Worship Matters, Part 1 September 9, 2008
Posted by AUC Worship Administrator in Worship and Spiritual Formation, Worship and Theology.trackback
Over the next few weeks, we’ll take a look at excerpts from Worship Matters by Bob Kauflin.
God wants us to love him more than our instruments andmusic. More than our possessions, food, and ministry. More than our wife and children.
More than our own lives.
That doesn’t mean we can’t love anything else. Or that we shouldn’t love anything else. But we can’t love anything in the right way unless we love God more. Our desires will be out of whack. We’ll look to temporary pleasures like concerts, video games, and sports to fulfill eternal desires. We’ll love things that aren’t as worthy as God to be loved.
How do I know what I love the most? By looking at my life outside of Sunday morning. What do I enjoy the most? What do I spend the most time doing? Where does my mind drift to when I don’t have anything to do? What am I passionate about? What do I spend my money on? What makes me angry when I don’t get it? What do I feel depressed without? What do I fear losing the most?
Our answers to those questions will lead us straight to the God or gods we love and worship.
That’s why as worship leaders our primary concern can’t be song preparation, creative arrangements, or the latest cool gear. Our primary concern has to be the state of our hearts.
The great hymn writer Isaac Watts once wrote: “The Great God values not the service of men, if the heart be not in it: The Lord sees and judges the heart; he has no regard to outward forms of worship, if there be no inward adoration, if no devout affection be employed therein. It is therefore a matter of infinite importance, to have the whole heart engaged steadfastly for God.“
A matter of infinite importance. Is it a matter of infinite importance to you?
Unquestionably it is to God. And when it becomes a matter of infinite importance to us, we’re beginning to grasp the heart of leading worship.
I think the author says it well. I recently quoted another author, Francis Chan, from his book “Crazy Love” on our student ministry blog. He says something similar to Kauflin.
“Many of us believe we have as much of God as we want right now, a reasonable portion of God among the other things in our lives. Most of our thoughts are centered on the money we want to make, the school we want to attend, the body we aspire to have, the spouse we want to marry, the kind of person we want to become …. But the fact is that nothing should concern us more than our realtionship with God; it’s about eternity, and nothing compares with that. God is not someone who can be tacked on to our lives…. (W)e need to realize that how we spend our time, what our money goes toward, and where we will invest our energy is equivalent to choosing God or rejecting Him.”