Barriers to Worship
by Angela Weir
Some of us find it difficult to express love, or indeed any emotion. We know that we should love God but we find worship, and consequently any relationship with Him, extremely hard.
This can be because our emotions are blocked. Perhaps we have been told as children that big boys, or girls, don’t cry. Or maybe we have discovered that showing emotion is unsafe, like the five year old boy who reacted angrily to his stepfather and was beaten so badly he made a vow never to show anger again. In his case it didn’t work and he became a violent and angry man, ending in prison for grievous bodily harm. There he met Christ and through a slow and difficult journey has learnt to express his emotions in a godly way - by forgiving the ones who hurt him and releasing the pain and anger to God.
Sometimes we choose to block our emotions off completely because the pain of what has happened to us is so terrible - all our feelings are stuffed down inside. The effort of holding them down can sometimes cause depression and other similar sicknesses.
But God is a God of love, which is an emotion, and Jesus, who was fully human as well as fully divine, expressed the whole range of emotions from love to grief, anger to joy, and as we are made in His image, He wants us to express the whole range too. Where we have blocked off our emotions we need to ask Him to help us release the pain and anger to Him and know freedom inside.
Prayer: Father, I am sorry for the times when I have blocked off my emotions. Please help me to connect my memories with the emotions so that I can deal with them in a godly way and be healed. In Jesus' name, Amen.
Angela Weir has been associated with Ellel Ministries from the very beginning, first as an associate member of the ministry team and later as an associate teacher. She trained as an actress before moving to Cumbria, where she taught drama in a girls’ school. She now teaches and ministers at various Ellel Centres.
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