Wise Pastors Understand Emotions
The perceptions that stand behind our emotions have been twisted by sin. Our values are aimed at lesser things, and the members of our body habituate sinful patterns and tendencies that we struggle to even recognize. And yet, emotions are a pathway to what’s truly happening in us. The wise pastor will recognize this and seek to understand the emotions of those he shepherds.
I’ve lived and pastored near Detroit, Michigan for almost six years now. It’s a city that has rightly earned the moniker “The Motor City.” The automobile industry dominates our economy, and this goes well beyond the Big 3 automakers: Ford, GM, and Chrysler. Thousands of smaller companies supply the Big 3 with everything they need to build a new car or truck. From parts to marketing and everything in between, nearly everyone’s job is connected to the auto industry.
With this comes a genuine love for cars and a deep understanding of how they work. I’ve walked through the lobby of our church early on a Sunday morning and heard 3–4 guys engaged in a deeply passionate conversation about brake pads. We had friends from out of state come visit a few years ago, and their van started making some unusual sounds on the way to church. One of our guys went outside with them after the service, listened to the sound for a couple of seconds, and said, “You should be fine to drive home.” They were.
I envy this thorough knowledge of cars. I don’t have it and most likely never will. I can put air in my tires and, I think, if everything was on the line and I had no other option, I could probably change a flat tire. I couldn’t name all the parts that make up an engine and certainly couldn’t explain how they work together to move my car forward. Now, imagine for a moment if I applied to work for a local mechanic here in Detroit. I clearly wouldn’t be very effective, and if I imagined myself to be a competent mechanic, despite my lack of basic understanding of cars, I could cause significant problems for people.
Now, human beings are not automobiles. We aren’t mechanical creations; we are embodied souls. It’s also true that serving in pastoral ministry isn’t quite the same as working as an auto mechanic. We don’t simply assess a person’s problem and apply the right fix to make sure everything is running again. However, I believe that as pastors seeking to faithfully shepherd God’s flock, we need to have a thorough grasp of the human beings we shepherd. This means understanding one of the basic features of our humanity: emotions.
What are Emotions?
This is a question pastors need to ponder both as they shepherd others and as they keep watch over their own souls (1 Timothy 4:16). I would guess that, in recent years, most pastors have seen an increase in the number of people grappling with their emotions and how to handle them. We can’t counsel and shepherd those struggling if we don’t have a basic grasp of this important feature of our humanity.
The discussion over the nature of human emotions goes back to the Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle and has typically swung between two poles. On the one side, emotions are defined as simple bodily impulses. We have little to no control over them and they are illogical. A modern example of this would be those who see emotions as nothing more than chemical reactions that produce physical results. On the other side, emotions are viewed as cognitive, coming from our perceptions and judgments concerning ourselves and the world around us.
Christians have generally understood the Bible to teach the cognitive view of emotions, and yet, Scripture presents human beings as complex creatures where mind, emotions, and body all work together to shape and influence one another.
Author Jeremy Pierre puts it like this, “No one should treat people as merely rational beings in need of instruction, nor as merely emotional beings in need of healing, nor as merely decision-makers who need the right motivation. The truth is broader than each of these.”1
The Bible describes humans as embodied souls (Gen. 2:7). We think, reason, feel, and act with our bodies and simply cannot do otherwise in this life. Matthew Lapine explains, “Because we are embodied beings, physicality always qualifies our agency. God formed us from the ground and enlivened us with his breath. We are not mere souls, but embodied beings. Our entire agency is qualified by physicality.”2
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Post Mortem: Lessons from a Failed Church Plant
Though we had people who attended regularly and who were positive about the ministry of the church, that’s where the commitment of many ended. We needed a few more couples or families, committed to throwing in their weight 100%—with the mindset that they would give themselves to the plant, no matter what.
A pastor friend told me that planting a church would be the hardest thing I ever attempted. Wise words. But closing a church is tougher. I guess it’s like a divorce; or perhaps like switching off the life support system of a loved one. It’s brutal. Terribly disappointing. Profoundly sad. It comes with a sense of deep loss, a sense of failure. Everything about it feels so wrong.
