Nothing will stir up and agitate the emotions of Christian men and women as much as a discussion of the role of emotions in Christian men and women. Is it bad for a Christian to feel good? Or is it good to feel bad? Or are feelings, whether good or bad, irrelevant to the one who believes in Jesus? Are our emotions as Christian men and women something to enjoy or avoid? Are they a source of delight or a sign of danger, or in some sense both?

These are extremely important questions, but our focus is on emotions or feelings or affections in worship and the degree to which they are visibly and audibly expressed in our corporate praise of God. Sadly, too many Christians tend to gravitate to one end of the spectrum or the other. Some focus almost entirely on feelings and judge the success or failure of a Sunday service based on how high their emotions were elevated. Other believers focus almost entirely on facts and consider feelings to be altogether irrelevant. Some hanker after the mountain-top experience of emotional ecstasy while others simply want to be informed of some new and insightful theological truth. They usually end up attending either the First United Church of Christian Feeling or the Orthodox Assembly of Christian Fact.

The result, all too often, is that one church bears a striking resemblance to a Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey Circus while another is more like a Sunday visit to the county morgue! It seems that we are confronted with a choice between the frenzy of unbridled chaos, on the one hand, and the rigidity of immovable concrete on the other.

So what does the Bible have to say about our affections, our deepest and most intense desires, and the feelings that characterize and accompany them?

Look at what Jesus said in his rebuke of the religious leaders of his day.

“You hypocrites! Well did Isaiah prophesy of you, when he said: ‘This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men’” (Matt. 15:7-9).

There is a lot here, but I want you to see that genuine, God-honoring worship includes as an essential element the coming alive of feelings and affections for God. When affections or feelings for God are absent, worship is dead. But what kind of affections? I would include here such things as joy, gladness, fear, awe, reverence, trembling, gratitude, love, exultation, delight, humility, brokenness, contrition over sin, heart-warming satisfaction, and a fervent, white-hot passion or zeal for God. Consider these biblical texts:

“But let all who take refuge in you rejoice; let them ever sing for joy, and spread your protection over them, that those who love your name may exult in you” (Ps. 5:11).

“I will give thanks to the Lord with my whole heart; I will recount all of your wonderful deeds. I will be glad and exult in you” (Ps. 9:1-2a).

“Be glad in the Lord, and rejoice, O righteous, and shout for joy, all you upright in heart!” (Ps. 32:11).

“My soul will be satisfied as with fat and rich food, and my mouth will praise you with joyful lips . . . for you have been my help, and in the shadow of your wings I will sing for joy” (Ps. 63:5,7).

“But the righteous shall be glad; they shall exult before God; they shall be jubilant with joy! Sing to God, sing praises to his name” (Ps. 68:3-4a).

These are but a handful of dozens of similar texts where the engagement of the whole soul in joyful, glad-hearted enjoyment of God is described. There are texts such as Psalm 5:7 that speak of reverential fear in our worship:

“But I, through the abundance of your steadfast love, will enter your house. I will bow down toward your holy temple in the fear of you” (Ps. 5:7; the psalmist clearly felt no inconsistency in speaking of his “fear” of the God whose “love” for him is “steadfast”).

There is a consistent emphasis on gratitude in the psalms:

“Enter his gates with thanksgiving, and his courts with praise! Give thanks to him; bless his name” (Ps. 100:4; see Ps. 103:1-5).

Love is also often the focus in worship:

“Love the Lord, all you his saints!” (Ps. 31:23a).

Passion and hunger for God are essential in worship:

“O God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water” (Ps. 63:1).

If the reality of God and his saving grace for us in Jesus Christ is displayed and explained and understood and we do not feel in our hearts things such as gratitude and joy and love and hunger for more and longing and hope and fear of offending this great and gracious God, then we can go through all the motions of which the body is capable and sing to the heights of musical excellence and still not worship God in a way that truly honors him.

I realize that this scares some people. They are terrified of emotionalism. But let’s be clear: emotionalism is the artificial manipulation of heightened feelings for the sake of the feelings themselves. What I’m advocating is the awakening and intensification of heart-felt affections by means of biblical truth for the sake of God’s glory. Here is how John Piper explained the significance of our Lord’s statement that we worship God “in spirit and truth” (John 4:23):

“Worshiping in spirit is the opposite of worshiping in merely external ways. It is the opposite of empty formalism and traditionalism. Worshiping in truth is the opposite of worship based on an inadequate view of God. Worship must have head and heart. Worship must engage emotions and thought. Truth without emotion produces dead orthodoxy and a church full (or half-full) of artificial admirers (like people who write generic anniversary cards for a living). On the other hand, emotion without truth produces empty frenzy and cultivates shallow people who refuse the discipline of rigorous thought. But true worship comes from people who are deeply emotional and who love deep and sound doctrine. Strong affections for God rooted in truth are the bone and marrow of biblical worship.”^[1]

We must be careful neither to manufacture feelings when they aren’t really there nor suppress them when they are awakened. So let me go on record once again about the relationship between biblical truth and heart-felt affections:

For emotional heat to be holy, it must be the product of theological light.

