Spiritual pathways (4)

The worship pathway. When you’re on the worship pathway, you resonate with the Psalmist: “I was glad when they said to me, ‘Let us go into the house of the Lord.’” Something deep inside you feels released when praise is given. Your heart opens up and you come alive. You find yourself in tears, sometimes in moments of deep joy, because God seems so close. But here are two cautions if you’re on this pathway: (1) Don’t judge people who are not as outwardly expressive as you. Some of them grew up in churches where no one raised a finger, let alone a hand in worship. (2) Guard against an experience-based spirituality that has you always looking for the next “worship high.” C.S. Lewis wrote about the fatal sin of saying, “Encore!” by demanding that God reproduce an experience or an emotion. He said that of all prayers, this may be the one God is least likely to grant because it can lead us to worship an experience rather than the God to whom our experience points. Music, for instance, can be a great gift to worship. But because music affects our feelings so powerfully, we can grow dependent on it to produce a certain emotional response. In this case, you may need to spend some time worshiping God without music, so that your worship is based on who God is and not a matter of getting swept up in certain sounds. Also, you may need to engage more in Bible study so that your heart is deeply rooted in the knowledge of God.