YOU MAKE ME GLAD
Psalm 92
“I sing for joy at what your hands have done.”
In these days where much of worship in churches consists of singing songs, it would seem that all of us would know in our life and experience what is meant when the Psalmist says that it is good to praise the Lord, as expressed by the rest of the psalm.
Yet I suspect, and forgive me if I am wrong in your particular case, that many of our experiences of worship in church, while they may bring us to a high in emotion, do not last long enough to draw us closer to God, and be emotionally invested in him, for the rest of the week. And that is because, again, in my opinion, there is a disconnect between what we sing and what we know—what arises in our hearts out of our experiences.
I think that in the main, the worship we experience in church is not so much the response that arises out of the lives of the people of God gathered as much as the efforts of those in charge to lead the worship to transport us to a place where the words and songs of worship enter our minds and hearts and draw out our emotions. Or worse, the obligation we carry out every Sunday to elevate the God we profess with words and songs.
In other words, churches are now much more concerned that we have a “good” worship, whatever that means to us, rather than “true” worship—worship that each of us can honestly express, arising from our knowledge, experience and our faith. It is true that “good” worship may lead to “good and true” worship, and that would be excellent because such true worship that comes out of a good worship can work in our minds and hearts and produce the “good” that the Psalmist speaks of.
But all of us should focus on true worship.
Jesus, in response to a question posed by the Samaritan woman he met at a well said this:
“Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth.” (John 4:23-24)