What is the main thing we all do together at the same time in worship? We sing unto the Lord! Singing is a natural, God-given gift that He has built inside of us to express joy and celebration as well as sadness and comfort. If you have never really let go and lifted your voice in praise of God, you have missed out on one of God’s greatest blessings, but He can fix that! If you have never been moved to tears by a song, you may have a pretty tough heart, but God can fix that, too!
I have been in both sides of the pulpit in worship – in the congregation and on the platform. And I have seen on occasion fellow Christians standing with closed mouths and hands in their pockets while the Body of Christ is collectively offering up songs of praise. I am always reminded of Isaac Watts’ response to that same thing he saw in his own church: “Let those refuse to sing who never knew our God – but children of the heavenly King may speak their joys abroad!” But I just don’t buy the excuse that someone may offer that they can’t sing. I want to say, “Do you mean to tell me you will not sing “Happy Birthday” to your little daughter or grandson?” No, you will sing to that precious one you love so much – and you won’t care what it may sound like to others. How much more so should you desire to sing to the One who has bought you soul back from eternal damnation and given you life?
But did you know that God sings over you? Zephaniah 3:17 says, “The Lord your God in your midst, the Mighty One, will save; He will rejoice over you with gladness, He will quiet you with His love, He will rejoice over you with singing.” He does not have to sing over us, but He does of His own volition. But we are commanded to sing! Psalm 96:1 – Sing to the LORD a new song; sing to the LORD, all the earth. And the Bible says that we will sing: Rev. 15:2 And I saw what looked like a sea of glass mixed with fire and, standing beside the sea, those who had been victorious over the beast and his image and over the number of his name. They held harps given them by God and sang the song of Moses the servant of God and the song of the Lamb.
My hope and prayer for every Believer is that we will all sing because we are happy and free in the Lord Jesus Christ! Come on, let’s be God’s people who are known for our strong singing! We have the most reason of any to sing from the depths of our souls!
“Never-ending” is a term for us earthlings that is generally associated with negative things that we wish would come to a stop. We generally don’t like seemingly never-ending things like: long lines at the store, a tough steak you chew and chew, or a repetitive job that goes on and on without a point of completion. We need stopping points! We need breaks from any constant state of pressure and demand.
In music, it’s those relief points called resolutions and rests. The dissonant chords and suspensions need resolution. And no matter how great a song is, you will turn on it quickly if it begins to seem never-ending. Yes, “I could sing of His love forever”, but please, don’t make me sing of His love forever with the same song with the same phrase over and over and over and over! I love the song, “Amazing Grace, My Chains Are Gone!” But if that song did not have an ending to it after 10 or 20 minutes I would feel like my chains were back!
But the term “everlasting” is different. We associate that with positive things. We speak of everlasting life as the goal and prize for every Believer! Of course, we are assuming that our concept of time will be altered after we die and there will be no such thing as boredom and any sense of “when will this __(whatever it is we will be doing)___ end?” I believe God is going to be giving us jobs and tasks and ways to continue serving Him – but in His awesome presence, we probably really could “Sing of His Love Forever” for a thousand years or so before someone says, “Hey, How ’bout let’s sing another song!”
But as long as we are on this little planet, we are trapped by time. And I am so thankful for stopping points like we have right now at the end of the year. God has been faithful, loving, kind, gracious, merciful, and encouraging over the past 12 months, and here I will raise my “Ebeneezer” – a “Stone of Remembrance” to say, “Thank you, Lord! We survived and made it to this point because of YOU!”
May you take some time at the end of this year to rest, reflact, and thank God for what He has done for you. And let’s enter 2012 wearing all of our spiritual armor, ready to take on the challenges that await us in the service to our King – the Lord Jesus, Yeshua Hamashiach, the Prince of Peace!
How do you prepare yourself for worship as a church musician? Here are two Bible verses that give us some great answers to this question:
2 Chronicles 20:20-21
Early in the morning they left for the Desert of Tekoa. As they set out, Jehoshaphat stood and said, “Listen to me, Judah and people of Jerusalem! Have faith in the LORD your God and you will be upheld; have faith in his prophets and you will be successful.” After consulting the people, Jehoshaphat appointed men to sing to the LORD and to praise him for the splendor of his holiness as they went out at the head of the army, saying: “Give thanks to the LORD, for his love endures forever.”
From the above passage I see 6 major things:
1. Early in the morning – Time and again we see in the scriptures about the importance of starting great things EARLY each day. I can’t fully explain why, but God just really endorses getting an early start whenever he does something big! Think about it – what other big things in the Bible happened early in the morning?
2. Have faith in the LORD your God and you will be upheld – God will keep us upright (still standing amidst the turmoil all around) when we live by faith in our God!
