by Amelia Blanchard

This is adapted from an article featured in the Winter 2022-23 Advent/Christmas issue of The Table magazine.

The heart—often referred to in the West as the seat of our longings, desires, feelings—that wild and unruly thing: who can understand it? And what role, if any, does or should it play in our relationship with God and our worship of Him, especially as we seek to know and live according to what is true?

In my own life and journey with God, I have felt a particular bent toward the things of the heart and have wrestled deeply with this question. It wasn’t until I started going to an Anglican church three years ago when I started to learn how to value the heart and the role it plays in our relationship with God while remaining rooted in the steady, reliable truths of God.

Various arms of the church have tended to pendulum swing to one extreme or the other when it comes to engaging our hearts—either totally neglecting them or embracing them and their whims as the be-all and end-all of relationship with God. Many faithful Christians, in the desire to live faithfully, have gotten stuck in the fear that entering at all into the “land of subjectivity”—the land of the heart—will lead them away from the truth. This is a valid fear, given the many examples we have seen of such things happening and the caution of our Lord not to be caught up in deception and falsehood.

However, dare we shut off our hearts in the pursuit of Truth—Jesus Himself? I have found that to even know and live in the truth, we must begin with the honest reality of where we are, which most certainly includes our feelings and longings, and allow Truth Himself to meet and transform us there.

As I look at Jesus’ encounters in the Gospels, it appears to me that they often begin with, or find their trajectory in, Jesus drawing out the longings and desires of those He is interacting with. He seems to be on a mission to tenderly expose and draw forth their hearts. Consider the woman at the well in John 4, whom Jesus meets in all her shame and hiddenness. He compassionately pursues her heart and offers her what she truly longs for—living water, so that she would never thirst again. It’s through drawing forth her heart that He comes to reveal Himself as the fulfillment of her heart’s desire. Think too of blind Bartimaeus, who encounters Jesus through the longing for his sight, and the guttural emotions of desire and hope. This is where Jesus meets him. I believe that we come to know the truth, and ultimately Truth Himself, only as we allow Him to meet us in the honest places of our hearts.

So then, what could it look like to live somewhere in the middle of the pendulum swing—to recognize that our emotions, feelings, and desires have a place in our relationship with God, and yet be able to know and live in the truth that is often beyond (sometimes even other than) what we feel?

More specifically, what could it look like to do this (as a microcosm of our lives) at a Sunday service at Redeemer? As we come into the service, can we acknowledge our hearts honestly before the Lord with expectancy that He will meet us where we are, while also acknowledging and yielding to the truth of who He is regardless of whether or not that aligns presently with our emotional state?

Consider what the Opening Collect for Purity invites us into at the beginning of each service:

Almighty God, to you all hearts are open, all desires known, and from you no secrets are hid: Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love you, and worthily magnify your Holy name through Christ our Lord. Amen.

We begin by first acknowledging that we have hearts and desires, and that they are fully known to God. Then we ask Him to cleanse our hearts (or more specifically, “the thoughts of our hearts”), by the Holy Spirit, who is the Spirit of truth, that we might come to love and worship God rightly. God already knows our hearts and desires—let us acknowledge them to Him and to ourselves, that then we might be open to the Holy Spirit’s cleansing work of bringing us to Truth.

How then do we continue to engage our hearts and yield to truth? We progress through the service with this posture of openness and expectancy into musical worship. Particularly in musical worship, because of the generally acknowledged heightened desire to “feel God,” it seems as though this tension is highlighted. We’ve heard the caution not to get caught up in whether we “feel God” or not so that we won’t base our faith in the presence of God upon what we experience or feel.

However, I believe the desire to truly experience God and know Him in personal lived experience (through musical worship or whatever other means) is such a natural and beautiful desire–for what lover wouldn’t want to spend real, embodied, quality time together with their love? A.W Tozer in his book The Pursuit of God talks of how we must expect such a relationship with our God:

For millions of Christians, nevertheless, God is no more real than He is to the non-Christian. They go through life trying to love an ideal and be loyal to a mere principle. Over against all this cloudy vagueness stands the clear scriptural doctrine that God can be known in personal experience. A loving Personality dominates the Bible, walking among the trees of the garden and breathing fragrance over every scene. Always a living Person is present, speaking, pleading, loving, working, and manifesting Himself whenever and wherever His people have the receptivity necessary to receive the manifestation.

Thus, how can we honor the longing heart (in musical worship or otherwise) that seeks to feel and experience the presence of God, just as we see Jesus honoring Bartimaeus? Perhaps the skeptic in us can learn to make space for the desperate longings of our hearts. May we not be quick to shut these down in ourselves or in others.

Though at times we may have sensory encounters with God, we may not always sense or have a visceral experience of His presence. What then? We are always able to rest in the knowledge of the truth that He is present, and we can practice seeking and worshiping Him for His sake, only. Ultimately, we must surrender to the truth of His presence in musical worship and engage Him by faith, while not shutting off our longing to experience Him.

In all of this, the beautiful thing about musical worship is that, by participating, we are effectively engaging our hearts, minds, and bodies before the Lord. Music has a way of bypassing our rational brain and accessing something deeper (and oftentimes more emotional) in us–calling us to an awareness of our own hearts. And yet, music is also subconsciously forming and nourishing our minds. Whether we realize it actively or not, through the words of the songs that we sing, we are proclaiming and resting in truth (if the songs we sing are indeed theologically sound). So, we can trust that we will be resting in truth as we sing truth together with the people of God.

How then do we seek to engage our hearts just as our minds and bodies are being engaged? The structure of worship overall at Redeemer—the Anglican liturgy that forms and shapes our Sunday service—provides a helpful framework for musical worship. Unlike many other churches where musical worship is half the service and is expected to be the main place of encountering Jesus, we understand at Redeemer that the whole service is one of worship and that we encounter Jesus throughout it all, with special awareness of how He reveals Himself in Word and Sacrament. (Fun fact: We actually call the celebrant—the person who guides us through the liturgy—the worship leader for the service!) Thus, there is less pressure for musical worship to be especially powerful or emotionally moving. This has been healing for me as a music leader here at Redeemer. I don’t feel the same kind of pressure that I used to in other churches for the time of musical worship to be especially powerful for people as the primary moment when God would move or speak or reveal Himself to the congregation. I sense an overall simplicity of trust in God’s presence and goodness from this congregation that is not dependent on whether or not people feel/seem visibly moved. Yet, while we generally seem released from unhelpful pressure, how do we continue to engage our hearts with expectancy for God to meet us in musical worship? This can feel rather risky, even as singing itself can often feel risky for some. Singing with others invites us to step outside of a place of safety and normalcy, as we stand maybe a little too close than we’d prefer to the stranger sitting one chair away from us. Singing can be vulnerable! Perhaps this same invitation to risk and vulnerability is also extended to us in the way we engage our hearts, not just our vocal chords.

I long for Church of the Redeemer, participating in worship together as a whole, to be a body of believers who risk being people of the heart and who truly experience the living presence of Jesus in our lives. May we be honest and wholehearted people of expectancy and faith who open ourselves vulnerably to Jesus while we wait on him, believing that He wants to meet us right where we are. May we honestly name the truth of where we are while ultimately resting in the Truth—Jesus Himself.