Made to Feel

True Worship & Emotionalism in the Church according to C.S. Lewis

Squint your eyes; focus for a minute.

Flip through the file-folders of your mind. Can you remember?

The first time you won at something? When you aced a geometry test or crushed it at a recital or hit the game-winning shot? That first taste of elation as a child when you mastered a bicycle or a yo-yo? How every muscle in you felt springy, pulsing with Heaven-kissed confidence? Like your soul felt completely settled and at home in your body and you could luxuriate the refreshing flavor of a deep breath?

The rush of joy. According to C.S. Lewis “joy is the serious business of Heaven.”¹ It’s what Chesterton mused was the thing pushing Man to be his best — “when Joy is the fundamental thing in him.”² It’s the wave of divine favor. The gravity of eternity that pulls us forward. The taste of victory, “the will which labours, which overcomes obstacles, which knows triumph.”³

I wonder if that’s what the disciples felt.

[NOTE: Taking a slight detour from our weekly scheduled Wednesday Wonderisms. I’ll be on track with another midweek morning reflection again soon. Thanks so much for reading and please consider sharing with a friend. I am grateful for you all.]

After a lengthy regional missions trip, the Twelve came back to Jesus. They told Him of their mastery over the demonic spirits who had haunted the pagan regions they encountered. Following a quick teaching moment, lest they get too inflated craniums, Jesus turns His attention above:

At that very time He rejoiced greatly in the Holy Spirit, and said, “I praise You, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that You have hidden these things from the wise and intelligent and have revealed them to infants. Yes, Father, for this way was well-pleasing in Your sight.”

— Luke 10:21

Peter: “Wait… did Jesus just call us infants? Oh, okay.”

Super-fun Greek word here when we get to “rejoiced greatly.” It’s the term agalliaó. Down to check it out? Let’s go:

• agalliáō (from agan, “much, very” and 242 /hállomai, “jump, leap”) – properly, getting so glad one jumps in celebration; to exult (boast) because so experientially joyful.⁴

Remember, this is describing Jesus. He’s the one doing this.

Luke, educated historian and doctor, uses one of the more passionate words to describe Jesus’ reaction. Interesting.

What jarring beauty. This is the unique reality of what God’s ideal humanity often looks like in the Son of God. For Him, the most visible manifestation of emotion was often to break out in praise. To quote Chesterton’s Orthodoxy again, “Praise should be the permanent pulsation of the soul.”⁵ And praise is the baseline example of a thing expressed — often using the faculties of emotions like gratitude, humility, joy and love.

Emotion is a part of God’s plan and blueprint for a fully-fledged human experience.

Which is why the feelings flamewar in the Church troubles me from multiple angles.

One of the most wonderful twists in the Narnian epic is the death and resurrection of Aslan. Susan and Lucy are devastated and hopeless at the loss of their friend, the Lion, the true king of Narnia. This gloom is only surpassed by their overwhelming joy after hearing the Stone Table crack in two and reuniting with him:

“Oh, Aslan!” cried both the children, staring up at him, almost as much frightened as they were glad.
“Aren’t you dead then, dear Aslan?” said Lucy.
“Not now,” said Aslan.
“You’re not—not a—?” asked Susan in a shaky voice. She couldn’t bring herself to say the word ghost.
…
“Do I look it?” he said.
“Oh, you’re real, you’re real! Oh, Aslan!” cried Lucy and both girls flung themselves upon him and covered him with kisses.⁶

Lewis describes the Pevensie girls becoming overwhelmed with the weight of grief and loss at Aslan’s death. Understandably so. Which makes his coming back to life all the more reason for them to undergo a sweeping rush of emotion. Imagine losing someone dear to you, only to discover them shortly thereafter — alive and better than ever. You would express appropriate emotion.

Duh.

Which leads me to the following 4 reflections on emotion.

1. Don’t confuse emotion with emotionalism.

Let me clarify. Some in the Church are quick to point at other people’s expressions and immediately accuse them of being too emotional. In their estimation, these people are not “led by the Spirit.” Now, hear me. Emotionalism can absolutely be an unfortunate by-product of any large gathering of people in general, whether a sporting event or rock concert. It happens in the Church, especially our charismatic/Pentecostal streams. But I worry that, at times, we’re not truly discerning what’s going on with people spiritually (1 Corinthians 12:10; Hebrews 5:13-14), we’re just being jerks.