But we acknowledge that in all of this is the sovereignty of God. In this sense, it wasn’t a failure at all. And if we’re willing to learn, God teaches us in many ways. So here are a few lessons:
The Context of Our Church Plant
Historically, East London, South Africa, is a very well churched city. But today it’s 3rd or 4th generation stuff. Nominalism is entrenched, there seems to be very little robust, biblically faithful, vibrant faith. There are some faithful gospel teaching churches. However they are few and far between.
The spiritual landscape is strewn with superficial and shallow therapeutic, feel-good stuff. False teaching is rife. We are the home of TBN Africa, while every other health and wealth sect thrives here. Zionism and AICs are hugely influential. Syncretism abounds. There are several varsity and college campuses in the city, but no decent student ministry among them. All of these were good motivations for a church plant.
We had meetings and conversations with other local pastors and church leaders about our desires to plant a new church. They were in favour of our plans.
We started meeting as a very small house group in late 2013. This grew slowly, and in 2015 we began meeting in public space. We consider this time as the actual beginning of Grace Bible Church in East London.
The Factors That Contributed to Our Failure
1. Unresolved Ministry Baggage
I probably carried baggage with me from my previous ministry context. We did not start as a result of a church split, or anything scandalous. But I did leave a previous church as the result of an unworkable and unhappy situation.
As a starting group, we evaluated our attitudes honestly. We wanted to stay far away from being a group of disgruntled Christians, planting as a reaction. Regarding my previous troubled experience, I tried to learn the lessons, work through my attitudes, seek grace to move on, and make a clean “emotional” break with the past. But it wasn’t as clean as I’d hoped.
Lesson: Check yourself for lingering emotional and heart baggage before embarking on planting a church—or any other ministry, for that matter. Deep heart surgery is required here.
2. Isolation
Because we didn’t plant out of an existing church, or within a denomination, we were isolated. Having no local church to support, advise, and encourage us was difficult. We did join a church planting network. And that was invaluable. It gave us credibility, some excellent church planting training, and some great relationships. And we appreciated some good relationships with local pastors. But we lacked committed, consistent, local input into our church. This means we lacked sufficient prayer support, funds, and accountability. As leaders we lacked fellowship and encouragement. This was a serious drawback.
Lesson: Churches plant churches. There needs to be a committed, local support system.
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Worship Regulated by Scripture
The critical point is to extend biblical authority to every aspect of our worship—elements, content, structure, and aesthetics: If we understand the formative role of corporate worship in making disciples, and if we consequently recognize that such disciple-forming corporate worship must be formed by Scripture, then we must be sure that our liturgies and how we express God’s truth aesthetically in corporate worship are similar in meaning to how Scripture expresses God’s truth.
What would it mean for our worship to be truly shaped by Scripture? Christians are people of the book. Conservative Evangelical Christians, in particular, demand that their beliefs and lives be governed by Scripture. God’s inspired Word is “profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work” (2 Tim 3:16–17). Therefore, for Christ-honoring sanctification to take place, the lives of Christians must be governed and saturated by the living and active Word of God. And for this same reason, corporate worship must also be governed and saturated by the Word; since public worship both reveals belief and forms belief, and thus it must be shaped by Scripture.
Yet, I think it’s safe to say that most modern evangelical Christians have an entirely different conception of corporate worship. Instead of a life-forming drama, corporate worship has become a concert plus a lecture, a time where we sing some songs that give authentic expression to our hearts and listen to a sermon that hopefully will give us some practical advice for the week. Most evangelical Christians would quickly assert that Scripture in general provides for us the necessary theological foundation and content for our corporate worship, but not much more, particularly when you venture into questions of the aesthetics of our worship, the cultural forms our songs employ.
Instead, what I will argue in this essay is that in order for worship to properly form God’s people as God has intended, every aspect of our worship—including our worship aesthetics, must be formed and shaped by the Word of God.
Biblical Worship
This emphasis upon biblical authority over our corporate worship applies in at least four areas; First, the elements of our worship must be regulated by the Word of God. The sufficient Word has given those ordinary means of grace that, through their regular use, will shape believers to live as disciples who observe everything Jesus taught: These elements have been clearly prescribed for the church in the New Testament: First, Paul commands Timothy, in the context of teaching him how to behave in the house of God, “devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture (1 Tim 4:13). He repeats similar commands in Colossians 4:16 and 1 Thessalonians 5:27.
