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Betraying God in Worship
- 06/23/08
- 21
Only on rare occasions can I bring myself to buy greeting cards. When it is Aileen’s birthday or when it is our anniversary, I either tell her how I feel (not something I’m particularly good at most of the time) or I buy a blank card and fill it with my own words. Or occasionally, to my shame, I forgo to card altogether. For some reason it just seems fake, disingenuous, to give her a card with a little poetic inscription written by someone else—someone who has never met her and knows nothing about her. What do the words mean when they’ve come from someone else? It seems that a card like that really means nothing to me, and I would rather give her a card that has come from my heart rather than the mind of a stranger. I prefer to invest the time and affection in expressing myself for her benefit.
Have you ever stopped to consider what it must be like to work for Hallmark or another of the companies that create greeting cards? Imagine spending your whole day attempting to come up with wonderful statements of deep feeling—love, remorse, sympathy—yet without feeling any of the associated emotions. Imagine having to write words that express sympathy, yet not feeling any sympathy yourself. Or imagine having to write words that can express the deep, passionate love a man has for his wife as they celebrate fifty years of marriage, but without having ever experienced that sort of love yourself. It must be very odd to spend the whole day writing words of love and passion from a husband to a wife but then return alone to an empty home and a life lived alone.
I fear that all too often I, as a Christian, can worship God in just this way. So often I sing songs with the most wonderful lyrics, but in a way that betrays my true feelings. I sing “When I survey the wondrous cross, on which the Prince of Glory died, my richest gain I count but loss, and pour contempt on all my pride.” But when I sing those words, so often it is as if I am a single man writing a greeting card to celebrate a fiftieth wedding anniversary. Though the words may sound wonderful, they are devoid of any true understanding. When I sing “Amazing grace how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me” do I even try to understand just how amazing God’s grace is? Have I experienced that grace and allowed it to transform my life? Do I know that the very grace I sing about is the only thing keeping me from an eternity of separation from God? Do I feel deep love and affection to the giver of grace? Or do I merely parrot back the words?
True worship relies on both feeling and understanding, or as Jesus said, on spirit and truth. Worship that is devoid of feeling and emotion will be dead worship, for the God we serve is worthy of feelings that express His worth. He evokes these feelings in those who love Him. It is the very height of hypocrisy to pay lip-service to God when I do not truly feel affection for Him. At the same time worship needs to be thoughtful. While it engages my feelings it must also engage my mind. My feelings must have their basis in what I know about God so that the more I know about Him the greater will be my feelings of affection for Him.
Before I married my wife I heard time and again from the wonderful older couples in our church that after forty, fifty or even sixty years of marriage, they continued to love each other more deeply and more intimately. I marveled that this could be true, yet through the first decade of my marriage I have already seen that it is not only possible but it is the way God intended marriage to be. I love my wife in a deeper way now than I did the day we exchanged vows. In the ensuing years we have faced trials together and have spent countless thousands of hours talking and laughing and worshiping together. The more I learn about Aileen and the more time I spend with her the greater my feelings of affection for her. To know her is to love her, and to know her more is to love her more.
Likewise, great knowledge of God must produce great feelings of affection for Him. These feelings of affection give me the burning desire to worship Him. I long to express my feelings, not as a means to some devious or selfish end, but simply as an expression of the affection I have for Him. As such, worship is not a means to an end, but it is an end in itself.
I am a follower of Jesus Christ, a husband to Aileen and a father to three young children. I worship and serve as a pastor at 
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Comments (21)
A good lesson taught here Tim. It is much like the often quoted Tozer saying that goes something like: “Christians don’t tell lies, they just go to church and sing them.”
I am a bit surprised at your presupposition that the employees of Hallmark and others similar companies are fakers. I know the metaphor was useful in making your point. But are you certain that their writers have not experienced deep love, or loss, or joy, or grief and in some cases, even experienced those emotions under the influence of a faith in Christ?
I totally agree and is the reason I think the singing in church should come after the message. After we’ve had time to learn and be immersed in the Word. Then, is when we can finally really worship!
cool! good points. I love the concept of worshipping in spirit and in truth.
Good words. I think of Edwards’ Religious Affections, and how their is a “miraculous unity” between body and soul in worship; how what we know in our souls, i.e., what God reveals to our hearts, should and does affect our bodies, both physical expression and emotions. If I remember correctly from my Greek studies, “spirit and truth” can’t be separated as cleanly as we would normally categorize or systematize things or doctrines. “Spirit and truth” is miraculously unified, almost one word, such that the one can’t exist without the other, which makes a lot of sense considering God is both Spirit and Truth.
Shelley,
Or to tweak a bit, help people realize first that all of life is an expression of worship to God, and second that the whole service is worship to God. We worship in the word and we worship in the singing. If hearing the proclamation of the gospel is not done in worship, can we really hope that any of the service will be done in worship?
