Worship should be uplifting, right? It should make us feel great, right? Well…sort of. Worshipers and worship leaders need to take a good, hard look at the Scriptures and ask, “What is the Bible’s vision of worship?” THAT starting point–not what worship we grew up with, not what worship gives us goose bumps, not even what our favorite worship leader or blogger tells us–is the only way to begin finding healthy, wholesome answers.

So, for example, we open up to the Psalms, God’s only inspired grouping of top-150 worship songs. What do we see? What fills its contents? What language does it employ? What are its postures? What emotions spread across its spectrum? Well, among other things, there is a whole lot of not-so-pleasant feelings. Dark feelings. Honest feelings. Lousy feelings. And there’s a reason for that. 

Over at the Worship Cohort, I spring off a wonderful quote by Matt Redman and explain why good worship should make us feel painfully scrutinized, uncomfortably exposed. In fact, if you’ve experienced a worship service where you haven’t felt like a helpless mountaineer atop a cave-less mountain peak during a lightning storm, you haven’t experienced worship’s fullness.

In this post, I explore Isaiah’s own journey into lousy-feeling worship, and I explain how the Biblical and Reformational dynamics of Law and Gospel are at play when we gather corporately as God’s people. Here’s a choice, quote, but please go read the post.

Do we worship leaders recognize that part of worship’s job is to make us feel uncomfortable for a time? Contained in a well-balanced, full-bodied worship service should be at least a moment where each and every one of us feels jerked to a halt under the white-hot scrutiny of God’s holy eye. The holiness of God should feel, among other things, like the unrelenting sun in a shade-less desert. You can’t run from its blistering rays.