• Emotionalism is borne out of insecurity, history of abandonment, an unhealthy need for attention, lack of self-awareness, soul scars of various types and sometimes, good ol’ plain social awkwardness. One definition is “a tendency to display or respond with undue emotion, especially morbid emotion; unwarranted expression or display of emotion.”⁷

• Emotion is the mechanism of our souls to sense the weight of our experiences. Danger makes us fear for our lives or the lives of others; displays of affection make us feel sentimental and loved; injustice makes us angry at abusers. God created capacity for emotions, so they’re not evil — at least, not wholesale. They just need to be redeemed, like the rest of who we are. I guess that’s why self-control is a fruit of the Spirit, and maybe why it’s listed last: because it’s the most challenging one to grow (Galatians 5:22-23).

We need our emotions so we can connect with others, experience the deep love of God, celebrate beauty in nature, sympathize and cry with those who mourn and struggle, rejoice at God’s provision, pursue significance and seek the transcendence in God, express the glory of redemption in Christ to a broken world and be sobered to action by tragedy and the frailty of human mortality.

Do people go too far with emotionalism? Are they at times out of control? Yes.

But we need our emotions; at least, God seems to think so. The same God who fashioned reason and logic drew up the plans for the architecture of the human heart. These don’t need to be at odds.

You were made to think. And to think deeply.

2. You were also made to feel. And to feel deeply.

As imagers of God, we (ideally) reflect aspects of His nature. Think about Him: God expresses emotions, and He’s the source of logic and reason. Yet these things are not mutually exclusive or at odds, because “God's being is unitary; it is not composed of a number of parts working harmoniously, but simply one.”⁸ Our emotions were made to have their source in God. Through the regeneration of the Spirit, they are a beautiful creation of the Father and part of the image of God (imago Dei) each of us bears.

God feels too.

Throughout the Scriptures, God laughs (Psalm 37:12-13), gets angry (Isaiah 5:25), expresses joy (Zephaniah 3:17), grieves (Genesis 6:6), and is loving and compassionate toward humanity (Romans 5:8; Exodus 33:19; John 3:16; Jeremiah 31:3; 1 John 4:8). His relation to emotion is perfect; He is forever in control. In The Cry of the Soul, Dan Allender and Tremper Longman preface their work with a reminder that “God feels anger, fear, jealousy, despair, contempt, and shame—and all of these emotions reveal something about His character. Most gloriously, each one points to the scandalous wonder of the Cross.”⁹

Going deeper, it’s really sin that’s contaminated our souls, where our mind, will and emotions live.

The heart is more deceitful than all else

And is desperately sick;

Who can understand it?

— ‭‭Jeremiah‬ ‭17:9‬

Genesis chapter 3 teaches a key part of our ontology: humans became sick. Your mind, will and emotions are infected by iniquity. However, all the out-workings of this condition are mere perversions of what was programmed by the Creator. I like to think of it in context of what Lewis said concerning impulses:

Strictly speaking, there are no such things as good and bad impulses. Think once again of a piano. It has not got two kinds of notes on it, the “right” notes and the “wrong” ones. Every single note is right at one time and wrong at another.¹⁰

— C.S. Lewis

As a musician, that makes so much sense to me. God is amazing.

Feeling angered when someone hurts a loved one is reasonable, but not everything you do with that anger is justifiable. Playing the right notes of your emotional spectrum is all about allowing yourself to feel deeply, while being ruled not by your emotions, but the Ruler of the Universe.

Cut to the other end of the pendulum, though. Unfortunately, there are many people in the Church that have fallen victim to the pitfall of emotionalism. Being emotionally driven outside of connection to God is empty and vain. It is much like the showdown between Elijah with the prophets of Baal (1 Kings 18). Raving, crying out and cutting themselves did nothing for the false prophets in the end — because their emotion was not submitted to the truth.

3. If emotion isn’t married to truth, to Jesus — it’s fruitless.

Our feelings do work to tell us a bit about what’s going on, but they’re still imperfect. They can lie. They need to be conformed into the image of Jesus by the regenerative work of the Spirit (Romans 12:1-3). Redeemed emotions help make God more real to us, but they must take a backseat to the Scriptures and the Spirit on our journey.

“My feelings do not define truth. God’s word defines truth. My feelings are echoes and responses to what my mind perceives. And sometimes—many times—my feelings are out of sync with the truth. When that happens—and it happens every day in some measure—I try not to bend the truth to justify my imperfect feelings, but rather, I plead with God: Purify my perceptions of your truth and transform my feelings so that they are in sync with the truth.”¹¹

— John Piper

You may not feel like God’s sexual ethic as revealed in Scripture is important for today. In that instant, your feelings prove to be the unimportant thing.

