Worship: More Than a Feeling
If we are waiting on a feeling for worship to occur, then it may never occur. Worship contingent on a musical experience that just stirs the emotions may not be worship, but instead nostalgia or novelty. Nostalgia is sentimental remembrance of previous times that stir happy or meaningful personal recollections. It can cause a congregation to romanticize, idealize, and even embellish past experiences. The result is an attempt to recreate divine moments, events, or even seasons based almost completely on the feelings originally stirred.
Novelty is the quality of being new, original, or unusual just to be new, original, or unusual. A novelty entertains for a short period of time until another novelty surfaces. College freshmen enjoy the novelty of independence until they have to do their own laundry. A child’s birthday present is novel until he opens the next one. Novelty as it relates to worship can cause a congregation to over innovate, over stimulate, and over imitate. Each Sunday then becomes an exercise in surpassing the creativity of the previous one.
When congregations gather for worship, they may be hooked on a feeling stirred by nostalgia or novelty instead of spirit and truth worship. If those feelings are not elicited because they don’t know or don’t particularly like the songs, they can even leave the worship service believing that worship couldn’t and didn’t occur.
We learn from Scripture that we were created and sustained so that we can offer our worship to God alone. When the scribes asked Jesus which commandments were the greatest, he replied, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength. The second is, Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no command greater than these.” (Mark 12:30-31).
• In worship we love God with all our HEART.
The heart is often the symbol of our emotions. Worship is indeed emotional, but emotions alone can be shallow, especially when limited to the single emotion of happiness. Our heart reminds us that sorrow, pain, grief, fear, loneliness, lament, and even despair are also authentic worship emotions.
• In worship we love God with all our SOUL.
True worship doesn’t begin with what we do; it begins with who we are in response to who God is and what he has done. Spirit and truth worship begins in the depth of our soul. What occurs in our soul is then manifested in our worship actions. When we invert this, our worship becomes religion instead of response.
• In worship we love God with all our MIND.
The mind allows us to approach worship with knowledge, insight, reason, memory, creativity, inquiry, imagination, and even doubt. The Apostle Paul stated that spiritual transformation occurs through the renewing of our minds. Offering our prayers, reading and hearing Scripture, remembering at the Lord’s Supper Table, and singing our songs without engaging our minds can lead to thoughtless worship.
• In worship we love God with all our STRENGTH.
Worship without strength is often passive. It is something we actually do, not something that is done for us. When we offer our bodies as a living sacrifice, we are responding to God’s workmanship by doing good works. Loving God with all our strength is the external expression of the internal impression of loving God with all our heart, soul, and mind.
• In worship we love God by loving our NEIGHBOR.
It doesn’t matter how good our worship is in here; it is still incomplete until it also includes how we treat our neighbors out there. We must lead, model, and teach the church to worship not only when we gather with our church family but also when we scatter back to our neighborhoods.
Worship isn’t just our response to God’s revelation through the songs we sing on Sunday, it’s also our response through the rhythms and harmonies of life on Monday. So, loving God with heart, soul, mind, strength, and loving our neighbors…Worship…must spring forth from every aspect of our being or it may not be worship at all.
This post is adapted from David W. Manner, Better Sundays Begin on Monday: 52 Exercises for Evaluating Weekly Worship (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2020).