Seedsower Music:: Feeling Our Way Through Life

Feelings have become the new end all, the criteria that governs our actions. At the same time, self-discipline is frowned upon as inauthentic and artificial. Worship often loses out, when it is our means to health and wholeness.

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Feeling Our Way Through Life

November 24, 2008

I was glad when they said to me, "Let us go to the house of the Lord." Psalm 122:1

Is it just me or does the Psalmist here seem to need a little prodding to get to church? He got there, but his friends figured in the equation. In Hebrews we see that spotty attendance at worship is nothing new...

Let us not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but let us encourage one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching. Hebrews 10:25

"I just don't feel like it" is a well-worn mantra. You may have found those words coming out of your very own mouth recently! Doing what we don't feel like doing, feels - well - inauthentic.

Are we self-deceived, and missing out on the best by pampering ourselves? Eugene Peterson advises us that, when it comes to worship, feelings ought to take a back seat to obedience....

"God made us. God redeems us. God provides for us. That natural, honest, healthy, logical response to that is praise to God. When we praise we are functioning at the center, we are in touch with the basic, core reality of our being."

"But very often we don't feel like it, and so we say, 'It would be dishonest for me to go to a place of worship and praise god when I don't feel like it. I would be a hypocrite" The psalmist says, I don't care whether you feel like it or not: as was decreed, 'give thanks to the name of the Lord.'"

"I have put great emphasis on the fact that Christians worship because they want to, not because they are forced to. But I have never said that we worship because we feel like it."

"Feelings are great liars. If Christians only worshiped when they felt like it, there would be precious little worship that went on. Feelings are important in many areas, but completely unreliable in matters of faith. The Bible wastes very little time on the way we feel. We live in what one writer has called the "age of sensation."

"We think that if we don't feel something there can be no authenticity in doing it. But the wisdom of God says something different, namely, that we can act ourselves into a new way of feeling much quicker than we can feel ourselves into a new way of acting."

"Worship is an act which develops feelings for God, no a feeling for God which is expressed in an act of worship. When we obey the command to praise God in worship, our deep, essential need to be in relationship with God is nurtured."
E. Peterson A LONG OBEDIENCE IN THE SAME DIRECTION page 49-50

"A Christian should be 'ALLELUIA!' from head to foot." AUGUSTINE