3. have faith in his prophets and you will be successful – In order to have faith in the prophets, the people had to know what the prophets had said! This means they had to read the prophet’s writings! This means that we will be successful when we put our faith in God’s Holy Word that we read and study!
4. Jehoshaphat appointed men to sing to the LORD and to praise him – The singers who led the praise and worship of the Lord were appointed by the King! Can you fully wrap your mind around the fact that the King has appointed you to be in this choir to sing His praise?
5. as they went out at the head of the army – Say what??? The singers were at the head of the army going into battle!? They were making a tremendous statement of the confidence in their God that He would give them victory in the battle! But don’t you know that it took some courage on the part of those singers to be in front of the army? But this also says something about the mighty weapon we have against the enemy – praise is powerful in the Lord’s might hand! The enemy will run!!!
6. “Give thanks to the LORD, for his love endures forever.” – This was their #1 favorite anthem! This is the first verse of Psalm 136 which is all about God’s deliverance of Israel from Pharaoh in Egypt! How can we thank God enough for his deliverance and his great love for us?
There are so many ideas and concepts out there about how God’s people ought to be doing this thing called worship. After serving as a worship leader for 34 years I think it is possible to identify two basic philosophies out there about how God’s Church practices corporate worship here on earth while we await the Lord’s return. These two philosophies can both be supported by scriptures and are not necessarily mutually exclusive of each other.
Very generally, there are ministries that are turned outward and there are those that are turned inward. The church turned outward excels with the Lord’s commandments to “Go ye into the world” and Paul’s lesson to “become all things to all people in order to win some”. The church turned inward hits the mark when it follows Jesus’ triple plea to Peter to “feed my sheep” and “tend my lambs.” For these two extremes to become exclusive of the other is not good. The Church needs to go “beyond the walls” in evangelism, but it also needs to train and disciple our own and “care for the saints” within, especially honoring its elders and widows. This affects our approach to worship because we are commanded to evangelize the world for Christ, but we are also admonished to come apart from the world as God’s holy (holy means set apart) people in worship, discipleship, and love for the Body.
The Willow Creek model of the 90’s turned so completely outward in their worship that they themselves admitted after 15-20 years that they were attracting people but had little discipleship to show for it. The opposite of that would be any one of many churches so turned inward upon themselves that they have little or no influence in the community and lost world around them.
It helps to understand these two philosophical differences when it comes to worship so that we might be able to make sure we are giving adequate attention to both targets and also understand why we do certain things in worship. When “contemporary worship” first hit the scene as an alternative worship style, the points for its purposes were statements that all boiled down to something like “to reach more people for Christ.” Inherent in that mandate was an evangelistic component that dictated that the performance level of the worship leaders, the band and even the atmosphere of the room had to be attractive to the standards of the world for people who didn’t go to church or else they just wouldn’t come. I’m not so sure anymore that the main thrust of contemporary worship is so evangelistic because it has now become the “norm” for many, many faithful followers of Christ.
But the people who attend what we call blended or traditional worship for the most part still view Sunday as the meeting time for the local Body of Christ to come together to worship without a great emphasis on the professional quality of the worship leaders as crucial for whether or not they or non-members will attend regularly. They don’t really see Sunday morning as the best time to build bridges to people turned off with traditional church. It’s not that they don’t care about the lost – they do very much, but they see the work of “reaching more people for Christ” as what the Church does throughout the week out in the marketplace, mission trips, events, and evangelistic projects – both personal and church-wide.
So what shall we say then? Do we tailor our worship of God to be attractive and engaging for those outside the Body of Christ in hopes of winning them to Christ, or do we steer our plans for worship to be customized for the needs, gifts, and personalities of the faithful members who make up the local family of Believers? Most would probably say we need to do both, and therein lies the challenge of doing “Blended Worship”.
I would say that when there is unity is the Body of Christ and the Spirit of God is really moving among God’s people in a local church, we won’t need to worry so much about whether or not we “did it right” in weekly worship services. God will build His Church and grow us up to maturity in Christ and add to our numbers when His Spirit is leading, filling, and moving not only in our plans and implementation of corporate worship, but also when God’s people learn how to become effective worshipers each and everyday.
We are all so very different. We are unique individuals, and each of us are truly one-of-a-kind in a vast expanse of snow where no two flakes are alike. There’s nothing wrong with being a very unique person, but are you the artist and sculptor of your own life? When you became a disciple of Yeshua, you said, “I want to live like Jesus, and I want my life to have His brush strokes and His handiwork all over me.” So what is your life’s picture looking like? Do you want it to be a picture hand-painted by The Master, or do you want to reserve the pride and honor to be able to sign your own name at the bottom right-hand corner of the canvas when your “picture” is done? Do you secretly sing along in your heart with Frank Sinatra’s or Elvis’ hit song about life, “…I did it my way!”? I would rather have the record show that I took my blows and did it God’s way! For only then can I know that each blow that I dealt or received was something God ordained to happen in my life. We are in spiritual warfare, and we must remember that we are not fighting a battle against any people and their ideologies or their traditions, but we are fighting against demons and principalities and wickedness in high places (Eph. 6:12). It all boils down to this: “He must increase, and I must decrease.” (John 3:30) To me that means that I want the picture of my life to look more like Him and less like me.
