So If I Feel No Emotion, Can I Worship?

00:00:00.000 | [music]

00:00:05.000 | Pastor John, last Friday in episode 263, you said that the essence of worship is

00:00:09.280 | not what we do with our lips or hands or knees or tongues, but what happens in our

00:00:13.280 | heart. Affections for God that correspond to the truth He reveals about Himself.

00:00:18.280 | So what about times when we don't have those affections? Are you saying then that

00:00:21.880 | when we feel no emotion, we cannot be truly worshiping God?

00:00:26.280 | Let's remember the text, first of all, from yesterday. It's Matthew 15, 7.

00:00:31.280 | "You hypocrites! Well did Isaiah prophesy of you, 'This people honors me with their lips,

00:00:38.280 | but their heart is far from me. In vain do they worship me.'"

00:00:42.280 | So this is a text that says it is empty, it's vain, it's non-worship, if it's only lip worship.

00:00:52.280 | And I argued that that's just willpower religion. They had the willpower to move their lips,

00:00:57.280 | go to church, sing the songs, but it's not worship to just move your lips.

00:01:02.280 | There needed to be emotions like contrition, sorrow, longing, desire, fear, awe, gratitude, joy, hope.

00:01:12.280 | These are essential to be a real worshiper.

00:01:17.280 | So now the question is being raised, what do you do if those emotions are absent?

00:01:23.280 | Can you worship? Should you even go to church?

00:01:26.280 | What do you do if you're sitting in the pew and those emotions aren't there?

00:01:31.280 | Should you get up and leave?

00:01:33.280 | Now the answer to that question is very delicate.

00:01:37.280 | It has to be handled, I think, with pastoral care and biblical faithfulness.

00:01:43.280 | Our emotions, our spiritual affections, and when I say emotions, I'm not talking about physical things

00:01:51.280 | like sweaty palms or fluttering eyelashes or wobbly knees or butterflies in the stomach or anything like that.

00:01:59.280 | I'm talking about real spiritual affections rising in the heart.

00:02:04.280 | Now they rise and fall.

00:02:07.280 | We are seldom the same in the morning that we are in the evening.

00:02:11.280 | We are affected by many things in the rise and fall of our spiritual affections,

00:02:16.280 | from weariness to hunger to Satan to sinning.

00:02:20.280 | A lot of things affect how intensely we feel God, and so I don't want to be naive at all that there's just one strain

00:02:28.280 | and that's 100% engagement of your affections, and short of that, there's nothing worthwhile.

00:02:35.280 | That's not true.

00:02:36.280 | Let's use David for an example.

00:02:39.280 | Psalm 40, "I waited patiently for the Lord.

00:02:44.280 | He inclined to me and heard my cry.

00:02:47.280 | He drew me up from the pit of destruction, out of the miry bog.

00:02:52.280 | He set my feet upon a rock, making my steps secure.

00:02:56.280 | He put a new song in my mouth, a song of praise.

00:03:01.280 | Many will see and fear and put their trust in the Lord."

00:03:03.280 | Well, David was in a pit with no song, and that means he was emotionally flat.

00:03:15.280 | Could he worship in the pit, waiting for a song?

00:03:19.280 | "I waited for the Lord.

00:03:21.280 | I waited."

00:03:22.280 | I don't know how long he had to wait.

00:03:24.280 | I preached a sermon one time called "In the Pits with the King,"

00:03:28.280 | and I'm so encouraged that David had these pit experiences because everybody else does too, if we're honest.

00:03:36.280 | Sometimes you have to wait a long time, so could he worship in the pit,

00:03:40.280 | or could he only worship after he got out of the pit?

00:03:44.280 | I think the answer is his waiting for the Lord was worship.

00:03:50.280 | It wasn't what he wanted it to be because he had a new song when he got out,

00:03:55.280 | and then he saw the new song, and they were moved to trust the Lord.

00:03:59.280 | But he was not waiting for pills, and he was not waiting for somebody else.

00:04:06.280 | He was waiting for God because he had tasted and seen that the Lord was good.

00:04:11.280 | So here's my way of describing the levels of worship that move from the strongest to the weakest to non-existence.

00:04:19.280 | So here's really my answer to, "Can you worship when your emotions are flat or gone?"

