Scot McKnight has a thought-provoking article on the out of Ur blog about spiritual eroticism, i.e. the idea that sometimes we Christians are more in love with being in love with God, than we are with God himself. He writes:

Friends of mine today worry about consumerization or commoditization in the church. I offer a slightly different analysis of what might be the same thing: for many, Sunday services have become the experience of courtly love. Some folks love church, and what they mean by "loving church" is that they love the experience they get when they go to church. They prefer to attend churches that foster the titillation of courtly-love worship and courtly-love fellowship and courtly-love feelings.

They say they love worship, and by this they mean they love the courtly-love-like songs that extol the experience of loving Jesus or the experience of adoring God or the experience of a concert-like praise team that can generate the sound of worship intensely enough to vibrate the very soul of the worshiper.

Such folks might like sermons that create powerful contrasts between God’s wrath and human sinfulness or between our sinfulness and God’s gracious love; or they might like stories told so well as to usher them into the depths of human loves and hates and tragedies and comedies. What they like is the freshness of discovery or the flush of shame or the intoxicating sense of learning something new. They may create such a stir of silence in expectation of some great preacher or some great leader that the sheer presence of that person makes their soul swoon.

But this does not describe worship.

Click here to read the whole article.

I've definitely had this experience myself, and while I'd want to push back on Scot just a little bit with the recognition that we always have impure motives in seeking God and God in his mercy still uses that, I nonetheless admit that this is is a problem and one that we should try to be aware of in ourselves. This is part of the big reason that I don't actually enjoy most "praise and worship" services anymore, because a long time ago I became aware of the emotional manipulation that was occurring within me, and how I was becoming more attached to that experience itself than to God.

Labels: Scot McKnight, worship