I think it’s finally time that I write my “part 2” to the a blog I wrote on worship a while back. This one will make more sense if you read that one first, so feel free to read it here.
In my first blog, I set out to show that in order to worship in spirit you have to worship in truth. That is to say that truth about God is what propels worship into motion. I also wrote about how the very act of singing releases a chemical in your brain called dopamine, and that this chemical alone is what often fills our dark, moody worship experiences with warm fuzzies and happy feelings.
I suppose you could say that my previous blog was a warning against confusing the euphoric high for genuine God-honoring worship, as if the two were intrinsically the same thing.
This blog is simply a qualifier to the last; though genuine worship and esthetic emotional experience aren’t synonymous, genuine worship most definitely includes esthetic emotional experience.
God knows that singing releases dopamine in the brain. He made us to work like that. And we read all throughout scripture, “Sing to the Lord! Sing a new song! Shout to the Lord with loud shouts of joy!” and all sorts of fun stuff like that! God wants us to let that feel-good chemical spill out all over our brain when it is engaged in worship!
Whereas before, I was trying to show that you have to start with--and be sustained by--intelligible, cognitive, coherent truth in order for worship to be genuine, I am now merely pointing out that starting here will inevitably end with passionate, emotional affection.
When we gaze on the holiness of God we will weep over sin, we will be moved by his grace, we will exude gratitude and joy and a deep sense of being emotionally overwhelmed by his grandeur. And God wants this. This is why the Psalmist says, “The sacrifices of our God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.” and why he elsewhere says, “O God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and wear land where there is no water.”
Cold, lifeless, apathetic acknowledgment of true characteristics of God--no matter how doctrinally sound--is no more worship than the silly, confused, shallow evangelyfishism that I condemned my other blog. So let this be a tipping of the scales a bit to balance things out. When we fall in line and do what we were designed to do--which is ascribe glory to God--we will be stoked about it. We will access that secret layer of humanity and be who we really are; cognitive, emotional image bearers of God.
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