Since October, our church has done a lot of growing, including merging with another small church in Bountiful, formerly called Grace Baptist. Now called Bountiful Heights, Chas and I have been helping out with getting the worship ministry set up by going down every other week and leading a team for worship that Sunday.
It really has been a great experience and God's obvious opportunity knocking for spiritual growth, as I find myself nearly every time I lead asking myself how I can be a better leader, pick songs that reflect His glory, yet assist in leading the rest of the congregation to a place where they too can worship. Whether it is by their own mouths in song, or just by hearing the words and reflecting in them within their hearts, the goal is not and never had been for me to engage a response from the congregation to spring up my own ego that I am actually doing something right. I know that I could do everything possible to create a perfect picture of what worship should look like, but in the end, I know it has nothing to do with me. It has everything to do with God and his timing for creating a response from his people depending on where their hearts are at during any given time of corporate worship.
However, I often find that during the times where I feel I have had the most worshipful experience, the words of the song have hit my heart so deeply that I couldn't help but express a heartfelt worship toward my creator and the one who has built my heart to have a deeper desire to know Him more. I often find myself choosing songs not for their musical creativity, but for the message that the words bring from the author who has put those words together.
I recently read an article in a Worship Leader magazine about what it means to worship. Worship is not about a song and how well you play it, what it sounds like after you have done everything you humanly can to "perfect" it and make it sound exactly how you think it should sound so that the congregation will respond to it because it is a good song. Worship IS, and the very end, our response to God and his greatness, goodness, grace, mercy, and love for us. It may not always be easy for people who are struggling to offer a song of worship to God, and it might be those days where they just sit back and don't sing anything at all. But regardless of how our personal hearts may be feeling, we have been made to recognize the amazing-ness of our awesome creator. In the end, it's about God, and worship is merely our response to Him in those times of recognition. That's what I got out of the article anyway.
Even the rocks will cry out to God in worship to him.....
For He has made known through His creation....so that no man is without excuse.
What's your reason for worship?
If you had a song that you could sing every week that best represents how you see/feel/respond to God, what would it be?
