When I Don’t Want to Lead My Family in Worship
There have often been nights, tonight being one of them, where I can feel my flesh fighting against leading my family in worship. Maybe I could pivot to a movie night and we can enjoy dinner in front of the television or maybe I can hide behind the fact that my one-year-old is already melting down during dinner and to continue in family worship would be impossible as she screams from her high chair. This battle against family worship has been a fight that has arisen several times since I resolved last year to take my family ministry more seriously. Many of those battles I have lost and even more of them I have retreated entirely. However, tonight was not one of them.
The minute the fight came tonight, a line from the Phos Hilaron came to mind.
“You are worthy at all times to be praised by happy voices.”
This line resonated deeply with me and convicted me as I groaned at the thought of calling my family to worship.
I came to know Christ in an evangelical context that highly prioritized the experiential nature of the Christian life. When talking about salvation, the emphasis was on that conversion experience in which we were expected to demonstrate a sufficient amount of fruit borne by the Holy Spirit in our newness of life to the satisfaction of the hearers, lest we be considered false converts. When talking about worship, we discussed how moved we were by the music and how connected we felt to the Lord in it. When talking about the preaching of the word, we reflected on whether we felt convicted, moved, or inspired. The majority of the Christian life was related to our experience of it. This experience-centric understanding of Christianity, born out of the marrying of romanticism and the Great Awakenings, has had some unintended consequences. If experience was the prize, then the lack of it was a failure at best and a sin at worst. To go to worship God through praise and word, and not feel something, was an indication of some moral failing on my part. To go to worship without first having a joyful, excited heart was to embrace a dry and dead religiosity that was repugnant to God.
As I’ve come to know the beauty of the liturgy, my experiential, me-focused, attitude to worship has come under judgment. We shouldn’t come to worship to experience something. Worship is not about our reception of it. We come to worship to give ourselves to God. Worship to God can be meaningful, genuine, and reverential even if I don’t receive a deep emotional experience during it or have a joyful excited heart going into it. This is not to say we won’t have these experiences during worship. I have several times been moved deeply amid a worship service in both liturgical and non-liturgical settings. This is also not to say that our heart positions during worship are entirely irrelevant and as long as we say the right words and do the right things we are okay. God addresses this through the prophets quite directly and forcefully when discussing the heart position and the life of the Israelites in relationship to the liturgical patterns that they were prescribed.
This is, however, to say that worship is not contingent on our experiences. Worship is contingent on God's worthiness. Since God is worthy, we have to worship Him and give ourselves to Him. Even when we aren’t emotionally moved first to go to Him in worship. We make those decisions to worship when the days are hard, the times are busy, and excuses abound to omit it because God is worthy at all times to receive worship.
Don’t let your lack of experience serve as an excuse to fail to give God the worth that He is doing.
I’ll end by noting that choosing to worship was meaningful tonight. Praying alongside my family for our friends and the church and getting to recount what we love about Jesus as we reflected on the lectionary passage in John for this coming Sunday, completely melted away all the feelings of “I don’t want to” that nearly halted me from calling us to worship tonight.
I pray for you and your family worship and I ask you to pray for mine as well. He is worthy at all times to be praised by happy voices.
God’s peace to you.