Light First, Then Heat: What Worship Leaders Today Can Learn from Isaac Watts

This excerpt from Douglas Bond's new book on Isaac Watts is a needed reminder for those who lead God's people in public worship:

Watts understood that "our passions are intensely directed toward material things but are hardly moved by the most important discoveries of faith." He was warring against the stale lifeless singing in worship in his youth, and he rightly wanted to see emotion and passion, as we do, in sung worship. He knew that passions "are glorious and noble instruments of the spiritual life when under good conduct." But here is where Watts is a counter voice to many well-meaning worship leaders today: he knew that passions "are ungovernable and mischievous energies when they go astray." He grasped - and so must we - that it is the business of church leaders both "to assist the devout emotions" and "to guard against the abuse of them." Centuries before the invention of the electric bass, Watts warned church leaders: "Let him not begin with their emotions. He must not artfully manipulate" their passions and feelings until he has first "set these doctrines before the eye of their understanding and reasoning faculties. The emotions are neither the guides to truth nor the judges of it." He argued that since "light comes before heat...Christians are best prepared for the useful and pious exercise of their emotions in the spiritual life who have laid the foundations in an ordered knowledge of the things of God."

In the very best of Watts' hymns, he combines both emotion and knowledge. But for Watts, it is always light first, then heat. The feeling of wonder, the emotion of profound gratitude, the escalating thrill of adoration and praise always follow the objective propositional exploration of the doctrines of the gospel. For Watts, the doxological always follows the theological....We know this not because Watts said so. Watts discovered it from divine revelation. Hebrew poetry in the Bible can be deeply passionate, even erotic, and the Psalms are rich with thrilling emotion, but it is always light first, then heat.

--Douglas Bond, The Poetic Wonder of Isaac Watts