Now whence was it that a religion, so serious in its restraints, so beautiful in its outward form and practices, and commanding such reverence from all that beheld it, was yet charged by Truth itself with having inwardly such an abominable nature? It was only for this one reason, because it was a religion of self. _William Law._
As heaven or hell depends on the choice between self-giving and self-seeking, so does the worship of the true God or the false. Names may be mockeries here. The self-seeking Christian, worshipping, as he may tell us, the God and Father of his Lord Jesus Christ, is doing nothing of the kind. He is worshipping that which he serves. If he could really use the true God as a means towards the end he has at heart, that is, make God serve him, he would do so. This, in fact, is what he tries to do. Naturally he cannot succeed. And the God whom he thinks he worships is fiction and an idol; it is one who is his instrument in self-seeking, and that is a fictitious God. 'God is a Spirit; and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.' 'Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength.' Here is the first clue to Christian worship. And the second is 'like unto it':—'Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.' The Christian comment on this is characteristic:—'He that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen how can he love God whom he hath not seen?' And the test is crucial. There is no true worship without love, and no love of God without love of the brother-man. So the argument works itself out and finally excludes the consistent and impenitent self-seeker from the worship of God.
Indeed, in the nature of life in man, this exclusion is inevitable. Unless a man makes his neighbour and that neighbour's interests his own, he necessarily excludes him from himself. In the nature of living personal beings this must be, for only in harmony do persons coincide, only by the stretching out of my interests and myself to embrace do I include. I must grow if my neighbour is to become for me 'as myself' and be loved as myself. So that love of myself which is evil when confined to interests solely mine, becomes good as it expands. So the contracting of life within my narrow boundaries is escaped, and although I still love myself I love a self that grows out and forth to the inclusion of all, even to the inclusion of God, whom then I shall love with the ardour which in the contracted self is the very torment of its hell. Only the directing of that ardour beyond the self can prevent it from being a consuming fire within the self. Therefore unless I learn to worship God (and here again words, names may mock at realities), I shall 'perish' in my own flame.