Worship

God created us in such a way that the magnifying of his glory and the satisfying of our souls would happen in the same act—namely, the act of worship. In this chapter, we dig into the nature of worship to test this claim and then draw out some of its implications for our corporate and everyday experience of worship. We begin by lingering with Jesus at Jacob’s well, where he said far-reaching things about worship.

Truth without emotion produces dead orthodoxy and a church full (or half-full) of artificial admirers (like people who write generic anniversary cards for a living). On the other hand, emotion without truth produces empty frenzy and cultivates shallow people who refuse the discipline of rigorous thought. But true worship comes from people who are deeply emotional and who love deep and sound doctrine. Strong affections for God rooted in truth are the bone and marrow of biblical worship.

Almost everyone would agree that biblical worship involves some kind of outward act. The very word in Hebrew means “to bow down.” Worship is bowing, lifting hands, praying, singing, reciting, preaching, performing rites of eating, cleansing, ordaining, and so on.

But the startling fact is that all these things can be done in vain. They can be pointless, useless, and empty. This is the warning of Jesus in Matthew 15:8–9 when he devastates the Pharisees with God’s word from Isaiah 29:13 (ESV):

This people honors me with their lips,

but their heart is far from me;

in vain do they worship me.

An act of worship is vain and futile when it does not come from the heart. This was implied in the words of Jesus to the Samaritan adulteress: “True worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship him” (John 4:23, ESV). Now, what is this experience of the spirit? What goes on in the heart when worship is not in vain?

Worship is more than an act of mere willpower. All the outward acts of worship are performed by acts of will. But that does not make them authentic. The will can be present (for all kinds of reasons) while the heart is not truly engaged (or, as Jesus says, is “far away”). The engagement of the heart in worship is the coming alive of the feelings, emotions, and affections of the heart. Where feelings for God are dead, worship is dead.

Minimizing the importance of transformed feelings makes Christian conversion less supernatural and less radical. It is humanly manageable to make decisions of the will for Christ. No supernatural power is required to pray prayers, sign cards, walk aisles, or even stop sleeping around. Those are good. They just don’t prove that anything spiritual has happened. Christian conversion, on the other hand, is a supernatural, radical thing. The heart is changed. And the evidence of it is not just new decisions but new affections, new feelings.