What to Do When the Joy's Not There

Dan Phillips has a good post challenging us to worship God even when we don’t feel like it. He describes a situation where he genuninely thanked God although at the time he did not feel necessarily thankful or joyful. From this experience Dan asks the following pertinent questions:

But did the prayer, the worship, not “count,” because I didn’t have any of those wonderful emotions we’re supposed to have? Was it not real worship, because it wasn’t emotional worship? What do you do if you don’t feel anything? [underlined word was italicized in the original]

At this point, Dan has some strong words against charismatics in general and also against John Piper.  

Here’s where Piper will point to the many passages about joy and rejoicing, assert that they’re feelings, and as much as say that they are absolutely essential. The Charismatic…will agree. And so what this mindset produces is that you chase the feeling, you chase the emotion, you do whatever you have to do to get that emotion back — because if it’s not there, what you’re doing isn’t real. It doesn’t “count.”

In fact, I’ve known people who simply stop and refuse to budge until they get the emotions back. They don’t “feel” like going to church. Therefore going wouldn’t be real worship. Therefore they don’t go. They don’t “feel” like showing love (or respect) to their wives (or husbands). So it wouldn’t be a spiritual action. So they don’t do it. They don’t “feel” like reading their Bibles, and it’s a “dry” experience. So they don’t.

Or they sing “Breathe” or some chorus ten or twenty times, or get slapped on the forehead, or babble, or do the hokey-pokey, or whatever it might take to roil up those flighty emotions. They chase the emotion, the experience, so they can get going again spiritually.

I call it “making a god of your glands.” And I call it tempting God. And I call it unbelief.   [bold emphasis mine; underlined words were italicized in the original]

I think those are some pretty strong words. Perhaps he is more concerned with the run-of-the-mill charismatic than with Piper, but the words speak for themselves.  

His conclusion is to live from conviction. To just fight on. Not to seek for emotions, but to seek for God. And to a degree I would agree. However, I think his conclusion misses something. I think he is belittling the importance of emotions.  

John Piper specifically addresses this same overall problem in his book When I Don’t Desire God: How to Fight for Joy. On pages 220-222 he sets out to answer this question: “If joy in God is the fountain of love and the root of right living–as I believe it is–can behavior that proceeds without joy be virtuous?” What follows is a quote from comments I left under Dan’s post over at Pyromaniacs. It is the answer that Piper provides to the above question. I think Piper’s answer is better than Dan’s and does more justice to the Biblical call to “always rejoice”.

He answers the question on two levels:

“First, I would say that a Christian, no matter how dark the season of his sadness, never is completely without joy in God. I mean that there remains in his heart the seed of joy in the form, perhaps only of a remembered taste of goodness and an unwillingness to let the goodness go….” (pg. 220)

“The other answer…is that we should never say to ourselves or another person in the season of darkness, ‘Just do your work. Just do your duty. Just act like a Christian, evein if you don’t feel like one.’” (pg. 220)

Before yoy say “Aha!”, Piper clarifies this assertion (the quote picks up right where I left off above):

“That’s almost good advice. but the problem is in the word just. Instead of only saying, ‘just do your duty,’ we must say four other things as well.

First, we must say that joy is part of your duty.” He cites 1 Thess. 5:16, 2 Cor. 9:7, Ps. 100:2, Rom. 12:8 and James 1:2 here. (pg. 220)

He goes on…

“The second thing we must say when we tell a disconsolate person to ‘do their job’ is that while they do their job, they should probably be repenting and confessing the sin of gloomy faith….Failing to rejoice in God when we are commanded to rejoice is sin.” (pg. 221)

“…the third thing we say along with ‘Do your duty’….[is] As you are able to do some of your duty, ask God that the joy be restored. That is, don’t sit and wait for the joy, saying, ‘I will be a hypocrite if I do an act of mercy today, since I do not feel the joy of mercy.'” (pg. 221)

“And the fourth thing we say,…is, ‘Be sure to thank God as you work that he has given you at least the will to work.’…Your aim in loosing your tongue with words of gratitude is that God would be merciful and fill your words with the emotion of true gratitude….”(pg. 221-222)   [All bolding emphasis added by me; underlined words were italicized in the original]

[For more on this whole issue read Piper’s book When I Don’t Desire God: How to Fight for Joy. You can read it online for free here (pdf).]

∼striving for the unity of the faith for the glory of God∼ Eph. 4:3,13 “¢ Rom. 15:5-7