Honest Worship

I've been thinking about how we worship, in light with the book 'Faking Church' that I've been reading. This book has given me lots of food for thought. One thing I noticed is that our worship songs are filled with 'feeling' words. I don't know about you but sometimes I find it hard to sing those songs, when I don't feel that way. I don't want to offer God praises with my lips when my heart seems so far from what I'm singing. Yes, there is a place where we have to proclaim by faith and sing what is true according to God's Word even when we don't 'feel' it is true. There is also a place of offering a sacrifice of praise, where we praise God for who He is and what He has done and those truths are objectively true even though it may not be how I perceive the reality of my present experience.

What I'm referring to is the state of our emotions and whether they are consistent with what we are singing, especially when many of the songs have words that describe our passion for Him. The ancient meaning for that word is suffering. The early church fathers were skeptical of passions, because it means to be responsive to an external influence. And for them, spirituality is about training ourselves not to be reactive and dependent on external factors, but that we be disciplined in our walk, not susceptible to external influences. Today, passion is often seen as an intense emotion. Can we really maintain that sort of passion about Christ and God all the time? Can we honestly sing these songs when we don't feel the passion? Perhaps we can, because someone once said, Passion is doing what you ought to do even when you don't feel like it. However I must say that I feel like a phoney singing "Yes, I'm so in love with You" when I don't feel the least bit in love with God.

Is our relationship with God dependent on our feelings? No and it shouldn't be but you can't deny that it plays a big part. I guess we can look at couples who are in love and also those who have been married for many years. Couples who are in love often feel very strong and intense emotions but we know that such highly charged emotions are not the basis for building a strong and lasting relationship, because what happens to the relationship when you no longer feel the passion for each other? However these emotions are very real and can make us believe that this must be the real thing. Yet we know that we cannot always trust our emotions at these points but need to give ourselves time for it to cool off, especially if we are making a life-changing decision based on them. The state of mind of someone who is infatuated is said to be no different than a person who is insane (temporary insanity), and are thus not in their right mind and it is usually unwise to make any major decisions in this state of mind. A long term marriage on the other hand can be full of passion, but it may feel very different even though the intensity and degree may not be any less that those of newly wed, or if not, more.

Some have suggested 'tweaking' some of the lyrics of the songs we sing. One speaker, Benny Ong, used to sing 'I surrender MORE', rather than 'I surrender ALL!'. So, perhaps one could sing, 'Jesus I want to be so in love with You' (Let my words be few), or add words like, 'Help me be ...', 'Teach me to...', etc. At the end of the day, I believe God sees our heart and know we want to worship Him in Spirit and in Truth.