Spiritual feelings must arise as the fruit of our perception of spiritual realities.

High and noble thoughts about God are inseparably linked to deep and pleasurable feelings for God.

Worship is neither a mind trip nor an emotional binge. It is a biblical blend of our highest and most noble thoughts about God and our deepest and most passionate desires for God.

So we must never be afraid to enjoy God! The primary problem today is that far too many professing Christians enjoy everything in life except God. But listen to the psalmists once again:

“You make known to me the path of life; in your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore” (Ps. 16:11).

“How precious is your steadfast love, O God! The children of mankind take refuge in the shadow of your wings. They feast on the abundance of your house, and you give them drink from the river of your delights” (Ps. 36:7-8).

“Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart” (Ps. 37:4).

“Praise the Lord! For it is good to sing praises to our God; for it is pleasant, and a song of praise is fitting” (Ps. 147:1).

Before we leave this topic of the pleasures of praise, we need to look closely at a genuinely remarkable, but easily misunderstood exhortation in the OT. It is the one we find on the lips of David in Psalm 37:4. Let’s look at it in its broader context.

“Fret not yourself because of evildoers; be not envious of wrongdoers! For they will soon fade like the grass and wither like the green herb. Trust in the LORD, and do good; dwell in the land and befriend faithfulness. Delight yourself in the LORD, and he will give you the desires of your heart. Commit your way to the LORD; trust in him, and he will act. He will bring forth your righteousness as the light, and your justice as the noonday. Be still before the LORD and wait patiently for him; fret not yourself over the one who prospers in his way, over the man who carries out evil devices! Refrain from anger, and forsake wrath! Fret not yourself; it tends only to evil. For the evildoers shall be cut off, but those who wait for the LORD shall inherit the land” (Ps. 37:1-9; italics mine).

To “delight” in the Lord is closely related both to what precedes in v. 3 where David calls on us to “trust” in the Lord and to what follows in v. 5 where we are called on to “commit” our “way” to Lord. Likewise, the same God-centered focus continues as we are told again in v. 5 to “trust in him” and in v. 7 to “be still before the Lord and wait patiently for him.”

All these exhortations that have God as their focus are set over against the tendency to “fret” yourself over evildoers and to be “envious” of them. Instead of fretting over the prosperity of sinners we are to trust in God, delight in God, and commit our way to God. And that only makes sense if there is more gladness and peace and joy and comfort and delight in God than there is in all the riches amassed by human effort.

I once asked John Piper how we avoid reading this text as an endorsement of the prosperity gospel or a gospel that uses God to get goodies, so to speak. In other words, what prevents us from seeking our joy and satisfaction in God as a pathway to laying hold of other desires of the heart? In other words, how do we avoid making God a tool or instrument or means for the pursuit of joy in something other than him?

He responded in a private email by saying that the “desires” of the heart must be desires that are satisfied in more of God in more and more ways. If that were not the case, we would not truly be delighting in God as an end in itself but only using God to get what we enjoy more than what may be found in him alone. He wrote to me: “I often say that the desire of the heart that we get is God himself. True. But the text implies plurality, and so I am willing to say that we get more of God in more ways when we delight in him. It does not promise that all we can conceive of enjoying will come to us, but that our desires to taste more of God in many ways will be arranged according to God’s wise and loving plan.”

We should also note that if your delight is wholly in God then your desires will not be for anything that would diminish his centrality in your soul. You won’t want anything that has the potential of turning your heart to trust in anyone but him. If your “desires” are for the stuff of this world that would detract from your complete satisfaction in God, then you aren’t truly delighting yourself in him.

But why joy? Why do the biblical authors, such as David, make delight or joy in God so central to our relationship with him? Is it not enough simply to obey God or fear God or worship God or believe in God? Why joy? Why delight? Why does it matter so much?

Not long ago a blogger criticized Christian Hedonism for insisting that we come to God and praise God for the joy to be found in him. He said that we should worship God simply because God deserves to be worshiped. Well, of course he does. No one disputes that point. But Christian Hedonism directs our attention to the how of worship. How is God most glorified in his people? And I would insist that God is most glorified in his people when they experience in themselves, by God’s saving and sanctifying grace, the affections of joy, delight, and satisfaction that God himself experiences in God himself. So, there is obviously something special about joy.

So, let’s resist any temptation to relegate joy and delight to a place of secondary importance. We must also resist the tendency among many to describe joy as little more than the unintended effect or result or inadvertent fruit of some other Christian duty. Instead, let joy in God, delight in God, not in his gifts but in God himself, be the focus of our efforts through the power of the Holy Spirit. For in our delight and joy in God is God most gloriously glorified in us.

[Adapted from my book, Understanding Worship: Biblical Foundations for Delighting in and Feasting on God (Zondervan, 2025)]

[1] John Piper, Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist (Colorado Springs: Multnomah Books, 2011), 81-82.