Beware #2

Beware speaking with people about God BEFORE speaking with God about people!

Beware #1

Beware spending more time in God’s work than with God in worship!

Observations: 1 Chronicles 29

Interesting observations of worship elements/dynamics from 1 Chronicles 29:

1. Vs. 9 – the leaders’ generosity and attitude inspired joy among the other worshipers. How are we leaders leading with the kind of attitude that inspires the worshipers of God?
2. Vs. 20 – the people praised God from a posture of bowing. For us praise is usually done upright with hands raised. How often do we practice bowing as an act of praise in our gatherings?
3. Vs. 21-22 – their sacrifices were also used to fund their hearty party and fellowship together before God. Man, what a great idea! You can’t tell me that this didn’t put a smile on God’s face! How often do we gather together to party hearty before God?

Improving Our Approach

(This one post especially for those involved in the ministry of worship and arts leadership and service)

3 Who may ascend the hill of the Lord? Who may stand in his holy place? 4 He who has clean hands and a pure heart, who does not lift up his soul to an idol or swear by what is false. Psalms 24:3-4 (NIV)

I was seated in our den recliner (my throne!) for a morning devotional when I heard this strange scraping sound outside on my porch. When I got up I found out it was made by our dog, Buster…wiping his feet prior to coming inside the house! Turns out, my wife, frustrated with the dirt Buster would track indoors, had taken time earlier, to stop the dog on the back door mat, bend over him and manually swiped his feet, all four, on the mat, knocking off the dirt and then letting him inside. (No, I am not making this up). She did this so many times that Buster began doing it himself! I was dumbfounded!  My dog was becoming cleaner than the humans who lived there!

I see a parallel with this and the way we approach God in our corporate worship experiences. We have done so much in our contemporary churches to remove barriers from people entering in. We have altered architecture, symbols, music, clothing and our overall environment to facilitate better accessibility for people to enter our worship services to engage God. Some of this needs to happen and needs to continue.

But I fear that although we have taken people’s inhibitions to heart, we may have neglected God’s conditions in our approaching Him in worship and these conditions have not changed. No one comes to the Father but through Christ and the necessary admission of their spiritual need for Him as our sole, soul’s spiritual resource. Such an exchange can wonderfully affect our environment and ‘response-ability’ to worship God in spirit and truth. Throughout the Scripture, those sincere members of the faith community consistently responded to the presence of God with reverence and humility. In many cases, however, our casual worship services may miss the depth of that kind of reverence.

This devotional is not a criticism of the church but a challenge to those of us who serve in this powerful ministry of worship. Prior to our “ascending the hill of the Lord” (this includes singers, instrumentalists, AV technicians) and leading others to do the same, are we “wiping our feet”? Are we keeping the holiness of God in mind and heart? Are we confessing our sins before the God who provided His Son who is absolutely not a door mat, but is the One through whom sins against God are resolved and our relationship with God restored? Do we recognize that He expects only the holy to stand in the holy place and that we are to pursue holiness even as He makes us holy?

True holiness makes all the difference in the world. Jesus teaches that the pure in heart are the ones who see God. It is therefore the pure who are in the best position to help others see Him. This is not about our being perfect. It is about our commitment to remain in the process of being made perfect. We must approach our ministry responsibilities and our opportunity to worship God in spirit and truth with a profound awareness of His righteousness and His holy expectations for us. As we hold instruments in our hands, our guitars, keyboards, organs, faders, switchers, mics, hymnbooks, bibles, etc, with hopes  of effective responses, may we recognize with awe and wonder that we are being held in the Hand of God who desires us to respond to His desires for His glory. May we serve and worship as holy vessels — broken but holy.

Father, You are worthy of our very best, not only in performance but also in lifestyle and character. Help us to make sure to take time before placing our hands on our instruments and our feet in the “holy place”, to confess and repent of our sin, receive Your forgiveness and restoration, and renew a corresponding passion to live free from the power of sin and in the power of Your righteousness. May we be instruments of holiness always before You, whether on or off the stage. Always for Your eternal glory, in Jesus’ name, Amen.”

Inspired with History.

One of the tenets of postmodernism is its paradoxical intolerance toward the “meta-narratives”, the preposterous notion that humanity can be constrained to some larger story moving to a specific goal at the expense of the smaller stories that are decidedly autonomous. [I say “paradoxical” because their claim is in itself a kind of  ‘metanarrative’ making absolute claims about metanarratives other than theirs!] (Don’t worry, I probably won’t blog on that! Makes my head hurt!) I will say this: it is philosophically unfeasible for a professed follower of Christ and one who claims devotion to that which Christ affirmed, namely the Scripture,  in any significant way to embrace the fallacious view of postmodernism against meta-narrative. (That oughta get me into trouble!) Why? Jesus Himself taught that human history is really God’s story, His-story. He’s working it out and we all play a part in it, as he is reconciling all things to Himself (Col. 1:20). It is impossible for such a believer to deny the reality of His larger story already in progress. That is except…

…in the contemporary evangelical worship arena. (Finally, getting to the worship thingy)

I do not in any way consider myself to be an expert in what takes place in churches, though I have been in churches since I was a zygote and have evolved with them in a variety of denominational contexts and permutations. Far from generalizing I have observed a troubling phenomenon: much of the mode of worship seems thoroughly self-centered or now-centric or sadly historically ignorant and tradition-phobic. There seems to be a defiantly militant attitude to draw attention to the God of the moment and of “my experience” at the tragic and extravagant expense of the God who has been revealing Himself to His Church for 2000 years and His community of faith for thousands of years before that. Surely, as fallible flawed scribes and bards, there is much we can learn from what God has revealed of Himself down through the ages?! Bryan Chapell writes,