Tim,I understand the point you are trying to make but you are way off the mark with using Hallmark as your example. I happen to know for a fact that Hallmark has many Christians that work for the company. To make a broad sweeping statement like that is very dangerous. As a nurse I was put in situations that I had never in my life experienced but that didn’t mean that I couldn’t try to understand or have empathy. God created all of us so I can only imagine that the writers at Hallmark fully understand the emotions that they are writing about all to well. I have a very good friend who is an artist for Hallmark. Tim, I suggest you call Hallmark and ask them about their creative process. Like I said they do have many talented Christians working for them, my friend is one of them.
Well put. I have had deep concerns about this issue, and I find myself desiring to find worshipers who really do so in spirit and truth. What does God really mean by “they worship me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me”? How do I know I am not the one He is describing? This is why we must continually be in an attitude of repentance and humility. I pray people are stirred to listen and learn from your words.
When my heart lusts, or is gripped with pride, then a hymn like “When I survey the Wondrous Cross” genuinely overwhelms me.
We need to see just how wicked we are for the Good News of Christ to affect us. Not that we need to constantly belittle ourselves, for we may well be walking in His grace, and uprightly for a good season, and this is good as well. But it’s the grace which works in us, not ourselves.”Nothing but the Blood of Jesus” is all my peace and righteousness.
Thanks for this encouraging word, Tim. Being able to mean the words we sing is one of the most important litmus tests for choosing songs for congregational worship (so many young people today simply choose songs based on how cool they sound or who wrote them). But even if we are unable to feel what we should at any given moment, it is helpful for us to recognize how weak we are in ourselves to be able to produce the emotions meant to be wrought in us by the Holy Spirit!
A few years ago, okay more years than I want to talk about here, I was encouraged to memorize Psalm 100 in its entirety. I was reminded of it today as I was reading the posts and got to “donsands” post. I, like him, have to be reminded that worship reminds me to do away with my pride and my own agenda. Even this last Sunday, I arrived at church with things that needed to be delivered to the proper people, and conversations that needed take place to bring a ministry together. By the time I arrived at “worship”, I was already in a mental whirlwind of all the things I had yet to accomplish while at “worship”.
Yikes! Back up the truck. Then, it comes to me, “Shout for joy to the Lord all the earth, Worship the Lord with gladness; come before him with joyful song (you mean, not a list of tasks to accomplish this morning or my grocery list of prayers?), Know (and I repeat “know”) that the Lord is God, It is he who made us, and we are his; we are his people, the sheep of his pasture.”
Thanks Tim for the reminder that our worship is in direct relationship to how well we know God, and how much time we spend daily in His presence. That’s the only way that we truly can worship Him in Spirit and in Truth.
Beautiful.
Being a pre-boomer, the subject of worship as expressed by much of the younger generation, is more often painful than uplifting. Somehow singing in the assembly has been narrowed down to singing nice ditties to God which have an average shelf life of about three weeks. Week after week, month after month, year after year we hear the “worship leaders” admonishing us to lift our hearts in worship to God in accompaniment to sounds that hurt both our ears and hearts. If one of a select few hymns is sung it is often reworked to suit the taste of the younger generation. This unrelenting (at least in my church) snubbing of the more mature members of the body raises many questions. Just one for instance, “Is it possible to teach the reverence of God without demonstrating respect for one’s elders? Is our very worship destroying our adoration of God? Could we actually be betraying God in our so-called worship?
Did you ever wonder how these leaders, who are never mentioned as part of church leadership in the New Testament, will answer to God for manipulating the group that gathers on a Sunday into thinking they have drawn near to God just because they feel warm and fuzzy? This is especially true when one realizes that a good number of us should have been in the prayer room taking care of sin that renders even “real” worship impossible.
What happened to singing doctrine, testimony, exhortation, repentance, etc. etc.? It seems to me these are things we sing to one another as mentioned in Eph. 5:19. False worshipers have swept these beautiful expressions clean out of our church experience.
When the O.T. king Josiah cleared 350 years of garbage and ungodly tradition out of the temple there were likely whole departments that had to go. I can imagine there were worship leaders in the temple who could point to hundreds of years of history explaining why they were so important to effective worship. But they were bogus. Could we be seeing that again today?
Worship is a 24-7 thing and even calling what we do in church “worship”, encourages misunderstanding. Praise? Perhaps. Worship? Hardly. When it really comes down to it, the most powerful and meaningful form of worship is obedience. Didn’t John write, “For this is the love of God, that we keep His commandments.” I John 5:3
Surely none of you would make the mistake of calling this legalism. True love and worship of God lives itself out in joyful obedience. I can’t imagine that anyone in proximity to this kind of worship leader would ever feel left out.
