Worship Essentials

These are strange times in which we are living and this passage from the Gospel of Mark reads like this morning’s newspaper.

 

When you see the abomination of desolation…let the reader understand…For those will be days of tribulation, the kind that hasn’t been from the beginning of creation until now and never will be again. If the Lord had not cut those days short, no one would be saved. But he cut those days short for the sake of the elect, whom he chose. Then if anyone tells you, “See, here is the Messiah! See, there!”  Do not believe it. For false messiahs and false prophets will arise and will perform signs and wonders to lead astray, if possible, the elect. And you must watch! I have told you everything in advance. (Mark 13:14a, 19-23 CSB)

 

 

Do you remember the legendary radio personality Paul Harvey? He was famous for telling some amazing antidote acquired from his travels across America that had some amazing point with an amazing punch-line. He was so well known for this that when you caught his distinctive voice passing through the dial, you would automatically stop just to hear those iconic words after his well-delivered, powerful punchline – “And, that my friends, is the rest of the story.” Then, he would close the segment with, “Good day!

 

In this passage, Jesus does the same thing, only better.  And, it is much more than a story Jesus tells. He is recalling the events of a previous time and outlining the events of a coming day in which his followers will suffer many persecutions and hardship. The news is ominous at best, horrifying at worse.

 

The Abomination of Desolation in verse 14 is something from their history (Daniel 9) and something in their future. The presence of God had been reviled and ridiculed and it was going to happen again. The phrase “let the reader understand,” is a reference to me and you reading this today! And, boy, do we understand. Jesus and His glory are profaned and treated with ultimate disrespect by a culture growing increasingly hostile to the holy, indignant with the righteous.

 

That’s why the closing phrase of Jesus in this passage stuns us and gives us the “rest of the story.”  He asserts, “I have told you everything in advance.” There’s no other shoe to drop, no other unexpected outcome. Read the rest of the chapter. Jesus is coming back and setting everything right.

 

And that, my friends, is the rest of the story.

 

So, child of God, rejoice that we serve a Savior who knows it all, and still tells us to not lose heart. He has never broken a promise and he won’t break this one.  When we see the walls crumbling around us, we can rest in the assurance that he has it all in his hands.  That’s why we can close this story the same way Paul Harvey closed every one of his –

 

Good day.

It was a chain reaction on Interstate 65 South during rush hour traffic. Car #1 comes up suddenly on a truck and brakes abruptly. Car #2 slams on the brakes but still hits Car #1 from behind, then comes to a complete stop on a road where the speed limit is 70 MPH.  Car #3 locks up his brakes but still plows into car #2 and then gets rear-ended by Car #4.

 

Guess which car I was driving?

 

Yep, Car #3. I learned later that none of this was considered to be my fault. The way I learned this was by the lawyers calling me to ask if I wanted to sue the driver charged with causing the accident. Feeling exonerated didn’t make me any less sore.

 

But, the part of all this that bothers me the most is what happened while I was sitting in my smashed car. There I am – counting all my teeth and feeling around for any blood as I waited for the police to interview me.  The traffic had been diverted around the four wrecked cars, and a driver going around me on the right side stopped and angrily shouted at me, pointing his finger, “That’s what you get for texting and driving!!!”

 

Hence the question, “Where did mercy go?”

 

Even if I had been texting and driving (I wasn’t), is that really what I needed to hear at that moment?  If I had road rage, I would have chased the guy down and given him a piece of my mind. But, of course, my car couldn’t move so I would have had to do it on foot. I didn’t.

 

Can you imagine if he had said this instead; “Hey man, sorry you’ve been in an accident. Are you okay? Is there anyone I could call for you? Praying for you right now!” Or how about this – how about if he had just gone on without saying anything?

 

Thinking about this has helped me realize how often I offer judgement and punishment when I could offer mercy. It causes me to wonder how often my assumptions about a situation are just as wrong as that guy was when he assumed, I was texting and driving.  Again, he was wrong because I wasn’t.

 

God help us have mercy. When we don’t, we become the unforgiving servant in Matthew 18. We’ve been forgiven a huge debt and shown great mercy, but we don’t show mercy to anyone else.

 

I hope I remember that before I pass around someone who has been in a wreck in life and start wagging my finger at them.

According to ADDA (Attention Deficit Disorder Association) ADHD is a highly genetic, brain-based syndrome that has to do with the regulation of a particular set of brain functions and related behaviors.  All of us probably know someone who has lived with this disorder and had to learn ways to compensate for the challenges ADHD presents.