00:04:27.280 | The highest level of worship is when you see some aspect of God's glory,

00:04:34.280 | and you feel affections that are corresponding to that glory, grace, justice, goodness, wrath, wisdom of God,

00:04:43.280 | something you see, your eyes are open, the Spirit moves, thankfulness or admiration or contrition or wonder or hope well up in your heart.

00:04:52.280 | It's lively. We feel it, and then we can express it. That's the top level of worship.

00:04:59.280 | Second, we see God in some measure—we're moving down now to a less than ideal—

00:05:06.280 | we see God in some measure in his glory, but the corresponding affections are just not lively.

00:05:14.280 | They're scarcely there. What we see is true, and we long for those emotions to be there, but they're not.

00:05:25.280 | We've tasted that God is good, we remember it, and we ache for the former love and for the former passion and affections.

00:05:33.280 | And my answer is that that ache and that longing for what we're not presently experiencing is genuine worship, is genuine affection for God.

00:05:44.280 | It's not ideal, but it is a reflection of God's worth and value that you ache to want him, you ache to love him,

00:05:53.280 | you ache to delight in him like you once did. And that very ache is worship.

00:06:00.280 | And the third is we see God weakly, and we're unmoved by this weak sight.

00:06:08.280 | We're so down and so lifeless that we not only don't have the corresponding affections worthy of God,

00:06:19.280 | but we don't even feel a desire for them.

00:06:25.280 | Now, this is getting scary. We are blank. There remains a seed of some new life in us,

00:06:35.280 | but it expresses itself not in, "Oh, Lord, I want to want."

00:06:42.280 | Instead, it expresses itself in a bare regret that we don't long for anything.

00:06:51.280 | But we still can feel some seed of regret, some remorse, some sorrow at how utterly blank and flat we have become toward God

00:07:05.280 | that we don't even want to want him. We're just sorry for the mess we're in.

00:07:13.280 | And my answer is that sorrow, that regret is worship.

00:07:18.280 | It's far from ideal, but it's still a seed that reflects what we're missing,

00:07:25.280 | and we know we're missing it, and it reflects itself in that regret.

00:07:30.280 | Now, there is one step below that, and it is non-worship.

00:07:35.280 | We see no beauty in God. We feel no admiration for God.

00:07:39.280 | We feel no longing to have those affections for God, and we feel no regret.

00:07:45.280 | And we feel no conviction, and we feel no remorse.

00:07:48.280 | And I would say at that point, "No, you cannot worship. I don't care what you do.

00:07:52.280 | Go to church, sing, pray, jump up and down. You can't worship because your heart is gone."

00:07:59.280 | So my answer to the question is, yes, there are levels of worship when the affections are weak or almost gone.

00:08:11.280 | But if all the affections are gone, there is no longer any worship.

00:08:19.280 | If there's no longing to desire, if there's no regret or remorse at failing to long for the desire for God,

00:08:29.280 | then we are beyond worship.

00:08:32.280 | At that point, we are utterly cast upon the sovereign grace of God alone,

00:08:39.280 | and there's nothing in us until he creates it.

00:08:42.280 | Yeah, that's very sobering. Thank you, Pastor John.

00:08:45.280 | And for more on this theme, you can find a book by Pastor John at DesiringGod.org,

00:08:48.280 | which is titled "When I Don't Desire God," and you can download the book free of charge.

00:08:53.280 | And speaking of the importance of the affections, see the recent Ask Pastor John episode,

00:08:57.280 | which is titled "Why Stoicism is Toxic," and that's episode number 239.

00:09:02.280 | And also the episode titled "How Do I Own Biblical Truths for Myself," which is episode number 183,

00:09:08.280 | which talks a lot about how our affections are tied to our personal discoveries of truth in the Bible.

00:09:13.280 | And, of course, you can find that sermon mentioned earlier, "In the Pits with the King," from back in 1980.

00:09:18.280 | You can find that at DesiringGod.org as well.

00:09:21.280 | We'll be back tomorrow with a new episode.

00:09:23.280 | Until then, I'm Tony Reinke. Thanks for listening.

00:09:26.280 | [End]

00:09:28.280 | DesiringGod.org

00:09:30.280 | DesiringGod.org

00:09:32.280 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

So If I Feel No Emotion, Can I Worship?

Chapters