Not only because worship’s primary aim is to give God the glory and praise that is his due, but also because worship’s secondary end and purpose, inseparably bound up with the first, is to lead worshippers into the sunshine of communion with God — a true foretaste of heaven, in which all spiritual souls find their highest delight.
Thus, to the Puritans, communion between God and man is the end to which both creation and redemption are the means; it is the goal to which both theology and preaching must ever point; it is the essence of true religion; it is, indeed, the definition of Christianity.
— J.I. Packer
From J.I. Packer, A Quest for Godliness: The Puritan Vision of the Christian Life (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1990), 202
James Innell Packer (1926-2020) was an influential Anglican theologian. I was introduced to Packer’s exceptional knowledge and wisdom in the books Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God and Knowing God. If there is an endgame to Christianity, Packer is spot on about communion between God and man.
