...I'm not at the beach. If I were, this would be great reading for the beach. I'm not a huge Ravi Zacharias fan either, and I don't like the title. The title reminds me of a cheesy poem that might circulate on the Internet like samizdat. That criticism aside (the title is probably the fault of his publisher) however, I've been enjoying the distilled version of Zacharias' book, The Grand Weaver, courtesy of David Mays. Zacharias' thoughts on worship captivated my thinking and had me chewing on them for a while. Here are David Mays' excerpts, with my comments in brackets.

Your Worship Matters

Here is life's essential purpose--to worship God in spirit and in truth (see John 4:24).  All other purposes are meant to be secondary.  When they become primary, they destroy the individual." (132) [My thought was that this is pretty close to accurate. I would refine it by saying that the essential purpose of life is to bring glory to God. Some may not worship Him intentionally. That is the great difference between those who believe and those who don't. We - believers - worship God intentionally. The essential purpose that ALL will eventually fulfill is to bring glory to God. See Philippians 2:10-11:
10 that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,
      in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
11 and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord,
      to the glory of God the Father.
Notice that glory to God is the end result of the humiliation suffered by Christ on the cross. It wasn't the intention of those who crucified Him, but it will ultimately result in their bended knee acknowledgment.]

"This thread of worship binds together all the rest of the threads in the design of our lives.  We cannot see the pattern if this thread goes missing.  If this thread breaks, the whole design falls apart." (132) [This strikes me as brilliant and insightful]

"Worship is exclusionary.  You cannot compromise on worship." (133) [Yes, that's exactly what worship is!]

"Worship is ultimately 'seeing life God's way.'" (133) [I'm not sure about this one. I'm going to have to read the entire book to capture his argument, but this might be true]

Five main components of worship from the book of Acts:  the Lord's Supper, teaching, prayer, praise, and giving. (140)  [I've never thought of the Acts 2 passage as describing the 5 components of worship. A very interesting concept and one I'm going to have to think through it with regard to its implications. Not sure that Rick Warren is going to re-tool his baseball diamond based on this statement, but Zacharias may be more helpful in this than Warren, IMHO]

Praise.  "Somewhere, somehow, we have been led to believe that music is the centerpiece of worship.  It isn't.  It is included in 'praise,' one of five expressions of worship."  "Is it possible to be so swept up by the music and the art of worship that we lose the message and the guidelines on how to worship?  Teaching must become the center of worship again, and the ideas that shape our expressions must be biblically induced and shaped."  (145-46) [This is simply brilliant! It reminds me of Bill Hull's statement that the first duty of faithful men is to state the obvious. This is the piece that every person who is fighting the worship wars seems to forget. Its not about the music.]

"If you do not believe that the situation today has become precarious, stop and ask a young person in your church to take a Bible and show you from Scripture the path of salvation.  Ask the same person to name the top choruses or songs, however, and he or she probably will feel very comfortable doing so." (146)

Prayer.  "In our understanding of prayer, I fear we take one finger of it and think we have the whole fist." (146)  "More than anything else, prayer enables you to see your own heart and brings you into alignment with God's heart."  "...it is a duologue through which God fashions your heart and makes his dream of you a reality."  (147)

Giving.  "To consume the best for yourself and give the crumbs to God is blasphemy."  "A heart that truly worships God gives generously to the causes of God--causes that God cares deeply about.  I have to wonder whether someday we may wake up to discover that all our incestuous spending on ourselves and our frantic construction of excessively luxurious places of worship--even as we ignore, for the most part, the hurting and the deprived of the world--filled God's heart with pain."  "Spending more and more on ourselves and giving less and less to the world in need may be the very reason few take our mission seriously." (149) [WOW!]

These are things I could chew on all day long. I hope after reading them you are chewing too!