 

But, what about ADWD?  Attention Deficit Worship Disorder?

 

Okay, I made it up. But, I believe it is a real thing that we all deal with every time the church gathers to worship. If you spend even a little time observing a congregation during a worship service, you will see people who are having a hard time keeping their focus on the goal, the worship of Jesus. The distraction of others can often be a distraction to us!

 

Here are three suggestions of how to compensate for this disorder in your own life. Maybe you can share these thoughts with the people you lead and see if more focus can come to our times of worship.

 

1. Observe a Media Fast before worship.

What do you do when you wake up on Sunday? Turn on the news? Read the paper? Check out Instagram or Facebook? What not start your day of worship with a blackout of outside information that will only take your mind back to the news cycle or to the sports schedule for the day?  You will have plenty of time to catch up on all those things after worship. Why not block out every outside voice from the time you wake up and start putting your mind in a frame of focus on the One whose voice you really want to hear today.

 

2. Let the praises ring!

With the TV off, your social media silent, and the paper waiting till the afternoon, why not crank up music that honors the Lord and proclaims His attributes and glory as you are preparing for church?  Fill your house with the worship of Jesus and get everyone singing along.  Athletes get their “game face” on before the contest begins. Why don’t you get your “praise face” on long before church begins? Your kids will quickly adjust to this if you will take the lead on it. They too can start focusing on the Lord as they get ready for church.

 

3. Leave your phone at home.

If it’s in your pocket, it will be in your hand during worship. And if it’s in your hand, you will be going back and forth to your phone during the worship time. If you use your phone to read your Bible, you might have to take a Bible with you instead – one that you can write in and interact with during the teaching.

 

I never take my phone to church, because I know what I would do if I had it with me. This might be the first step toward curing ADWD in your life. It is a big deal for me, for sure.

 

In Matthew 26, we read the story of the woman who poured out an expensive perfume on Jesus in worship. There are many things to learn in this story, but one of them for me is how much intention worship requires. She had a singular focus on worshipping Jesus to the point that the cost, the opinion of others, the challenges of getting to Jesus, and more didn’t matter. She was there to do one thing, and she did it. Because of her worship, Jesus said her sacrifice would always be remembered.

 

How about us? Do we have that kind of focus? Or, is our worship filled with so many distractions, we don’t even hear the voice of the One we are there to worship?

 

May the Lord help us. And, may we model intentionality in worship and help our people find the cure for ADWD.

I can’t really tell you why this is on my mind. It couldn’t be because I have one or two of these lit on my dashboard right now, could it? Nah. That’s not it.

But, if our lives had a dashboard with warning lights, there are a few warning lights we would all do well to look for, before we wind up on the side of the road.

1. You have a quicker than usual trigger on emotions of all kinds.

Things that usually don’t bother you, all of a sudden bother you. Or, you find yourself crying over something that usually wouldn’t move you that way. Whatever it might be on the spectrum of emotions, you are not yourself and little things trigger out of proportion reactions.

2. You are experiencing constant fatigue, loss of sleep, and appetite.

Stress causes many things and one of them can be loss of sleep and rest. It doesn’t seem to matter how much you need sleep, you find it very hard to get rest. Along with that, a normal day is exhausting to you because your internal motor is running faster than your speed should require. It’s like you are in a low gear, but running at high speeds. Your engine is screaming at you.

3. You have a growing desire for isolation from others.

This one is so dangerous. You are tired and overloaded emotionally. You want to retreat from everyone, even those closest to you. You avoid people you work with and withdraw from your friends. You just want to be left alone, all the time. But, our enemy longs to have a man by himself. We are most vulnerable when we are isolated.

4. Your inner voice is drowning out all others, even God’s.

The first three lead to the last one. When you are out of balance emotionally, tired and fatigued, and isolated, you will be susceptible to your inner voice and it will lie to you.

“Nobody cares about me.”

“I am worthless.”

“I don’t have anything left to give.”

“It wouldn’t matter if I just went away.”

Of course, none of these thoughts are true.

Do you have any of these warning lights on right now? Disconnect from your usual pace. Get some physical rest and enjoy a good meal with your spouse. Run to the Word of God and saturate yourself with everything you know about Jesus through music, reading, and meditating on God’s promises. Find someone you trust and open up your heart to them. Communicate with your husband or wife and spend time in prayer.

Most of all zero in on God’s voice. He is speaking and wants you to hear Him now.

