"Giving God his due"

From "Feeling Good Is Not the Point of Worship":

When does worship become more about the worshipers than the one being worshiped? If weekend worship is designed primarily to be a sort of emotional therapy, do we really need God for it?

No doubt, worship often leaves us feeling better. Sharing space with like-minded believers, opening God’s Word, singing hymns, partaking of Communion—how could such practices not yield beautiful byproducts? I hope my parishioners and I leave church better off than when we came in. Moreover, the emotional side of our lives is vital in worship (just read the Psalms). It seems to me that Christians too often forget we are embodied selves whose hearts are crucial to true worship, so emotional worship can be a welcome corrective.

Even so, there are dangers of emotional excess in worship—in emotion sought for its own sake. Or, perhaps, more precisely, there are dangers in myopic and clichéd pursuits of emotion in worship. ....

Is the church that makes us feel better making us be better? What is the long-term fruit of experience-driven worship? Are congregations becoming brighter lights and sturdier bastions of faith in an increasingly dark and hostile world? Do these worship habits help Christians become more like Christ? ....

Hyperfocus on feeling is a dangerous path to tread. Feelings ebb and flow. It is no knock on emotion to say it is not the foundation of faith, even if it often plays a significant role in our relationships with God and each other.

“Nobody can always have devout feelings: and even if we could, feelings are not what God principally cares about,” C.S. Lewis wrote in Mere Christianity. “He will give us feelings of love if He pleases. We cannot create them for ourselves, and we must not demand them as a right. But the great thing to remember is that, though our feelings come and go, His love for us does not.” ....

Have you have seen the work of the Holy Spirit equated with sensation? Next time someone in a pulpit or worship band says, “The Spirit is really moving today,” ask yourself what, specifically, that person means.

Nothing in Scripture suggests you can tell you’re experiencing a movement of God’s Spirit if you feel positive affect and overpowering sensation. Rather, biblically speaking, the Spirit is the one who makes us more like the crucified Jesus, the one who leads us into sacrificial suffering, by whom we cry, “Abba, Father” (Rom 8:12–17). If we say, “The Spirit is really moving today,” we ought to be witnessing something closer to Good Friday than Woodstock.

Don’t hear me wrong: Experience and emotion matter. These are good gifts from God and have their place in worship. But what we do at church must be far more than emotion and experience. ....

Worship is fundamentally about giving God his due, the glory and honor he deserves. We worship because God is God, whether or not we get anything out of it. Recall the words of the prophet: “Though the fig tree does not bud and there are no grapes on the vines, though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food, though there are no sheep in the pen and no cattle in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will be joyful in God my Savior” (Hab. 3:17–18). .... (more, probably behind a paywall)

Matthew D. Love, "Feeling Good Is Not the Point of Worship," Christianity Today, August 27, 2026.