Why Lead Worship? – Part 1 – a.k.a. Cold Hands
It’s been pretty cold lately – particularly early in the morning – and it’s got me thinking. Church musicians, why do you do what you do? Why practice an ever-changing bunch of songs to play and sing with people in your Life Group, your Youth Group, your church meeting or wherever you do it? Why do you rehearse on a Saturday when friends and family are relaxing? Why do you get up at 6:00am on a Sunday morning in the middle of winter and try to warm up your fingers and voices to a point where they work to some semblance of fluidity before standing in front of a crowd of people to sing and play music. It’s fun? Yeah, I guess it is, but if it’s for some sort of gratification, whether the recognition of people or your own entertainment, it’ll be short-lived – especially when your delicate musician hands are so cold.
We have to be worshippers of God first before we are musicians. The Westminster Shorter Catechism says, “The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever”. Now, I’m not entirely convinced that that’s our purpose in it’s entirety during this life but I do believe that it is, at the very least, a very big part of it. God has created us for relationship with Him and our most natural way of relating to Him is in worship.
Ok.. So, if we are to be worshippers and if we try as far as possible to take our lead from the bible then I’d like to look at a biblical character that models a worshipper and attempt to learn a few things from this person. No prizes for guessing who I’m about to look at. Ok, so maybe a small prize: a chocolate to the first person who names the character. I’ll even double the stakes if the answer comes with a good explanation. Ok, go!
Written by Jonno Warmington.
Actually, when we worship Him it is for our own good. When, according to John 4:23, we worship in Spirit (because God is Spirit) and truth, as Wikus reminded us last week, we worship in the truth of who God is. The “truth” part of that scripture is the truth of God’s eternal nature and not our own, often grossly inconsistent truth. When we gather together to worship, or indeed when we worship on our own, we are not meant to try to “stay true to ourselves”. We don’t just honour Him when we feel we are being sincere about it. Our hearts are so deceptive and will readily lead us down a path of introspection at the expense of fixing our attention on Jesus where it belongs. Our worship would therefore be as inconsistent as we are prone to be. Thank God that He is consistently awesome and always worthy of praise! When David was feeling melancholic he would often speak to his own heart as if it were something apart from him, sometimes questioning it, “why are you downcast?” and encouraging himself to, “put your hope in God…” and he would urge himself to “yet praise Him, my Saviour and my God.” (Ps 42)