I Second that Emotion. Sort Of.

My friend Wes pointed his Facebook friends to yesterday’s post at Zeal For Truth. In that post, Colin writes the following:

Once upon a time, I used to think that the gospel was just the “milk” of Christianity. One’s spiritual ‘maturity’ was marked by ‘solid food’ like apologetics, eschatology and using spiritual gifts. How wrong I was.

He says that he’d come to believe a myth about Christianity: that

the gospel is just the first rung on a ladder of Christian ‘maturity’ and that in general, there are ‘deeper things’ than the gospel. One place where this is evident is worship.

Colin goes on to cite a very popular worship song that is (admittedly) short on any part of the gospel message. The song speaks only to the kind of hand-waving, eyes-tightly-shut kind of worship that has come to typify much of modern Christianity. I like the song, kind of…so I second that emotion. Sort of.

Let’s not pretend that there’s anything wrong with such songs. The Psalms are chock full of that kind of emoting, and we don’t think twice about it. The problem is not that modern worship music is devoid of substance. A lot of it is…and a lot of old hymns are garbage, too.

The problem is our diet.

We tend to gorge on the cotton candy of fluffy praise music, reveling in the tasty emotional soup that it creates in us. We often only nibble at the heart of the gospel, thinking that its richness will fill us after only a bite or two. We feel satisfied after a two-hankie song set, but wonder why we lack the hearty and flavorful stick-to-your-ribs kind of faith we read about in Scripture, or in missionary books.

We’re emotional beings. We’re thinking beings. We’re relational beings. We’re called to love God with all of our hearts, our souls, and our minds (Matthew 26:37 ). We need a balanced diet to be healthy, and – at the moment – American Christianity seems stuck in the drive-thru.

How’s your spiritual diet? Do you focus more on your heart, or on your head? Do you consider yourself “well fed” spiritually, or are you missing something in your diet?

Join me on Substack!