After a while, it becomes easy to not worship.
Easy to go through the motions.
Easy to do the “church thing” and live for your day off.
Easy to stand in the back, criticize, observe, and chill out.
I think it’s safe to say I have led more worship services than I have attended worship services. It’s my job. Quite simply, worship is what I do.
And that scares the crap out of me.
When was the last time?
I have some questions for you today – questions I’m asking myself.
When was the last time you cried in worship?
When was the last time you personally answered an altar and received prayer?
When was the last time you lost track of time worshiping Jesus?
When was the last time you were lost in wonder?
When was the last time you showed up to church with expectancy?
Too many of us are checking out of encounter. We’ve given up on experiencing God merely to get our job “done”.
We’re in leadership, so church is about “them”, right? It’s about the needy people walking through our doors, isn’t it? It’s not about what God wants to do in us.
Or is it?
The Importance Of Losing Yourself
Something tells me God wants your undivided attention today.
Maybe He wants to show you His glory. Maybe He wants to heal your disease. Maybe He wants to satisfy your longing heart.
But you’re too busy…worshiping busyness.
Busy doing a job. Busy being professional. Busy filling your life with more noise.
We’ve become jaded, hard, insensitive, professional, and…fake.
We need to get back to the simplicity of encountering God. The balm of revelation needs to heal our souls. We need to lose ourselves at the feet of the Master.
Do You Want To Know Him?
I want to know Jesus.
I want to really love Him with all my heart.
What does that mean?
All my soul.
How do I do that?
All my strength.
Is that even possible?
I don’t have all the answers…but I’m running with everything I’ve got.
Will you join me?
Question: How do we keep ourselves from worshiping our worship leading and really encounter God? Let’s encourage each other in the comments.
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Wow. I’m not technically a worship leader, but you’ve somehow invaded my heart and stolen the truth about me.
Awesome, I think 🙂 What do you do Bernard?
You mean, as in “at church”, or “life in general”? I’m just a humble pianist for a itsy bitty church that’s fighting to even exist.
That last section on “do you want to know him” was the part that I meant about stealing the truth about me.
Great post! This can easily happen. As worship leaders, we must continually ask ourselves why we are leading worship…
It is really amazing to me that we can lead people into worship and not actually worship.I want to be consumed by His Spirit so when I get up on stage we are all being led by the Holy Ghost into the courts of the most High God! Bam!!!BAM!
Consume me LORD!
Love the energy!
With the time constraints of children’s ministries, multiple services, coordinating elements and shuffling thousands of people in and out without incredible CHAOS occurring, I admit, it can be DIFFICULT to lose yourself.
We have struggled with that at our church until we came up with a beautiful alternative on Saturday nights – it is called xtended worship. After the main service ends, worship and prayer continues. For the worship team and leader, it becomes a time to ‘let our hair down’. No time constraints, no agenda, often no rehearsal on the songs chosen, xtended allows us to abandon ourselves to the flow of the Spirit. Once it starts my spirit heaves a big sigh. I often physically take off my shoes to symbolize holy ground and how open I am to God’s work.
Sometimes we combine with the prayer ministry to practice prophetic and healing gifts. I often invite dancers up on stage to join the worship team. Sometimes we have long periods of silence, or open the mike up to the audience to share what God is saying. Usually we will move to songs that we had no intention of doing and nobody has any music and the band leader is calling out chords to the bass player on the fly. Sometimes new songs are born, miracles that God wanted to birth. Sometimes we go on and on and on instrumental and people just sit and soak.
It is a beautiful, chaotic mess. And at an EV Free church – lol – whowouldathought!
I already know it would be amazing to carry this spirit into the main service, and we are trying – it is a process. We are learning to enjoy the process and not be judgemental on ourselves as we walk the tension of the Martha – logistics of coordinating large numbers of people and schedules and whatnot with Mary – the call to sit before the Lord and marinate.
Gosh I feel like I deviated from the original question….sorry about that!
~sarah
P.S. Does anyone know how to put a picture in the gray box next to my information? Still not very web savvy here…
Sarah, the picture you want is called a gravatar. Head over here: http://en.gravatar.com/
I love what you said – a beautiful, chaotic mess. So, inviting dancers on stage? That’s not something I’ve heard of before. Does that go over well?
Well…I should clarify.
I usually invite one dancer – a friend of mine that is gifted in several styles – I am comfortable with her and know her heart is to glorify God through movement.
It goes over very well. In fact…sometimes too well! One of my greatest worship moments was when I invited her to come up, and the song and the dancing was so exuberant that other dancers rushed the stage.
It. was. awesome.
The good thing was everybody was too tired after that song, so they all calmed down and went back to being good little congregants. lol.
Thanks for the tip on the gravatar. I’m still learning my way around. My current THORN is the blessed digg button. DON’T UNDERSTAND HOW TO EMBED THE BLESSED THING.
Oops. Sorry for shouting.
Hi David,
Thanks for sharing this. It’s so true. And, for me personally – I find that we lose sight of what matters most when we get overly focused on the technical stuff.
These are very good questions to be asking yourself David. I used to be on a worship team every week and all my time at home and work and church was doing and getting drained. Now its 24/7 that I know Him… I often need to just listen, cry, work through nasty attitudes, go for prayer in my mess, looking forward to worship service after dealing with life, coworkers, and managing and managers. If I can’t get past the doing, He cannot open my heart to enjoy the people and moments He is present for.
All great thoughts and in the great scheme of things and as the drummer in a box at an awesome church, I flow into worship quite easily as we play and lead worship. And the more I see the congregation getting into the music and lyrics, the more I feel and see they are in time to the faith we all share.
Awesome services indeed and we know our purpose within our music ministry, and that is to utilize the wonders and power of music and worship to open the hearts of those in need and those looking to re-energize their faith and spirit to get through the chaos of the world. What an honor and joy it is to be part of such a strong mechanism of faith.
And to know that this energy of faith will be taken from our place of worship into the world to be shared with others in so many different ways. The key is carrying and paying it forward from within the walls of the church into the world where there are millions of opportunities to make a difference.
Finally, it is important for those leading worship not to forget we are “part” of the worship experience and we should work to focus on and use this to our advantage and remember to “share” the experience within ourselves as well.
Keeping the Beat of Faith…
Pls pray for my husband christopher who is in the chains of adultery. He is abroad and have not been communicating with us anymore. He has been cheating for 15 years now diff girls diff lies. I am always praying that one day he will change and learn to us his family. We ve been married for 15 yrs now and have a son. I have been through a lot like contacting sexually transmitted disease which i didnt know i got from him because he kept it from me. He had himself cured a year ago leaving me clueless of my disease. I only realized it when i got worst already and i asked him abt it. He said he has no courage yo admit his fault thats why he kept it from me. Please include me in your prayers. I really need it a lot. May God finally see me and may He answer my prayers for my husband to change so we can have a happy family. Thank you and God bless po.