
And when this perishes,
spiritual life is as a house without a foundation,
which either sinks down successively,
or becomes full of chinks and cracks,
or totters till it falls.

NJHD 129

True worship is from the Lord with a person,
not from the person himself.

The Lord desires worship from a person
for the sake of a person's salvation,
and not for the sake of His own glory.

A person believes
that the Lord desires worship for the sake of glory;
but they who thus believe
know not what Divine glory is,
nor that it consists in
the salvation of the human race,
which a person has
when he attributes nothing to himself,
and when he removes his proprium by humiliation;
because the Divine is then first able to flow in.

Humiliation of heart with a person exists
from an acknowledgment of himself,
which is, that he is nothing but evil,
and that he can do nothing from himself;
and from a consequent acknowledgment of the Lord,
which is, that nothing but good is from the Lord,
and that the Lord can do all things.

The Divine cannot flow in
except into a humble heart,
since so far as a person is in humiliation,
so far he is absent from his proprium,
and thus from the love of self.
So the Lord does not desire humiliation
for His own sake,
but for a person's sake,
that a person may be in a state
for receiving the Divine.

Worship is not worship without humiliation.