The Error of Emotion

The other day I had the opportunity to attend a worship service focused on attracting teenagers to come and worship God. As the service started, and I stood back and watched, I soon realized something. The loud music, fog machines, lights were attractive to some of the students. They were singing, jumping and having fun, but I began having flashbacks from my junior high days.

See, when I was a teenager, I too went to some services of this kind. It was great. We would sing, and pray, and I always just felt so close to God. Sometimes we would cry, sometimes shout. Do not get me wrong. There are times, we can even see this in the Bible, where it is necessary to cry and shout to God. Yet, with these emotionally driven worship services, I came out with a very shallow faith.See, what I was learning through this was that being close to God was a feeling. I would be close to God during these emotionally charged services, and soon the feeling would fade. I would feel alone without this feeling and fight to get it back. This is not what the Christian life is about. Emotions and feelings come and go, and if we base our relationship with Christ on them, our created god will be as changing and fleeting as our emotions. The one and true God is not like that. He never changes. "For I the Lord do not change." Malachi 3:6

There is a danger in building your relationship with Christ on your emotions, and to teach young people to do so is greatly destructive. I am speaking as having been one of those teenagers that was taught that through such services. It took a long time for me to learn the difference between real worship and being emotional. Mark Dever says in his book The Deliberate Church, "Worship is not about pleasing people." That is so true, yet many people today do not remember this simple fact. Worship is for God. He is the only one worthy of worship, and when our "worship services" are focused on the emotional we are focusing on ourselves.

Do not get me wrong. I am not against emotions. God gave them to us for a reason. I am just concerned with emotional services that are giving us the wrong idea of what real worship is. If we go into the services to get emotional, we can. True worship may result in an emotional reaction, this is usually not a happy feeling though. Look at Isaiah when he saw the Lord and Him being worshiped. He said, "Woe is me!"Worship is not about how we feel. Worship is giving to God what He deserves, everything.

Psalm 29:2
Psalm 95:6
Psalm 96:9
Psalm 99:9

O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is Your name in all the earth!!!