Are we supposed to enjoy worship?

A good friend of mine recently wrote a short e-mail to me after playing music together in a worship service.  He said that he had fun being a part of the service and asked if it was okay to enjoy times of worship or if those kinds of feelings should be kept separate in the context of worshiping.  

Since that e-mail, I've started reading Desiring God by John Piper.  There is a chapter on worship that speaks to this question about the heart, feelings, pleasures, thoughts that we should have in regards to worship, which is relevant to what my friend asked, and surely something most of us have wondered about before.

Piper starts this chapter on worship looking at John 4, where Jesus' conversation with a Samaritan women starts with asking for water, moves to her issue with sexual immorality, and then ends up talking about worship.  This is the chapter where we find the well-known phrase, "worship in spirit and in truth" (John 4:24).  Piper focuses on the "spirit" and heart element of worship, because he is concerned about the influence of Immanuel Kant on Christianity over the last few centuries.  His philosophy says that an action is moral only if one has no desire to perform it.  Piper particularly disagrees with this idea in regards to Christian worship.

In defining what "spirit" means in this context, Piper says he has taken it to primarily mean our spirits, our hearts engaged in worship, but also recognizes that the Holy Spirit has to be taken into account here.  So, his conclusion is that Jesus saying "that true worship comes only from our spirits made alive and sensitive by the quickening of the Spirit of God" (p.82).  Without the Holy Spirit, he says, our spirits will be dead and unresponsive to God and can't truly worship. Here are a few spirit/heart quotes from this chapter that stood out to me.

"An act of worship is vain and futile when it does not come from the heart"

"Where feelings for God are dead, worship is dead"

"Worshiping in the spirit is the opposite of worshiping in merely external ways"

The "truth" element in worship is essential to balance out our spirits, otherwise we will be like the Samaritans in John 4, who according to Jesus worshiped who/what they did not know.  If who God is and what he has done and all the other truth He has revealed to mankind didn't matter in worship, it wouldn't be wrong to think that God accepted the worship of all religions (sort of a unitarian view).  But Jesus Himself affirmed that truth was imperative to worship, which is why our songs and prayers and creeds and sermons must be weighed against God's truth as revealed in scripture.  A few more quotes to share, putting Piper's perspective on spirit and truth together.

"Worship must engage emotions and thought."

"How and whom are crucial, not where (referencing Jesus conversation with the Samaritan).  Worship must be vital and real in the heart... and rest on a true perception of God."

 

"Strong affections for God rooted in truth are the bone and marrow of biblical worship." 

I felt like God used this chapter to remind of the importance of our hearts and even emotions in worship because I've been focused mostly on the truth factor lately in my thinking and implementation.  The truth has to lead us to a place of not just knowing it, but being satisfied with the excellency of God and overflowing with the joy of His fellowship.  I'll sum up this post with Piper's analogy of how worship, in spirit and truth, works like a furnace.  

Our fuel is a true vision of God's greatness, our fire is the quickening of the Holy Spirit, the furnace is our spirit made alive and warm by the flame of truth, the heat that comes out is the resulting affections from us that result in powerful worship via confessions, longings, acclamations, tears, songs, shouts, bowed heads, lifted hands and obedient lives.  I don't think any of us could find fault in worship that works like that.