Audio Transcript

‘White-hot worship.’ What is it? Pastor John likes to use the phrase. And for those of you from a certain charismatic background, it’s a phrase that carries all sorts of unintended baggage, things Pastor John doesn’t intend by it. So, what is ‘white-hot worship’?

Lisa asks the question today: “Pastor John, hello and thank you for this podcast! I’m currently listening to your audiobook Reading the Bible Supernaturally. Wonderful book, thank you! Dozens and dozens of times throughout the book you mention ‘white-hot worship.’ When I hear that phrase, certain images come to my mind. I come from a Pentecostal background where this was the focus every Sunday morning, expressed with jumping up and down, screaming, running around, waving flags, twitching, falling to the ground, shaking, making unnatural sounds, speaking in tongues, and, yes, feeling for angels and electricity in the atmosphere. This is how thousands of us have always understood ‘intense worship.’ When you saw someone ‘going crazy’ it seemed they were deep in the Spirit, worshiping intensely.

“Now I have left that mindset and practice behind, and I know this is not at all what worship is about. Can you explain what you mean by ‘white-hot worship’ for those of us coming from this background? And thank you for always making Scripture clear!”

Well, thank you, Lisa, for reading Reading the Bible Supernaturally. I think your question is a very, very important one flowing from that book and gives me a chance to make some important distinctions.

Destiny of Worship

You’re right — the phrase “white-hot” occurs in that book 27 times. I counted them. And it’s important that I give you a couple examples, because the context matters in the way I think about that phrase.

• “I have proposed that our ultimate goal in reading the Bible — according to the Bible itself — is that God’s infinite worth and beauty would be exalted in the everlasting, white-hot worship of the blood-bought bride of Christ from every people, language, tribe, and nation” (102). So, notice the phrase “ultimate goal.”
  
• “God created human emotion for the ultimate purpose of white-hot worship of his worth and beauty. In this ultimate experience, we will be supremely satisfied, and he will be supremely glorified” (104).
  
• “The cosmos will reach its final purpose when the saints enjoy God in it and through it and over it with white-hot admiration for the Creator and the Redeemer” (174).
  
• One more: “Seeing and savoring Christ . . . [is] the key to the transformation that prepares the bride for her destiny of white-hot worship . . . moving ever closer to the white-hot intensity we will know when we see face-to-face and know even as we are known” (225–226, 348).
  

So, the main reason I read all those quotes is to give the context that my emphasis on white-hot worship is when it reaches its fullest experience in the age to come. For now, in this age, we see in a glass darkly; then we see face-to-face. Now we know in part, then we will know fully, even as we are fully known (1 Corinthians 13:12). So, for now, our worship is often frustratingly inadequate to what we know he deserves. But when we have our new minds, our new hearts, our new bodies, our new emotions, then the worship will be as it ought to be.

Why Use ‘White-Hot Worship’?

There are at least three reasons why I use the phrase “white-hot” to describe our final aim in worship.

“God is infinitely worthy of our fullest responsiveness from mind and heart.”

First, simply to emphasize the fact that authentic worship is in fact a matter of the emotions as well as the intellect. Thinking right thoughts about God is not in itself worship. Feeling intense emotions that are not rooted in a true sight of the way God really is, is also not true worship. We worship “in spirit and truth” (John 4:24). We worship with lips and heart. So, that’s the first reason — to stress the emotional reality that worship includes.

Second, I use the phrase “white-hot” to emphasize the fact that a lack of earnestness or a lack of intensity or a lack of zeal is a detraction from the beauty and worth of God. He is infinitely worthy of our fullest responsiveness from mind and heart. “White-hot” calls attention to the full, intense engagement of our emotions as we respond to him with the joy of admiration.

The third reason for using the term “white-hot” is to try to capture what the Bible itself is getting at when it says, for example, “Do not be slothful in zeal, be fervent in spirit, serve the Lord.” That’s Romans 12:11. That phrase “Be fervent” literally means boil. It’s the word for boil. Simple, straightforward, “boil in the spirit.” Now, my phrase “white-hot” is an effort to capture the meaning of boil; boil in the spirit.

Or Matthew 24:12 warns about a time when lawlessness will be increased, and the love of many will grow cold. So, the Bible itself puts our love on the scale of hot and cold, and warns about cold and pleads for hot. Like Revelation 3:16: “Because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth.”

And surely Jesus is getting at the same thing when he sums up all of Godward living with the Great Commandment: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind” (Matthew 22:37). I think these all’s — all your heart — mean nothing less than a white-hot engagement of the heart with God.

Discerning Genuine Worship

Now, Lisa wants to know what the difference is between my meaning of “white-hot worship” and her past experience of people “jumping up and down, screaming, running around, waving flags, twitching, falling on the ground, shaking, making unnatural sounds, speaking in tongues, and yes, feeling for angels and electricity in the atmosphere.”

“For emotions to have spiritual significance, they have to be stirred by truth about God, not just music or hype.”

My first response is to point out that the actions of the body are no sure sign of any intensity in the heart. That’s a big mistake people make — that if the body can somehow feel a certain thing physically, that the spirit is, therefore, more engaged with spiritual intensity. That’s just not true. There’s no necessary correlation between what the body does and what the spirit does. Surely the body is going to be affected, but the body can do many things that are peculiar without it being any sure sign of a spiritual reality.

The second thing I would observe is that the movements of the emotions themselves are no sure sign that God is being worshiped. For emotions to have spiritual significance, they have to be stirred by truth about God, not just music or hype. Romans 10:2 says, “They have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge.” In 1 Corinthians 14:19, Paul says, “In church I would rather speak five words with my mind in order to instruct others, than ten thousand words in a tongue.”

And the third thing I would say is that we should want our corporate gatherings not to be so chaotic that people would say, “You’re all out of your mind.” First Corinthians 14:23: “If, therefore, the whole church comes together and all speak in tongues, and outsiders or unbelievers enter, will they not say that you are out of your minds?” He doesn’t want that to happen, so he regulates how tongues and prophecy are to be used.

Maybe the best guideline I can give to help us distinguish between intensity, hotness, that honors God and intensity that doesn’t honor God is the guideline Jonathan Edwards gave himself in his preaching. And I’ve always felt this is a healthy, wise, biblical guideline. He said, “I should think myself in the way of my duty to raise the affections” — and he means spiritual emotions — “of my hearers as high as I possibly can, provided that they are affected with nothing but truth, and with affections that are not disagreeable to the nature of what they are affected with” (Works of Jonathan Edwards, 4:387).

So, that’s the guideline I think would help guide all of us as we try to discern what aspects of corporate worship are helpful in honoring God with our intensity, and what aspects are not helpful.