About a year ago, you heard from me. If anyone is still reading, I hope to pick back up with more writing. I know I teased you with a bit of news…so here is some of it. In April 2025, I first learned about a Doctor of Ministry program at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in “The Arts, Ministry, and Mission.” I was accepted in 5 days and just 6 weeks later, I had completed about 10 books and boarded an airplane to Charlotte, North Carolina, for my first residency.
God used that step of faith to catapult our family into a whole new reality. Just a few months later, we packed up our lives in Oregon and journeyed East.
More about that at another time.
But consequently, in my reading for my second residency, there have been a series of questions I’ve been chewing on.
What does the role of emotion have in worship?
Can we encounter the living God and not have any emotion?
I would argue: No.
The Psalms: The Worshipbook of God’s People
The worshipbook of God’s people, the Psalms, is teeming with emotion: anger, frustration, joy, sadness, longing, hope, lament… the list could go on! If we use this as a guide for our worship today, we see the full spectrum of emotions the Psalmist feels, and we, too, as whole-bodied people, feel these things as well.
GLADNESS
Psalm 100:1-2 “Shout for joy to the Lord, all the earth. Worship the Lord with gladness…”
JOY
Psalm 16:11 “In your presence is fullness of joy...”
LONGING
Psalm 13:1-2 “How long, Lord? Will you forget me forever?”
SADNESS
Pslam 42:3 “My tears have been my good day and night…”
FEAR
Psalm 56:3 “When I am afriad, I put my trust in you.”
AWE
Psalm 8:3-4 “When I consider your heavens…what is mankind that you are mindful of them?”
CONTRITION
Psalm 32:5 “I acknowledged my sin to you…”
When we encounter God the Spirit in worship, we are met with our own finite smallness with the grandeur, holiness, wonder, and awe of the God we worship.
If we have met God in worship, we will experience emotion.
Has worship (particularly music) been used to manipulate emotion? Yes. Have other art forms been used to manipulate motion? Of course. BUT, that does not mean we try to avoid or manipulate an experience so that no emotion is present. That’s just not possible. (If you think otherwise, please prove me wrong!)
Gratitude
As Christians of the new covenant, our response in worship should be that of gratitude. When we ponder the love of God for us, who, while we were still sinners, sent His Son, Jesus Christ, to die for us, how can we not fall down in grateful worship for a God who would seek us out?
A God who would leave the 99 sheep for the lost one?
A God who, like the father in the Parable of the Prodigal Son, lifts up his garments and RUNS to us (shameful! scandelous! something only children would do!).
For this reason I kneel before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name. I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.
Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.
Ephesians 3:14-21
I choose today in gratitude to worship God with my whole heart and whole being: including my emotions.
somehow beautiful 