Your Hallmark illustration was so right!
beautifully written. :) i really love your blog, tim.
I’ve long wished, like Shelley, that singing would come after teaching. That’s when my heart is best prepared to sing, when I’ve learned about my God, and heard from His Word; that’s when my heart is best able to respond with praise.
Like Catherine, I arrive at church with supplies and tasks to perform, thoughts spinning. I can’t just shut them down. Little praise choruses tend to just provide mood music for my wandering mind. The great doctrine rich hymns are much better suited to to focusing my mind on the true and living God. My feelings are then more likely to follow suit. (I really dislike songs that seem to try to “get me in the mood to worship” yet don’t even bother to declare the greatness of the One we are supposed to be adoring.)
As far as greeting cards go, well, I like to buy them, choosing them carefully, and I like to add my own words as well. You see, it’s like singing songs on Sunday morning. What if, like me, you’re not a hymn-writer? Do you just remain silent, or worse, try singing the stupid sounding things that you would come up with if you tried to write your own songs? No, you sing the songs that others have written which happen to express (hopefully) perfectly what is in your heart as well. Some people have been gifted to express things very beautifully, in poetry and verse. Those of us not so gifted rely upon them for this. There would be no music, or poetry, at all in my life it were up to me to come up with it.
I think the hymns (or psalms) are instructive, as well as being something you should sing with true conviction.
After a bad morning, perhaps you sing “When I Survey The Wondrous Cross” a bit shallowly. However, the words and the Scripture within it have meaning, and you are instructing yourself, and your neighbor, as you sing.
We sing psalms, and we sing them before and after the sermon. I try to pay attention and sing with conviction, however, even if I fail, I do believe God is glorified and we are edified.
At frequent times, day and night, over the years, a phrase or stanza from one psalm or another is running through my head. I believe this is of great value.
It’s also hard sometimes as a songwriter — my tendency is to start critiquing worship songs, or to wish I’d written this or that song, or line. I have to stop and realize that what I’m doing is making it all about me — what I think, what I wish I’d done, etc. rather than moving my ego and opinions out of the way and remembering that worship is about giving all the glory to God for who He is and for what He has done.
To move the songs so that they follow the teaching is something that I think the Reformers would agree would change the entire focus of the Sunday worship service. Are we meant to prepare our hearts and minds so that we are coming to God’s word with an attitude of worship, or are we meant to use the sermon as a warm-up for a singalong? To rearrange songs and sermon would change the focus of your church service and make the pastor the servant of the songleader.
Worship is a lifestyle, and it does not consist in singing songs, although it is possible to sing songs worshipfully. “Whatever you do, whether you eat or drink, do all to the glory of God.”
As Steven J. Lawson has said, the Catholics have priests, the Puritans have teachers. The Catholics built cathedrals, the Puritans built universities. There is a very good reason why Evangelical worship services are arranged around the homily.
The reason Protestant services are arranged around the sermon, historically, is because we are replacing mass (the sacrificing of Christ, in RC theology) to the preaching of the sacrifice.
We believe the preaching of Christ’s sacrifice to be the central and main part of the worship service.
The people who are criticizing Tim’s use of the Hallmark analogy seem to be misunderstanding him.
He does not claim that people who work for Hallmark have never experienced love, sympathy, etc. He is saying that they do not feel/experience those emotions with respect to the people for whom the message of the card is written. So, while they very much might love their wife (or anyone else), the do not even know, much less love, the person for whom they are writing the message. In this way, their words of love are written/communicated without the emotion of love for the recipent of the card.
Finally, whether Hallmark has Christians working for them or not has nothing to do with the point that Tim was making.
I don’t know if it was your intention, but your first two paragraphs describe the Christian music industry precisely. Playing in a “worship band,” and my constant struggle is a fight for sincerity in what we do. I honestly have very little use for the worship industry, and despise what it has done to the concept of worship in the hearts and minds of the church, especially the children.
Tim,
I think an important point you made was, “He evokes these feelings in those who love Him.”
I am currently reading through God is the Gospel during my morning devotional time. A point that Piper makes is that, “The Holy Spirit must do his life-giving, eye-opening, blindness-removing, glory-revealing work.” This is certainly required for true saving faith to occur, but he also makes the point that this also happens incrementally (2 Cor 3:18) in the ongoing process of our becoming holy. He says, “He does not change us directly; he changes us by enabling us to see the glory of Christ.”
As we behold His glory more and more we will have an increasing desire to be like Him. This desire to be more like Him will in turn increase our desire to know Him more fully. It is our knowledge of Him that produces our feelings for Him. And as we fix our attention on Him, our worship should naturally become genuine. You said it perfectly, “My feelings must have their basis in what I know about God so that the more I know about Him the greater will be my feelings of affection for Him.”