"If you don't feel it, don't say it!" That mantra, more unstated than overtly expressed, has had a debilitating effect on  worship of late. After all, so the reasoning goes, how can you "be joyful" when you don't feel it? Isn't that just being hypocritical?

A great old Scottish saint (is that redundant?) from the 1600's, Samuel Rutherford, argued against this line of thinking, as pointed out by a Scotsman two centuries later named Alexander Whyte:

Ought we to go on with our work and with our worship when our hearts are dry and when we have no delight in what we do?

That is just the time to persevere, replies their evangelical guide, for it is in the absence of all sense of liberty and sweetness that our duties prove themselves to be truly spiritual.

A sweet service has often its sweetness from an altogether other source than the spiritual world. Let a man be engaged in divine service, or in any other religious work, and let him have sensible support and success in it; let him have liberty and enjoyment in the performance of it; and, especially, let him have the praise of men after it, and he will easily be deceived into thinking that he has had God's Spirit with him, and the light of God's countenance, whereas all the time it has only been an outpouring on his deceived heart of his own lying spirit of self-seeking, self-pleasing, and self-exalting.

In other words, we can be easily self-deceived. Just feeling good about our service for God, or our worship of Him, is no guarantee that what has been offered is genuine.

While, again, a man's spirit may be all day as dry as the heath in the wilderness, and all other men's spirits around him and toward him the same, yet a very rich score may be set down beside that unindulged servant's name against the day of the 'well-dones.'

God can honor his truth and his word, and accomplish His purposes, even though it come from Balaam's ass, or Balaam himself.

'I believe that many think that obedience is lifeless and formal unless the wind be in the west, and all their sails are filled with the joys of sense. But I am not of their mind who think so.'

My conclusion? Better to risk being inauthentic than to remain silent and choke off what God might want to do, in you and through you.

Brett McCracken notes that concern over "twenty-somethings" leaving churchgoing behind has elevated "relevancy" to be the ultimate consideration. He writes....

Increasingly, the "plan" has taken the form of a total image overhaul, where efforts are made to rebrand Christianity as hip, countercultural, relevant. As a result, in the early 2000s, we got something called "the emerging church"—a sort of postmodern stab at an evangelical reform movement. Perhaps because it was too "let's rethink everything" radical, it fizzled quickly. But the impulse behind it—to rehabilitate Christianity's image and make it "cool"—remains.

From the Orange County Register dated September 14, 2010....

ANAHEIM – Apparently holding services in a punk rock nightclub every weekend wasn't quite cool enough for City Church. So, to mark its first birthday, the budding Anaheim congregation Sunday proposed following its regular rock 'n' roll revival with a "radical commitment" – tattoos of various versions of the church logo.

Ouch....

C. H. Spurgeon asked his congregation this question 135 years ago....

Where are the saints now? We have a superabundance of professors (those who claim to follow Christ) but where are the truly eminent Christians?

I believe that the strength of the church lies in that inner circle of champions which is composed of the thoroughly consecrated, the men who are favored of the Lord.

Holy Bernard was the light of his age, and passing on from age to age we see men who blazed with the light of God; but we ought each one of us to seek to be saints in the highest sense of the word.

We must aim at being the holiest of men and women. Let it be ours to be like the mountain-tops that catch the first beams of the raising sun, and reflect the light upon the lowlands.