Pastor John, last Friday in episode 263, you said that the essence of worship is not what we do with our lips or hands or knees or tongues, but what happens in our heart. Affections for God that correspond to the truth He reveals about Himself. So what about times when we don't have those affections?

Are you saying then that when we feel no emotion, we cannot be truly worshiping God? Let's remember the text, first of all, from yesterday. It's Matthew 15, 7. "You hypocrites! Well did Isaiah prophesy of you, 'This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me.

In vain do they worship me.'" So this is a text that says it is empty, it's vain, it's non-worship, if it's only lip worship. And I argued that that's just willpower religion. They had the willpower to move their lips, go to church, sing the songs, but it's not worship to just move your lips.

There needed to be emotions like contrition, sorrow, longing, desire, fear, awe, gratitude, joy, hope. These are essential to be a real worshiper. So now the question is being raised, what do you do if those emotions are absent? Can you worship? Should you even go to church? What do you do if you're sitting in the pew and those emotions aren't there?

Should you get up and leave? Now the answer to that question is very delicate. It has to be handled, I think, with pastoral care and biblical faithfulness. Our emotions, our spiritual affections, and when I say emotions, I'm not talking about physical things like sweaty palms or fluttering eyelashes or wobbly knees or butterflies in the stomach or anything like that.

I'm talking about real spiritual affections rising in the heart. Now they rise and fall. We are seldom the same in the morning that we are in the evening. We are affected by many things in the rise and fall of our spiritual affections, from weariness to hunger to Satan to sinning.

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 and that's 100% engagement of your affections, and short of that, there's nothing worthwhile. That's not true. Let's use David for an example. Psalm 40, "I waited patiently for the Lord.

He inclined to me and heard my cry. He drew me up from the pit of destruction, out of the miry bog. He set my feet upon a rock, making my steps secure. He put a new song in my mouth, a song of praise. Many will see and fear and put their trust in the Lord." Well, David was in a pit with no song, and that means he was emotionally flat.

Could he worship in the pit, waiting for a song? "I waited for the Lord. I waited." I don't know how long he had to wait. I preached a sermon one time called "In the Pits with the King," and I'm so encouraged that David had these pit experiences because everybody else does too, if we're honest.

Sometimes you have to wait a long time, so could he worship in the pit, or could he only worship after he got out of the pit? I think the answer is his waiting for the Lord was worship. It wasn't what he wanted it to be because he had a new song when he got out, and then he saw the new song, and they were moved to trust the Lord.

But he was not waiting for pills, and he was not waiting for somebody else. He was waiting for God because he had tasted and seen that the Lord was good. So here's my way of describing the levels of worship that move from the strongest to the weakest to non-existence.

So here's really my answer to, "Can you worship when your emotions are flat or gone?" The highest level of worship is when you see some aspect of God's glory, and you feel affections that are corresponding to that glory, grace, justice, goodness, wrath, wisdom of God, something you see, your eyes are open, the Spirit moves, thankfulness or admiration or contrition or wonder or hope well up in your heart.

It's lively. We feel it, and then we can express it. That's the top level of worship. Second, we see God in some measure—we're moving down now to a less than ideal— we see God in some measure in his glory, but the corresponding affections are just not lively. They're scarcely there.

What we see is true, and we long for those emotions to be there, but they're not. We've tasted that God is good, we remember it, and we ache for the former love and for the former passion and affections. 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.

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, you ache to delight in him like you once did. And that very ache is worship. And the third is we see God weakly, and we're unmoved by this weak sight.

We're so down and so lifeless that we not only don't have the corresponding affections worthy of God, but we don't even feel a desire for them. Now, this is getting scary. We are blank. There remains a seed of some new life in us, but it expresses itself not in, "Oh, Lord, I want to want." Instead, it expresses itself in a bare regret that we don't long for anything.

But we still can feel some seed of regret, some remorse, some sorrow at how utterly blank and flat we have become toward God that we don't even want to want him. We're just sorry for the mess we're in. And my answer is that sorrow, that regret is worship. It's far from ideal, but it's still a seed that reflects what we're missing, and we know we're missing it, and it reflects itself in that regret.

Now, there is one step below that, and it is non-worship. We see no beauty in God. We feel no admiration for God. We feel no longing to have those affections for God, and we feel no regret. And we feel no conviction, and we feel no remorse. And I would say at that point, "No, you cannot worship.

I don't care what you do. Go to church, sing, pray, jump up and down. You can't worship because your heart is gone." So my answer to the question is, yes, there are levels of worship when the affections are weak or almost gone. But if all the affections are gone, there is no longer any worship.

If there's no longing to desire, if there's no regret or remorse at failing to long for the desire for God, then we are beyond worship. At that point, we are utterly cast upon the sovereign grace of God alone, and there's nothing in us until he creates it. Yeah, that's very sobering.

Thank you, Pastor John. And for more on this theme, you can find a book by Pastor John at DesiringGod.org, which is titled "When I Don't Desire God," and you can download the book free of charge. And speaking of the importance of the affections, see the recent Ask Pastor John episode, which is titled "Why Stoicism is Toxic," and that's episode number 239.

And also the episode titled "How Do I Own Biblical Truths for Myself," which is episode number 183, which talks a lot about how our affections are tied to our personal discoveries of truth in the Bible. And, of course, you can find that sermon mentioned earlier, "In the Pits with the King," from back in 1980.

You can find that at DesiringGod.org as well. We'll be back tomorrow with a new episode. Until then, I'm Tony Reinke. Thanks for listening. DesiringGod.org DesiringGod.org