I am currently reading A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society by Eugene Peterson. It is a devotional book about the Psalms of Ascent. The following is about Psalm 122. "...That is the reality. That is the truth of our lives. God made us, redeems us, provides for us. The natural, honest, healthy, logical response to that is praise to God. When we praise we are functioning at the center, we are in touch with the basic, core reality of our being. But very often we don't feel like it, and so we say, "It would be dishonest for me to go to a place of worship and praise God when I don't feel like it. I would be a hypocrite." The psalm says, I don't care whether you feel like it or not: as was decreed, "give thanks to the name of the Lord." I have put great emphasis on the fact that Christians worship because they want to, not because they are forced to. But I have never said that we worship because we feel like it. Feelings are great liars. If Christians only worshiped when they felt like it, there would be precious little worship that went on. Feelings are important in many areas, but completely unreliable in matters of faith. Paul Scherer is laconic, "The Bible wastes very little time on the way we feel." We live in what one writer has called the "age of sensation". We think that if we don't feel something there can be no authenticity in doing it. But the wisdom of God says something different, namely, that we can act ourselves into a new way of feeling much quicker than we can feel ourselves into a new way of acting. Worship is an act which develops feelings for God, not a feeling for God which is expressed in an act of worship. When we obey the command to praise God in worship, our deep, essential need to be in relationship with God is nurtured. Worship does not satisfy our hunger for God- it whets our appetite. Our need for God is not taken care of by engaging in worship- it deepens. It overflows the hour and permeates the week. The need is expressed in a desire for peace and security. Our every day needs are changed by the act of worship. We are no longer living from hand to mouth, greedily scrambling through the human rat race to make the best we can out of a mean existence. Our basic needs suddenly become worthy of the dignity of creatures made in the image of God: peace and security."