“Slavish loyalty to traditions will keep us from ministering effectively to our generation, but trashing the past entirely denies God’s purposes for the church on which we must build. If we do not learn from the past, we will lose insights God has granted to others as they have interacted with His Word and His people.” (From Christ-Centered Worship, Baker Publishing, (c) 2009)

Now don’t get me wrong. I love and prefer contemporary worship to traditional worship in form and sequence, maybe even liturgy, but that is not the point. There have been men and women, much closer to God than I will ever be, who have climbed the face of Mount God and come away with insights I need to know and embrace. There are saints of old to whom the Lord has revealed treasures of divine insight that I would love to peer into. There are pilgrims who, centuries before, walked alien paths divine self-disclosure and mystery that would set my heart and soul ablaze with Spirit conviction and consecration. I need that. The Church today needs that. God’s Word is living and active. It is power and life. It is His telling us of Himself and ourselves as well. What arrogance to believe that He wants us now to hear something new and different and revolutionary, when it’s clear that He loved His Church then, just as much as He loves His Church now and communicated with them in ways that were new, different and revolutionary…for them! We owe a great debt to His Church in our history, with humble respect for the fact that we too, will soon and very soon, become the future church’s history!

Practically speaking, what does this mean? Let’s not be too quick to abandon or neglect our connection the family of God down through the ages and the wonderful ways that God has been revealing Himself to them over the years. Quite frankly, we would not be able to see things the way we do without the past being what it was. (I have been grieved over watching –and at times joining in with– the ridicule of legitimate traditions of liturgical forms.) Let us come to the sanctuary and altar with the kind of humility that makes even old revelations resonate with contemporary vitality. Let’s study the liturgies and lessons from the ancients, the early church fathers, the mystics and be renewed with the phenomenon of God’s transcendent relevance. Let’s allow our worship services, contemporary or traditional, to include the contexts of His-Story that continues to conform His Church to the Perfection of her Lord. Let’s borrow from prayer books, hymnodies, recitations, biographies, and the like and celebrate our connection with His Family, our Family, down through the ages. Let’s not be too quick to write new songs without gratitude for and tutelage from the new songs He inspired then. Let’s not be too quick to package and process new worship formats without reviewing the life transforming liturgies of old that succeeded in also honoring our Holy Lord. Let’s not be too quick to throw out what is precious and possibly lose what it priority for the sake of our idea of creativity, relevance and excellence. (God must get a kick out of that every once in awhile!)

Consider this: If God did want to say or do or leave something special to us in our current context, why wouldn’t we want the future generations to celebrate that then? Why, therefore, would we not be eager to identify and celebrate the same from the past? After all, it is still HIS-STORY!

Worship Leaders as Theologians.

We have a reasonable expectation that the person who proclaims the Word through preaching should have adequately prepared with proper exegesis of the biblical text and then labored to arrange those discovered truths in a format that can be effectively delivered and received with life transforming potential as directed by the Spirit. If they’re going to preach the Word of God they should know the Word of God and the God of the Word. Makes sense enough.

So if worship leaders are called to lead people to worship God…how should he or she prepare?

Should they not invest significant time to ‘exegete the God of the Word’, seeking to know Him beyond our forms of corporate response? If theology is defined as “the ‘word’ on or study of God” should not the worship leader be at least as familiar with the Lord of Hosts as he/she is with the liturgical elements?

Which would God prefer to have as a worship leader: one who has great expertise in worship forms and encouraging the gathered faith community to meaningful response or a worship leader who has plumbed the depths of the immeasurable vastness of God, passionate to climb the face of Mount God with greater, more personal knowledge of the Lord?

Obviously, I believe the correct answer is BOTH, but I wonder that in many churches, the former carries the greater priority and measurement of success.

I have been challenged in  my thinking by a new friend from the Pacific NW, who has affirmed the importance, indeed, the priority of the worship leader being one who is intentional in their progressive knowledge of God over and above the ways to lead congregations in traditional worship forms. The worship of God as Jesus said requires the dual elements of spirit and truth. Spirit relates to the venue with which we can encounter and experience God in relationship. Truth involves the mutual self-revelation that must occur in our encounter with God but is grounded on what God has already revealed of Himself through the Written Word, the Scriptures, and the Living Word, His Son.

Worship leaders must be proficient with the art forms that enable a personal and corporate response to the reality and revelation of God. But the worship of God must be primarily response to the divine self-revelation of God Himself. This is what the leader and congregation must tune to. What does this mean practically for worship leaders?

1. They must invest significant time in their personal pursuit of knowing God through study of the Word, the practice of spiritual disciplines aimed at intimacy with God, etc.
2. They must be familiar with how God has revealed Himself to the faith community down through the ages. (More about this in a subsequent post)
3. They must seek to help their congregations to respond to truth of God by leading them to consider the diverse attributes of God even prior to the preaching of the Word of God.
4. They must help their congregations understand and practice that true worship is a two-way street and that we must do our part in pursuing greater knowledge of a God who has revealed Himself in ways it would take lifetimes to fathom.

All of this starts, however, with the worship leader’s personal passion to pursue intimacy with God. To really know God and then make Him really known through the medium of corporate worship. What becomes a public responsibility must begin as a private and persistent priority.