Paul also commands Timothy to “devote yourself . . . to exhortation, to teaching” (1 Tim 4:13) and “preach the Word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching” (2 Tim 4:2).
Third, Paul commands that “supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, for kings and for all who are in high positions (1 Tim 2:1). He commands the Colossians to “continue steadfastly in prayer (4:2), and to the Ephesians he admonishes, “praying at all time in the Spirit, with all prayer and supplication . . . making supplication for all the saints” (6:18).
A fourth biblically-prescribed element might not actually be a separate element at all, but rather a form of Scripture reading or prayer, and that is singing. In both Ephesians 5:19 and Colossians 3:16, Paul commands gathered believers to sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, thereby “singing and making melody to the Lord with your heart” (Eph 5:19) and “teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom” (Col 3:16).
Fifth, Christ commanded in his Great Commission to the disciples, “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”
And finally, Paul told the Corinthian church that he passed on “the Lord’s Supper” to the church, having received it from the Lord himself (1 Cor 11:20, 23). The regular, disciplined use of these means of grace progressively forms believers into the image of Jesus Christ; these Spirit-ordained elements are the means through which Christians “work out [their] own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in [them], both to will and to work for his good pleasure” (Phil 2:12–13).
Second, the content of our worship elements must be regulated by the Word of God. Clearly what we teach and preach, what we pray, and what we sing must contain the Word of God, or at very least express sentiments consistent with the Word of God.
Third, the order of our worship should be regulated by the Word of God. If the primary purpose of corporate worship is the edification of believers—God forming us into mature disciple-worshipers, then even the structure of our services should follow what God has given to us in Scripture. God made clear this purpose when he instituted corporate worship assemblies in the OT, establishing a structural pattern that continues also into the NT. God often calls these assemblies of worship “memorials,” meaning more than just a passive remembrance of something, but actually a reenactment of God’s works in history for his people such that the worshipers are shaped over and over again by what God has done. Beginning at Mt. Sinai (Exod 19–24), God instituted a particular order of what the OT frequently calls the “solemn assemblies” of Israel. This order reflects what I like to call a “theo-logic” in which in the assembly, God’s people reenact through the order of what they do God’s atoning work on their behalf. For sake of time, I will just summarize this structure:
God reveals himself and calls his people to worshipGod’s people acknowledge and confess their need for forgivenessGod provides atonementGod speaks his WordGod’s people respond with commitmentGod hosts a celebratory feast
This same theo-logic characterized the progression of sacrifices within the tabernacle assemblies and the dedication of Solomon’s temple (2 Chron 15–17). In each case, the structure of the worship assemblies follows a theo-logical order in which the worshipers reenact the covenant relationship they have with God through the atonement he provided, culminating with a feast that celebrates the fellowship they enjoy with God because of what he has done for them.
While the particular rituals present in Hebrew worship pass away for the NT church, the book of Hebrews tells us that these OT rituals were “a copy and shadow of heavenly things” (8:5). Thus while the shadows fade away, the theo-logic of corporate worship remains the same: we are reenacting God’s atoning work on our behalf when we gather for corporate worship. Significantly, Hebrews teaches that when we gather for services of worship, through Christ we are actually joining with the real worship taking place in the heavenly Jerusalem of which those Old Testament rituals were a mere shadow. And so it is important to recognize that the two records we have in Scripture of heavenly worship also follow the same theo-logic modeled in the OT.
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Expository Singing
What matters most to God is what fuels our obedience, and it should be love. When we come before the Lord in song, it’s not enough to merely be engaged with the words intellectually, it’s not even enough to follow through on what we sing, we must be a people that love God in these realities. That’s what the Lord desires.
Over the past few decades, there has been a tremendous emphasis placed upon exposition in the church. The benefits of this are too many to count. A revival has taken place where a number of churches have moved away from a surface level study of God’s word (like skipping a rock on the ocean), to an in-depth comprehensive study of the text––exposition (like dropping an anchor down to the ocean floor).