We used to hear criticism of the “7-11” songs. You know, seven words, eleven times? Then, when we acknowledged how repetitive hymns are, not so much anymore. The more recent critique of modern songs is that they all sound the same — same chords, same melodies, same rhythms, underneath only a handful of ideas about God.

Once, I heard a massive medley of modern worship songs – 10 in all – that had the same chord progression, tempo, and groove. It was scary how easily all of them could fit over the same accompaniment… and telling. Many of them actually shared the same ideas as well.

In my opinion, our musical palettes have become so small and narrow in modern worship that it was inevitable our songs would start to sound the same. Songs used to be written by musicians. Now, many of them are written by songwriters – and those two are not necessarily the same person. Perhaps this stems from the reality that the musical range of many songwriters is limited to a single approach on a single instrument — guitar. My fear of that happening to me is why I loved writing with Luke Garrett – his versatility on the piano stretched his songs in every conceivable direction, and I was the beneficiary of that as his co-writer.

Would you agree that our modern songs have a sameness about them? Is it a problem? So what if all of our songs are sounding the same? What difference does it make?

Here are three reasons why I think it matters.

We are losing the interest of our congregation.

They may love what our songs are saying. But, the sameness of our songs is making congregational singing pretty predictable. We have bemoaned often why our congregations don’t sing as enthusiastically as before. Maybe one reason we have overlooked is that they just don’t want to – the songs aren’t that interesting.

We won’t remember this song a year from now.

It is staggering to me how quickly churches move on from songs they love. It may be because the new songs sound just like the ones they loved and they all run together. It makes me wonder what this generation will sing on their death beds – they won’t remember any of these songs.

We are prone to reach for extreme lyrics (and other things) to compensate.

This is the scariest one to me. The musical same-ness of today is driving songwriters to reach for more extreme ways to say things lyrically in an effort to create interest. I’ll refrain from giving my own examples of this, but one of the reasons we see lyrical “reaches” is because the music doesn’t create interest, so the lyric has to for the song to catch attention. The effects we use in worship and as singers are also trying to compensate for this.

I’m concerned about this. Are you?

Question for today: Can we worship God and honor our country at the same time?

 

Over the last 15 years or so, a noticeable dilemma for worship ministry leaders has emerged. Can patriotism and worship co-exist? It’s a fair question to consider now as we are still some time away from July 4.

 

I recognize that some of the feelings on this question are generational.  My generation easily embraced the presence of patriotism in worship and it never crossed our minds we were doing anything that would somehow dishonor God and was inappropriate for worship.  When I was in youth choir at Tate Street Baptist Church, the musical we sang that fueled two different choir tours was “I Love America” by the legend, John W. Peterson. Even as a 17-year-old, I cried every time we sang, “The Red, White and Blue.” Today, many churches would think a song like that would be out of place in a worship service.  Were we wrong and are they right?

 

It’s not that simple.

 

The critical issue for anything we do in worship is, “Why?”  If you carefully study the principles that Paul lays out for church behavior in the letters to the Corinthians and Romans, the attitude of one’s heart toward the choice is paramount as to whether or not it is sinful. In other words, patriotism could be right in one setting and wrong in another, depending on the heart of the worshipper.

 

More practically – if the church is seeking to somehow esteem our country as being superior and super-blessed as opposed to every other country, then maybe what we think is patriotism is actually pride, something that doesn’t belong in worship at all.

 

But, if the church is seeking to 1) express gratitude for God’s blessing in our past by honoring the God-story of our nation’s history, 2)  acknowledge our failure and sin by crying out in confession and repentance for our nation, and, 3) call our people to “Salt and Light” living in the present, then perhaps we are acting like the “kingdom of priests” that we are called to be. It doesn’t have to be political at all and certainly shouldn’t be. It can be spiritual and certainly must be.

 

In the meantime, let’s be patient with each other if we feel differently about this than others do. For the leader who thinks nothing patriotic fits in a worship service, be careful characterizing the church across town doing a “I Love America” rally as doing something wrong. They may not be. And, for the church that is passing out flags as people come into the sanctuary, don’t look despairingly on the church that feels differently and would never do that.

 

Within your own fellowship, don’t be frustrated if some of your people want to handle this differently than you. The people who want to say the pledge are not necessarily idolaters that “don’t get it,” and the folks that cringe at a patriotic element in worship don’t hate America. Find some balance that helps your church process this and lead well in articulating the “why” behind your approach to this.

 

Whatever we do, let’s not let our enemy divide us on this question for the sake of proving our point. There is more than one way to lose here. Pursue each other, not your conviction.