If I blaze down the highway at 107mph, get pulled over by a CHP officer, and he begins writing me a ticket, I can feel however I’d like. Bitter. Angry. Irritated. Jealous of the dude who just burned rubber at 110mph and got away with it.

My feelings aren’t relevant. Submitting to authority is.

You don’t have to like what God says. But you need to submit to His authority.

Truth is what sets every part of us free, including the way we feel things.

4. Worship can and should encompass the whole person — especially your emotions

Sometimes religious folk are quick to pass judgement on someone they find caught up in “emotionalism.” To me, that’s sad. It seems these people don’t understand the concept Jesus was talking about when the woman anointed His feet with precious nard perfume. Despite the disgust of those around who thought she took things too far, Jesus said “her sins, which are many, have been forgiven, for she loved much; but he who is forgiven little, loves little.” (Luke 7:47). You don’t see the inner workings of a person’s heart or know what they’ve been delivered from.

Jesus’ radical deliverance of people from darkness, disease and death left people a tad bit expressive: “the entire crowd was rejoicing over all the glorious things being done by Him” (Luke 13:17). That’s worship.

Another nugget from Jack: “The most valuable thing the Psalms do for me is to express the same delight in God which made David dance.”¹²

Love it. Even though I can’t really dance. But that’s not the point.

Do some people hype themselves up, veering away from orthodoxy due to childhood abandonment and attention issues? Undoubtedly. But at the same time, I know down to the marrow in my bones that when I really think of what Jesus has done for me, and when I see God heal and save and restore, my emotional reaction and the worship that results are in fact spiritual things. It’s all part of the interconnected matrix of the human soul.

“Much of the worship in the Bible involves singing, and singing involves emotions (and our body) as well as the intellect. We should know and celebrate God with our whole person. While too many Christians neglect to serve God with the mind, others cultivate only their minds and neglect the emotional aspects of worship.”¹³

— Craig S. Keener

God deserves it all. Not unhinged hysterics. Not cold robotics.

All your heart and your soul and your mind (Matthew 22:37).

According to Jesus, anyway. You know. The Savior-King.

Let’s not lose our hearts for the sake of our heads.

Or vice versa.

God made both. I would encourage you to consider what it might look like for you to surrender this part of yourself to Him so that He can teach you to play the right notes. It takes time to stop clinking sharps and flats and messing up your arpeggios. Like most things, it takes practice.

Maybe you’ve never touched the keys out of fear.

Maybe you’ve been rattling along the ivoried with no rhyme or reason.

A parting word from Lewis in his brilliant The Great Divorce:

“No natural feelings are high or low, holy or unholy, in themselves. They are all holy when God’s hand is on the rein. They all go bad when they set up on their own and make themselves into false gods.”¹⁴

You were made by God to feel. Don’t be controlled or carried away by every emotion. Don’t be so repressed you squash your God-given heart like a tomato. There is a healthy rhythm in the middle, in the song of the Holy Spirit. He teaches all who choose to walk with His hand on the rein.

When is the last time you rejoiced greatly?

1. Lewis, C. S. (1964). Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on prayer. Harvest (San Diego). p. 93.

2. Chesterton, G. K. (1908). Orthodoxy. The Bodley Head (London). p. 296.

3. Yeats, W. B. (2010). The The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Vol. III: Autobiographies. Simon and Schuster. p. 348.

4. Strong’s Greek: 21. ἀγαλλιάω (agalliaō) -- to exult, rejoice greatly. (n.d.-b). https://openbible.com/strongs/greek/21.htm

5. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, p.296.

6. Lewis, C. S. (1995). The Lion, the Witch and the wardrobe. Scholastic Incorporated. p. 162-163.

7. emotionalism. (n.d.). In Dictionary.com. https://www.dictionary.com/browse/emotionalism

8. Tozer, A. (2022). The Knowledge of the Holy. Sea Harp Press. p. 161.

9. Allender, D., & Longman, T. (2015). The cry of the soul: How Our Emotions Reveal Our Deepest Questions About God. NavPress. p. xx.

10. Lewis, C. S. (2001). Mere Christianity. HarperOne. p. 11.

11. Piper, J. (2009b). Finally alive: What Happens when We are Born Again. Christian Focus Publications. p. 165.

12. Lewis, C. S. (1958). Reflections on the Psalms. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. p.46.

13. Keener, C. S. (2001). Gift and giver: The Holy Spirit for Today. Baker Books. p. 32.

14. Lewis, C. S. (1996). The Great Divorce. Touchstone Books. p. 92.