Sermon Central
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Be Sad, Mad, Then Glad! How To Worship An Emotional God!
Contributed by Kelly Durant on Nov 1, 2014 (message contributor)
Summary: God desires our sadness and soberness to enter into a relationship with Him, then we get angry at our our sin, just as He is angry against sin, and after cleansing ourselves, we can then become authentically happy in Him.
How to Worship Our Emotional God!
Be Sad, Mad, then Glad! Worship God!
We just got to visit out daughter and one thing very funny about her I that remember is that when she was little she was very emotional! Maybe something happened and she would cry big tears but then if I did few faces or something I could get her to laugh and she would go from crying to an instant laugh and it was so funny!
How many of you often get sad? If we are made in the image of God then all the emotions we feel, He feels, right! But what makes you sad?
Do you get sad about it when you discover there is abuse happening and you see others suffering? On our trip we saw a documentary on the abuse done to monkeys for experiments and it affected Regina, I think any type of abuse, to animals or people affects us in a bad way!
Maybe daily, or during the week you get sad about things that you suffer from in your home with misunderstandings between you and your mate or family. Or we get sad by injustices at our jobs too, right? In Atlanta before we would be sad when we would know of someone getting deported and their family was split up and their children would be without a father.
Deportation is the law for non-documented, I am not refuting what the law does, we obey the laws but the consequences in real life do provoke women and children to suffer! Our founder William Booth said, that while women and children weep as they do, he will fight! We fight to heal, save, restore, and mend broken lives!
There are so many things that will make us sad in this world because we live in a fallen world full of injustices and sin! But God wants these moments to be times in which we seek him. God wants us to share our sadness with Him.
He wants to be our comforter!
There is a type of sadness that can clean us inside too, a sadness that we discover exists because we are offending God and others by our ways.
8 Draw nigh to God, and he will draw nigh to you. Cleanse your hands, ye sinners; and purify your hearts, ye double minded.
9 Be afflicted, and mourn, and weep: let your laughter be turned to mourning, and your joy to heaviness.
10 Humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord, and he shall lift you up.
God is telling us in James that he wants to see us humble, he wants to see us sad and weep, or at least give a place for it. He does not want us to be always happy, there is time to be sad, and later there is a time to be glad.
Remember, the shortest verse in the Bible, “Jesus wept.” Why did he weep? He was sad because the people did not love nor seek God! He was sad because he knew of the judgment that would come over Jerusalem because of their lack of worship and recognition of God!
How do we worship an emotional God? We share in his sadness. This is the first step in getting close to God, the first requirement to worship Him is to have a humble, contrite (or sad) or broken heart.
Let’s turn to the sermon on the Mount and see what Jesus says.
4 Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.
God is there to comfort us when we weep, wither over the problems of others, or over our own problems.
Sometimes God wants us to cry not over what sadness we feel but over the sadness He feels for us because we are often so proud and not clean in His presence, we have hearts that need cleaning because we are not in love with Him wanting to be with Him in prayer and word everyday!
Today we are studying how our emotional God wants us to worship Him, or Be in His presence. We can discover that the first step God requires sadness, a weeping but then He will give us comfort and joy!
He needs us to have the right attitude of soberness to see our own sin and feel sadness that we are hurting Him by having that sin. So the first step is we must mourn over our sin.
Neh 8:9
9 And Nehemiah, which is the Tirshatha, and Ezra the priest the scribe, and the Levites that taught the people, said unto all the people, This day is holy unto the LORD your God; mourn not, nor weep. For all the people wept, when they heard the words of the law.
