His Emotions

I'm just three chapters into Singing the Songs of Jesus, and I have to say that this book is amazing. This last chapter in particular, "Recognizing Christ in 'Praising Conversations'" has left me meditating upon a conversation I had a few months back with a friend.

My friend leads in a praise band in a local church. He was telling me the tension going on in their worship. The new worship director desires to see some new praise choruses while my friend has had a growing appreciation for historic hymns. He voiced one of his complaints with the contemporary worship songs similar to this, 'you sing the same phrase 10 times... how many times can you say that you're happy and how happy you're happy?' I remember my contribution to this conversation. I told my friend that the Psalms have great depth of emotion. They remind us that we have emotions (happy, sad, angry, doubtful) and that God intends for us to bring these emotions into His praise. John Calvin has called the Psalter "The Anatomy of all the Parts of the Soul". (I forgot to mention that the closest thing the Psalter has to a repeated praise chorus is Psalm 136.)

Looking back on what I told my friend, there's something I feel I should have added. Seeing Michael Lefebvre's point, that the Psalms are conversations between Jesus, God the Father, and us, I feel that I was missing a huge point. The Psalms don't only tell us emotions we experience. The Psalms tell us the emotions He experienced. Jesus was full of emotion. He was fully human. In a way, the Psalms give us a deeper view into His emotions than the gospels do. I realized that I've been oblivious to this, but now I see so much of what I've been missing. By His grace, as today's Christians come to appreciate and use the Psalter we will better understand not just our own emotions, but also His.