Daily Posts...
Tuesday, September 12, 2006
A Challenge and a JourneyAs a worship leader I have always felt a passion for worship, for living it out in my own spiritual walk, for using my talents to create an atmosphere where the realities of our everyday lives and Jesus meet face to face. It’s a mysterious, life transforming, dynamic, life-giving, redemptive, faith and community building meeting with an ever present, knowable God who delights in being known, desires to be known, and finds great joy in revealing himself to those who are hungry and thirty for more of Him. It incorporates every fiber of our beings, every aspect of our lives, and is the heart and soul of who we are as the people of God. Worship is our lifestyle. We were created out of God’s own desire to be worshiped and adored.
My own understanding of worship and how it is to be lived out in the faith community is an ongoing process and a journey which has led me to the unknown chambers of my own heart and into the very heart of God. For the past several months my life has been turned upside down and inside out as I have been trying to come to a better understanding of my role as a worshipper and worship leader. It is as if one day Jesus shook me out of my place of complacency so that I might open my eyes, helping me to see through the Father’s eyes into the very heart of worship, the very place where Jesus desires the church to be. I can’t get away from it; I do not want to get away from it. My eyes of faith have been open and I am beginning to see things in a whole new light.
Lip service, Sunday salvations, Christianity that is nothing more than a smoke screen to cover up deeper issues, hypocrisy, faith without deeds (which, by the way is dead), all obstacles that have crept into the church and which need to be fleshed out. The church was never meant to exist in such a manner. Where is the authenticity in such a manner of living? No, the body of Christ was meant to be a vibrant, authentic, worshipping body of believers living out the message of Christ and proclaiming God’s kingdom to a world that is crying out for a Savior. At the very heart of the matter is worship, the missing jewel of the church. Worship will revitalize the body of Christ, give it strength to endure, empower it to fulfill its mission, and envelope it in the riches of God’s mercy and grace, releasing the blessings of Christ to a fallen humanity. Inevitably this enveloping and empowering, this wonderful mercy and grace will not go unnoticed, but rather will begin to transform all of those who come into contact with it.
It is the journey into the heart of worship. It is a journey that begins within our very own hearts when we get real with ourselves and grasp the realities in which we have lived, are living, and are going to live. Such self-understanding and reality provides an environment that gives birth to authentic worship. God is challenging the church to worship him in spirit and in truth, to return to its proper place in his divine purposes. Worship, the blood life of the church.
Be challenged. Keep it real. Go deeper. Get intimate. Search yourself. Seek Him. Begin the journey. Worship with reckless abandon. Amen.
