Jamin Bradley

Some feel that worship songs should not include personal elements and should be about God alone. I join the psalmists in disagreement. Yes, of course, worship is about God alone, but worship becomes deeper when we’re part of the exchange.

Consider the difference between a birthday card and a love letter. There are times when you open a birthday card to find that no personal elements have been involved other than the choice of the card and a signature. Such praise is factual: it is your birthday—just as it was always going to be your birthday, whether the fact was recognized by anyone else. When low effort is put into such a card, you may not even be sure what the intent of the card was. Did the card come from fondness, or did the sender grow up in a culture that expected them to send a card as a chore of sorts? Is it about you, or is it about the sender feeling embarrassed to forget?

A love letter, on the other hand, is superior to a birthday card because it is personal. A love letter doesn’t simply acknowledge a fact; it acknowledges why that fact is important to the writer and why that fact should be praised. It is no longer just your birthday; it’s the day that a life was born that changed the writer’s life forever. It’s a day in which the writer would not be the same, had your birthday never happened. Their praise is amplified because of their experience of you.

Yes, singing about God’s factual faithfulness is worship, but singing about experiencing his faithfulness is worship via adoration. Yes, singing about God’s factual holiness is truth, but yearning to be holy like him is worship via desire. Yes, singing about God’s factual salvation is remembering the story, but testifying to how he saved your life personally is worship via personal narrative. Yes, singing about God’s factual goodness is a way to ground ourselves in understanding, but tasting and seeing that the Lord is good is worship via experience.

We have a way of turning everything into legalistic religion—even worship. We want to write ourselves out of the equation and strip away emotion. But you are here because God wants you. You have emotions because he made you that way. You are part of the worship equation because he constructed worship this way.

Rather than program you to give him praise (for he is factually praiseworthy), he has decided that you have a choice in the matter. In that regard, you actually hold something that he does not have because, though he has all the power, he has decided to not take it from you. When you personally choose to worship him in a way you hadn’t before, you freely give him something that he was not receiving before that moment: more of yourself.