Empty Praise

At the Gospel Coalition’s TGC25 conference in April 2025, pastor and theologian John Piper offered a striking illustration about worship. Employing ChatGPT – an artificial intelligence (AI) tool that uses language models to create human-like text, speech, and image responses – Piper asked the AI assistant to generate a prayer “in the spirit and theology” of theologian D.A. Carson. The result was polished, theologically sound, and full of emotional verbiage. But Piper used it to highlight a crucial distinction between true worship and empty praise.

“That’s a machine,” he said in his conference address. “And I’m asking, is that praise? No! This people – these machines – honor Me [God] with their lips and their bytes, and their heart is far from Me” [Matthew 15:8].

The issue was not the words themselves, but the absence of a heart behind them.

“Computers do words,” Piper noted. “They don’t feel anything.”

His point was clear: Worship that does not flow from genuine affection is empty.

Worship beyond performance

On his podcast Things Unseen, theologian Sinclair Ferguson observed, “The quality of our worship isn’t so much a matter of our performance as it is a matter of displaying the glory of God.”

Ferguson challenged listeners to reassess their understanding of worship. He warned that becoming content with emotionally moving but spiritually shallow worship is possible. True worship, by contrast, produces reverence.

“Worship is about Him,” he said, “and how badly we need to hear – at least in our hearts, if we no longer hear them in our churches – those great words: ‘Let us worship God.’”

God-initiated worship

In his article “When Hearts Are Tuned to Worship,” pastor and hymn writer Matt Boswell reflected on Psalm 117, noting that worship begins not with humans’ initiative but with God’s.

“There is a quiet reminder in the call to worship that worship is not our idea,” Boswell wrote.

“We worship because it is God’s idea. Psalm 117 is God’s Word, which means it is God who is speaking to His people, commanding, inviting, and exhorting us to praise Him.”

This call is grounded in God’s steadfast love and enduring faithfulness. It is a response to who He is and what He has revealed. Worship is not rooted in emotional impulse alone but in the character of God as revealed in Scripture.

The heart of true worship

Both Ferguson and Boswell caution against a view of worship shaped by aesthetics or atmosphere. Worship is measured by the degree to which it draws attention to God Himself. Emotional expression can be genuine, but emotionalism alone does not measure spiritual engagement.

Empty worship is the disconnection of form from substance: words without affection, music without meaning, theology without awe.

Piper concluded his illustration: “The universe is created to have people in God’s image who feel the worth of grace, who feel the glory of grace, who feel the beauty of grace, who feel the wonder of grace.”

The remedy is not to retreat from beauty or structure but to ensure that every element of worship flows from and points to God’s glory.

As Ferguson noted, true worship leaves Christians humbled and awed, “realizing we have had the extraordinary privilege of joining with the angels and archangels led by our exalted Savior Jesus Christ to adore our glorious God.”

Since heartfelt adoration of a glorious God is the purpose of worship, Christians must stand and fight against the culture’s – and church’s – acceptance of AI as a tool of authentic praise.