Warren’s argument: Matthew 4:10 (“Worship the Lord your God, and serve him only”) puts worship explicitly before service. The ordering is intentional. A church so busy working for God that it has no time to express love to God has inverted the biblical sequence.
This is a common error. Churches with strong outreach programs, excellent small groups, and high production values in service can still be functionally un-worshipful — treating God as a cause rather than a Person. Service becomes performance; evangelism becomes target-hitting; ministry becomes program management. None of these failures are fixable by adding more service capacity. They require returning to first purpose: love of God as the root of everything else.
Warren’s phrase is sharp: “Sometimes we get so busy working for God, we don’t have time to express our love for him through worship.” This isn’t a productivity critique — it’s a theological diagnosis. The church that has displaced worship with activity has confused the fruit for the root.
The practical implication runs counter to urgency-driven church culture: protecting time for corporate and personal worship is not a luxury to squeeze in after the mission-critical work. Worship is the mission-critical work — everything else flows from it. A community that worships genuinely will serve, evangelize, fellowship, and disciple out of overflow rather than obligation.