Hard to Leave, Part 5

6. What about genuine feelings? If I’m not giving the Lord the genuine heart-felt inner me, then I don’t think I am truly worshiping God, right?

The Lord Jesus Christ wants us to draw near to God with our lips and our hearts. Using both in the worship of God is important. But we battle with hypocrisy all the time; we find ourselves often trying to fake God. We say words in worship and our lives are phony. That’s wrong. But also, maybe because we don’t feel like being in worship or we don’t have interests and good feelings for a particular hymn, we think that excuses us. Oh well, I don’t feel much like worshiping, so I shouldn’t and I won’t. But here, we need to be a hypocrite to our feelings! Here we need to be different than what our feelings are telling us. Being a hypocrite to feelings that mislead is the obedient thing to do.

I think it was C.S. Lewis who said, “The head rules the belly through the chest.” Head=acting on factual understanding, Belly=acting on need and appetites, and Chest=acting with personal heart. This is true for worship and singing worship music, and these three are to work together.

Genuine faith is not mere knowledge about God in worship, knowing the right facts about His presence, promises, etc. Also, genuine faith expressed in worship is not merely the exercise of our will, that is, having zeal, enthusiasm and conviction in worship; and last, faith is not mere attitudinal, that is, personal heart-sincerity showing reliance and trust. All three of these must cohere and work together to make up faith’s expression in worship.

There’s the great danger of relying on feelings, especially tied to music, as the essential basis for being able to experience true worship. Feelings are not automatically wrong. But there is the danger of attaching spiritual significance to feelings apart from a faithful connection to God’s Word, the truth. The basis for genuine, Spirit-filled worship cannot be our feelings. That would lead us to a doctrine of self-help, self-dependence on feelings. Such teaching would say: my feelings determine if I am having and keeping a solid, growing relationship with God (i.e. that I am growing in the worship of Him). Having the right, sincere feelings does not open the way to Heaven. God has opened heaven to us through His Son. That is truth separate from the way I am feeling.

G. Mark Sumpter