But I digress.
Like I said, there’s nothing wrong with being unique, but I sure don’t mind it when people say I look just like my dad. There are so many things about my dad that I want to emulate and be just like him, because in those things I see Jesus. I truly have that desire for my life to be filled with identifiable traits of my heavenly Father. The thing is, God has unique gifts for each of us so that we are not all identical cookie-cutter Christians, but yet we can all be a little bit like Him.
When Jesus asked Peter three times if he loved him, Jesus said after each affirmative response by Peter, “Then feed my lambs.” That’s the direction of God’s brush strokes on my life. He’s painted a shepherd’s heart on my chest and I love encouraging and feeding the lambs in the Body of Christ. OK, so this is how I would like to be known: As someone who prefers to be less known for accomplishments in this world so that the character and love of Jesus can be seen and known through me until He comes again.
A couple weeks ago I was fishing in the surf at Cherry Grove Beach. I walked about 150 yards from the car to the water’s edge at low tide in the middle of the day …a very hot day! I caught a couple whiting and a few sharks, but after a couple hours it was time to go. I had worn tennis shoes and socks down to the beach and did not want to try and put them back on just to go back to the car. So I gathered up my stuff, my fishing rod, and my 5-gallon red bucket which had about a gallon of water and 2 fish. I got about 50 feet across that hot sand and I thought I was going to get 3rd degree burns on the bottom of my feet! I still had a long way to go and couldn’t try and go back to the surf, so I did the only thing I could do! I quickly set the bucket down on the 150-degree sand, removed the filet knife in the bottom of the bucket, and joined the fish in my bucket! Oh, what a relief! But I still have over 100 yards to go! So, I made my way back by stopping every 30-40 feet and standing in my bucket!
I probably looked like I was trying to act out Winston Churchill’s famous quote, “ We contend that for a nation to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.” But it does give me an idea for a country song I ought to write and call, “Sometimes You Gotta Stand In Your Own Bucket!”
If there is a sermon illustration in this, I’m not totally sure what it would be. But maybe we could say that when things get really tough and you need deliverance, God may have already given you an answer that is very close by. So do what you have to do and don’t worry about what you may look like doing it!
You have to have a starting point and an ending point. We have been built by the Master Builder with an internal clock mechanism that says, ”Ready, set, Go!” And all we can do is just go until we cross the finish line! At least that’s the way that I am wired – I can’t imagine that there really are people who just sort-of wander around day by day as if they never even heard the starting gun, and they have no clue of the nature of the race they are in, much less the fact that there is a finish line out there somewhere. Our whole existence is geared for starting and finishing. We were made by the Master Builder with an internal clock mechanism that says, “Ready, Set, Go!” And we just go! But the only way to know which way to run and where the finish line might possibly be is to be closely in touch with the One that made us. And we can only know Him through a real and vital personal relationship with Jesus Christ, the Lord.
Being a music minister in the same church for 23 years (this month!) can sometimes feel like an endless cycle of seasonal preparations for the church calendar that doesn’t really change much from year to year. So the challenge is always there to be creative, to do something different than what we did last year. It is crucial for me to have some sense of “OK, we completed this task, what is next?” Sure, we have built-in starting points like January 1 and the first week after Labor Day. But for me, July 4 is always the end of the year, with the completion of the Celebration of Freedom. And the beginning of the New Year is always kicked off by going to the Choral Festival put on by Christian Supply in Spartanburg every year the first weekend of August where we hear all the new music by all the big publishers and we get inspired by the Holy Spirit to start a new year!
And so, the day after tomorrow we will take our annual vacation at Cherry Grove Beach where I hope to rest, fish in the surf, read a book, go to Calabash, and write a new song or two! I would be lying if I didn’t say that I would love to just hit the pause button and make this next week last a long time. But, I know the Lord has His plan and purposes to be carried out and I surrendered my life to Him many years ago to be available to Him 24/7. And I do look forward to the exciting things that He will do through His people in the coming New Year! See you soon!
Blessings, Dan
Phil. 1:6 Being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.