After all, if God’s word is breathed by Him and therefore sourced in Him, then it is incumbent upon us as His people to draw the last drops of sweet nectar that we can from every single word. Paul tells Timothy
All Scripture is God-breathed and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be equipped, having been thoroughly equipped for every good work.
2 Tim 3:16–17
Since the Scriptures are profitable to equip us for every single good work prepared for us, we should not just know a little bit of them, we must live in them (cf. Matt 4:4; Eph 2:10).
To that end, many pastors have written books on the topic of expository preaching. That is, preaching that seeks to understand a text within its larger context and draw out the God-laden meaning from the words and grammar that has been used by the Biblical writers. G. Campbell Morgan put it this way, “The sermon is the text repeated more fully.” That’s the idea.
In a related but slightly different direction, in 2010, Ken Ramey wrote a book entitled, Expository Listening. His work is a primer on how God’s people should approach listening to an expository sermon. It is based on passages like Jas 1:22, “But become doers of the word, and not merely hearers who delude themselves.” Building off of the momentum, in 2017, Josh Neimi released the book entitled, Expository Parenting. The book aims to show parents that they must expose and lay bare the pure milk of the Scriptures to their children.
With that being said, you opened this article expecting to learn about a different type of exposition. At this point, I do want to speak about expository singing.
Now, there are two ways that we might approach this topic. The first would be more for worship leaders. Expository singing could mean the way that writing hymns and spiritual songs should be done, based on the exposition or explanation of the meaning of the Scriptures. That’s one way, but that’s not what I intend with this article.
The second approach is seen in thinking about expository singing, not from the approach of creating content, but rather based on how we approach the songs that we sing to the Lord each Sunday (or throughout the week). Well-written hymns and spiritual songs are expository in nature. The Scriptures are the light unto our path, and good praise songs will emphasize the light of the Lord through His word and bring us near to Him (Ps 119:105).
With that in mind, there are four principles that I want to deliver to you that should cause you to enjoy God more through song when rightly appropriated. In finding your enjoyment in God, you bring honor to Him in fulfilling your created purpose… the exaltation of His name (Ps 34:3).
Here is a question for you, what makes a good Christian song? Is it the date in which it was written (a pre-1900 hymn with preferably some old English mixed in)? Is it the melody that the song has or its tempo, upbeat or slow? What about the instruments used or lack thereof (drums, guitars, cymbals, harps, a cappella)? How about the number of times the chorus is sung? Here’s the answer. None of those make a good Christian song, inherently.
What makes a good praise song is the words. It’s the content. After Jesus’ ostensible disciples depart from Him, there’s this precious interaction between Jesus and his disciples…
So Jesus said to the twelve, “Do you also want to go?” Simon Peter answered Him, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have words of eternal life.”
John 6:67–68
Where else can we go, but you Lord? We sing songs that make much of the God of our salvation.
But here’s the rub, how many of those words do you actually think about when you sing them on Sunday morning (or ideally throughout the week)? It is so ingrained in our culture and in our world to value songs that have catchy beats and rifts and then to mindlessly puppet the words the artist sings. That has no place in Christianity. This is the first principle of expository singing, we must be engaged singers.
We Must be Engaged Singers
There are two quotes that I use often but have never been able to find (if you can identify them please let me know). The first is from Charles Spurgeon (at least I think) concerning sanctification, “we must move, but He must move us.” I love that quote, but I can’t find it anywhere. The second pertains to our topic. Paul Washer once said (at least I think) that “we never lie more than in our singing of songs of praise.” Why would Paul Washer say that?
It’s all too common for people to sing glorious lyrics on Sunday morning but not truly mean them. If I told you, “I like your outfit,” but I didn’t mean it, what would you call me? You’d call me a liar. But doesn’t that happen with how we approach God through song? Yes, I said “we,” I am guilty of this too. Here are some relatively well-known lyrics… through introspection, answer as to whether or not you meant them fully when you last sang them.
“My soul finds rest in God alone; All glory, laud, and honor to Thee, Redeemer, King; I will tell the wondrous story how, my lost estate to save, in His boundless love and mercy He the ransom freely gave; When morning gilds the skies, My heart awaking cries, May Jesus Christ be praised; I will not boast in anything, No gifts, no pow’r, no wisdom.”
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