Music and Godly Emotion

In the last article, we began to look at music and worship, and said that God wants our worship music to be creative, to sing His praise with a variety of music: new, old, vocal and instrumental. God also wants our music in worship to be characterized by excellence, to bring our best to Him whether we sing or play or compose or arrange, so that the music we use in worship enables us to genuinely, consistently magnify God’s greatness in your own mind and heart. In this article we will continue the focus on music in worship, turning to a topic which can be a bit controversial, and that is music, worship, and our emotions.

I believe God wants our music to be filled with emotion that honors Him. Psalm 33 shows lots of emotion: joy in verse 1, thanksgiving in verse 2, loud shouts in verse 3. And the last 3 verses of the Psalm are all about the emotional impact that God’s power and work have on the worshipper: expectant waiting in verse 20, gladness of heart in verse 21, and hope in verse 22. That’s a good bit of emotion for 22 short verses.

One of the things music does very well is to engage our emotions. Jonathan Edwards, writing in The Religious Affections, 1746, said “The duty of singing praises to God seems to be appointed wholly to excite and express religious affections. No other reason can be assigned why we should express ourselves to God in verse rather than in prose, and do it with music, but only that such is our nature and frame that these things have a tendency to move our affections.”

Many of us have had profound encounters with God through music—that’s nothing new. More than 2000 years before Congreve told us that “music has charms to soothe the savage breast,” David knew that truth intimately. 1 Samuel 16 tells us that in Saul’s disobedience, God allowed an evil spirit to terrorize him. And when this would happen, David was called, as a skilled musician, to play the harp, and Saul would be refreshed.

But being moved emotionally is not the same thing as worshipping God. Being moved in your emotions doesn’t equate to being moved in your heart and mind to honor God with your life. The most memorable, emotional, profound experience I’ve ever had with music was at 1989 performance of Shostakovich’s 5^th Symphony, and it had nothing whatsoever to do with worship.

Edwards, again in Religious Affections, said that the mere performance of worship activities, “reading, praying, singing, hearing sermons” are not actually worship unless “our hearts are affected and our love captivated by the free grace of God,” unless “the great, spiritual, mysterious, and invisible things of the Gospel have the weight of real things in our hearts.”

Do you hear what he’s saying? We are not worshiping if we are not engaged. There is no such thing as detached, laid-back worship. When I’m leading worship and see some of our people half-asleep, barely singing if at all, looking as though they are bored out of their minds, the problem isn’t too much emotion, it is too little.

John Wesley said the same thing in his Directions for Singing, “Above all sing spiritually. Have an eye to God in every word you sing. Aim at pleasing Him more than yourself, or any other creature. In order to do this, attend strictly to the sense of what you sing, and see that your heart is not carried away with the sound, but offered to God continually.”

Friends have told me that they are troubled by emotion in worship, but emotion is not the problem, emotionalism is. Emotionalism pursues feelings as ends in themselves. But God created our emotions, and He wants them to be stirred up in response to who He is and what He has done for us. Music helps us in this.

The language of worship is a language of emotion, of love, of need, of joy in the living God. Psalm 32:11 says, “Be glad in the Lord and rejoice, you righteous ones; and shout for joy, all you who are upright in heart.” Psalm 42:1-3 says, “As the deer pants for the water brooks, so my soul pants for You, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God….My tears have been my food day and night, while they say to me all day long, ‘Where is your God?’” Peter reminds us that, “Though you have not seen Him, you love Him. Though you do not now see Him, you believe in Him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory” (1 Pet. 1:8). David declares, “I will celebrate before the Lord. I will become even more undignified than this, and I will be humiliated in my own eyes” (2 Sam. 6:21-22).

In that last verse, David said he would so celebrate God’s goodness that he would willingly humiliate himself in front of his people. That’s not cold, dead orthodoxy; that’s emotion! The problem comes when we make emotion the goal, when we try to stir up a feeling for the feeling’s sake. But emotion is not the goal. The goal is God’s praise, and emotion is merely a byproduct.

Having said that, we need to let music do what God intends for it to do. Music has limitless variety: soft, slow, loud, up-tempo, grand, or majestic. If we let the text dictate the style, the style will encourage fitting emotion. Music moves our emotions, and when done in a way that honors God and His Word, it can draw us in powerfully with it. And that is what God intends.

What about repetition in songs? Why do we sometimes repeat a verse, or more often a chorus, sometimes several times? Why on songs like “Open the Eyes of my Heart” do we sing “Holy, holy, holy” 10 times in a row when 3 times was good enough for Isaiah and for John? To get an emotional response? No. How about to stir your heart to consider the truth you are singing, to engage with it on a deeper level? Because repetition helps us get something in our heads, and hearts, and some things just need to be said more than once.

Paul knew that truth. In Philippians 3:1 he wrote, “Finally, my brethren, rejoice in the Lord.” Do you realize that is the fifth time in Philippians Paul has told them to rejoice? And as if he’s anticipating an objection (“Come on Paul, you’ve already told us that”), he continues, “To write the same things again is no trouble to me, and it is a safeguard for you.” Repeated truths are a safeguard to us. Witness Psalm 136—it has 26 verses, and the second half of every one says the same thing, “for His lovingkindness is everlasting.” There is value in repetition.

To be sure, repetition in songs can go too far. At some point, repetition goes from stimulating to numbing. But the next time the worship leader repeats a verse or a chorus, dwell on the words being repeated. What truth can be hammered home to your heart and mind? What can you meditate on to give God greater glory? Let repetition do its work.

When we worship well, when our worship is genuinely pleasing to God, we will benefit from its consistent practice. Allen Ross, in Recalling the Hope of Glory, said, “If worshipers leave a service with no thought of becoming more godly in their lives, then the purpose of worship has not been achieved….The clear teaching of Scripture is that genuine worship is life changing.” In other words, worship that pleases God reminds us that the Spirit Himself is constantly at work in us. We see it in 2 Corinthians 3:18, “And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.”

Worship that pleases God encourages us to grow in holiness because it reminds us that God has paid the price for our sins, that our bondage to sin has been broken, that we’ve been freed to obey God in the Spirit. “He Himself bore our sins in His body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By His wounds you have been healed” (1 Pet. 2:24).

Worship that pleases God edifies us because it renews our awareness of God’s love for us, and of the power of His Word. That was the point of Paul’s direction to the Corinthians regarding their worship services, 1 Corinthians 14, the short summary of which is, “Let all things be done for edification.” When we sing together, and pray together, and hear God’s Word read and taught together, we are edified, we are built up.

Finally, the most important result of worship that pleases God is that the object of our worship is pleased. He is honored. He is glorified. God gets the glory He so richly deserves. And that is really the point, isn’t it?

Our worship here is a bare glimmer of what it will ultimately be. And sometimes you really have to stretch the imagination to get even that glimmer. Maybe the worship team was off, they didn’t do any songs you liked, babies are crying, the preacher’s gone too long, and you’re hungry. But if we can even begin to comprehend God’s majesty, the risen Christ in all His glory, we will always strive to make our worship fit for the King.

We will wrap up this series with two more topics related to worship: the role of physical expressiveness in worship, and the legacy of worship.

Tim Schoap is co-pastor of Signal Mountain Bible Church in Signal Mountain, Tenn.