Forever
The Joyful Noise Handchime Choir is going to the Dominican Republic June 9-13. We will be donating a set of chimes to a church in Santo Domingo and teach a group of Dominicans how to play the chimes! The great thing about this is that this is virtually an unheard of ministry in the D.R. and so we sort-of feel like we are making history. And actually we are making history in that this is the first-ever Music Ministry foreign mission endeavor in the history of Lexington Baptist Church!
Handchimes and handbells are a very unique instrument! There is no other single musical instrument like this that requires a team of people to play. The Lexington Baptist Church Joyful Noise Handbell Choir has been in existence since the early 1970’s and now play over 5 octaves of handbells that require 15 ringers. The real joy and satisfaction for an individual in ringing comes through experiencing being a part of something beautiful that requires skill and dependency upon each other working as a team. I Corinthians 12:21-26 says, “The eye cannot say unto the hand, I have no need of thee: nor again the head to the feet, I have no need of you. Nay, much more those members of the body, which seem to be lesser, are necessary… there should be no schism in the body; but that the members should have the same care one for another. And whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it; or one member be honoured, all the members rejoice with it.” This is a description of a Handchime Choir! And it is also a picture of how the Church, the Body of Christ should live and function.
Since we believe that all those in Christ Jesus around the world are part of His Body, our desire is to literally take this message to another part of the world to remind us all that no matter if we speak a different language or have a different skin color, we are God’s people because of the common bond we have in our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Let’s work together, just as a bell choir works together, to give beauty and harmony to a world that is desperate for the love, presence and power of God.
I am writing this on the eve of what is being called the 3rd Intifada in Israel. The word “intifada” is an Arabic word that means “uprising”. The 1st Intifada began in 1987 and lasted until Israel granted limited autonomy to the National Palestine Authority in 1993. The 2nd Intifada happened in the year 2000 and resulted in the deaths of 6500 Palestinians, 1100 Israelies, and 65 foreigners. This 3rd Intifada was scheduled to begin the day after the 63rd anniversary of the rebirth of Israel as a nation on May 14, 1948. With each intifada, the Palestinians have been gaining ground towards the common goal of all Ishmaelites, (i.e. Muslims) which is to drive out all of the Jews from the Holy Land that was promised to them in the Covenant our God made with Abraham. And our God is a keeper of His word.
Yes, our forefathers in the faith failed in the test of obedience and so God sent His Son to become the Lamb that was slain to make atonement for our sins. He came first to the lost sheep of the House of Israel, and by His grace salvation was then offered to the gentile nations of the world.
But if you consider yourself part of the Body of Christ in this world, you will hurt to see the Holy Land torn to pieces and the people that are the “Apple of God’s Eye” being oppressed by the world once again. They are surrounded by opposition on all sides, fighting for the right to exist on a small percentage of the land that our God promised to give His people.
The stage is being set for the final showdown we know as “Armageddon.” We know who will win. But how can we sit idly by so far away and not be pleading to God for the Peace of Jerusalem to come quickly and for the Jews, the people through whom our Messiah was given to the world, to say of Yeshua, Jesus Christ, “Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord!”
Shalom Israel,
Dan
I heard a great story in a message by Dr. Kevin Ezell, the new president of the North American Mission Board. He and his wife have 6 kids – 3 of their own and 3 that are adopted from three different countries. Their most recent adoption about a year and a half ago was an 11 year-old boy named JM from the Phillipines. (seated in front) When they got the boy they were told, “Now you need to know that JM has never known a lot of things we take for granted – like hot running water.” So Kevin said that their first night at a motel before they were going to come back to the US, he took JM in the bathroom and turned the water on just luke-warm. He put JM’s hands under the water and ever so slowly added the hot water tap. Dr. Ezell said he will never forget the look on JM’s face and his exclamation of “This is WONderful, this is WONderful!” That night he put him to bed and gave him a hug when JM said for the first time, “I love you, Daddy.” Then he said that JM held his face in his hands and said, “I will be a good son for you!” Kevin replied, “And I will be a good father for you.” The next morning at the crack of dawn JM was waking him up with, “Good morning, Daddy! I will be a good son for you!” Kevin said again, “And I will be a good father for you!” But that night JM said the same thing and the next morning it was the same thing again, “I will be a good son for you!” By this time Dr. Ezell had to say, “JM, please stop saying that – you’re killing me. We love you and we will be your forever family, and you don’t have to do anything to earn our love for you. Do you understand? You don’t have to promise me everyday that you will be a good son for me.” And JM said, “OK, Daddy, but I will still be a good son for you!”
Dr. Ezell said he later thought of what it would be like if every child of God would get up every morning and say to our heavenly Father, “I will be a good son” or “I will be a good daughter for you today!” What a great prayer this would be for all of us who want to live holy and pleasing lives for our loving heavenly Father. So try it tonight before you go to bed and tomorrow when you wake up and be reminded of just how WONderful our Lord is!
Blessings,
