I’m in this situation myself. I have been dealing with quite a bit of stress and struggles. Some of it comes with working in a church and the burden on your heart for the people you lead. Some of it is just life and the number of things that it throws at you. Then I went to a Bible study on Tuesday and we started sharing prayer requests and by the time it got to me I realized that the things I’m dealing with in my life right now aren’t the biggest struggles known to man. It brought some perspective. Even with that, I feel like there’s a huge obstacle in my way and I’m just looking up at how enormous it is. The song Mighty To Save jumped into my head as I woke up this morning. I immediately changed the first line of the chorus, and that’s where the title comes from. It’s good to know that God can move mountains when the time comes. It’s also good to know that I can ask for His help when I’m in the struggle. That’s what the line speaks to. There are times when we need Him to move the mountains and we have to ask Him to do that.

I don’t know what you’re going through in your life right now. It’s quite possible that your struggles make my struggles look like baby Pandas at the zoo. Whatever it may be, you have to be able to take them to the Lord. Cast your cares on Him. Let Him care for you. Spend some time with the Lord. Worship Him. Praise Him for who He is and what He does. Ask Him to move your mountains. I’m praying for you that He will work in your life and through your struggles.

As I looked at this post sitting there all this time, I could very well see how that fit into my life right now. There’s so much going on right now in my life and it feels like I’m kinda out here by myself. I know that isn’t the case, but struggle begins to wear on your mind and leads you to believe that you are all alone. I needed to hear my own words this morning. I had to be able to declare that God is in the middle of all the things that I’m going through. I have to accept that He is really in control even when I feel as if I’m in the spiral of crazy.

Are you going through something right now that seems too much for you? Are things crumbling around you? Do you feel like you’re alone in the struggle? Let me assure you that you aren’t. God is right there. Rest in that fact. Praise Him for that fact. Keep moving forward in Him. He’s going to stay right there with you. As a matter of fact, if you let it go, he will actually lead. That’s truth.

I believe that there has to be a great divorce between American and Christian. Put together they end up doing only one thing: canceling out the Christian part. Is that an over generalization? Yes. Is there great truth in that? Of course, or I wouldn’t have said it. I spend time during the week reading tweets and Facebook posts and there were lots of different responses to yesterday to the President and his decision to support same-sex marriage. Of course, there were tons of people on either side of the fence and they ranged from sadness to joy to flat out mean. But there were a few that scared me and opened my eyes even more to the state of the “American Christian”.  Something I read was written to the tone of we don’t always agree with family but that doesn’t mean to don’t still love them (in speaking of the President and his decision). That’s MY truth. That last statement was the scary one. This person, whom I believe is a Christian decided that they are basing things on their own truth. That wasn’t the first time I’d seen someone share about their own truth.

I’m horribly bothered by this as a Christian, as a leader and as a pastoral figure. At the point people are living by their own truths they are compromising God’s truth. We start to believe that God’s truth isn’t good enough because we had to create our own. The sense of entitlement that comes with living in this country is spilling over into the church and is causing the truth of the Gospel to be diminished. The more this continues to happen, the more we see people creating their own truths. And the last time I checked, we doing that generally turns into something bad.

So where is this coming from? Does this extreme dilution of the Gospel come from the people never really grasping the “Lord” part of ‘Savior and Lord’? Does this come from years and years of a diluted, soft Gospel being preached from the pulpits and stages of today’s churches? Is this a double yes? Honestly, I don’t know what it is, but it is scary. It’s scary because the same people that make the statements like the one up top are the same ones that are wondering why people are the way they are. We wonder why people shoot to kill and steal and harm others. Well, if everyone is going around creating their own truths, then the rules are made and upheld by me.

Maybe there doesn’t need to be a great divorce, but start with a great switch-a-roo. Maybe instead of being American Christians we can work on being Christian Americans. That would simply make us defined by our Christianity and not our American-isticness (new word made up on the fly). And once you are defined by Christ instead of location (or race or occupation or anything else you want to put there), the importance of that thing gets smaller and Christ becomes bigger. I am PRETTY sure that’s what Christ wanted in the first place.

When I speak of worship, I am speaking in the corporate sense. We are obviously called and designed to worship the Father. People worship all types of things, if you don’t believe me, find a story in the early Old Testament. But I’m talking about the concept of worshiping with other people. Coming together in worship and prayer and song and the Word. All of these things. Is this the thing to come first, or is it the community?

I’m speaking of people choosing to come together for the cause of loving Christ. Churches. Prayer Groups. Bible Studies. Family dinners. Cookouts. You know, living life together. There’s something about worshiping with people that you KNOW. I mean, as a worship leader it’s par for the course to spend some time leading worship for people you don’t know in churches you’ve only driven by or in towns you’ve never heard of. But you can’t beat coming home to worship with friends and family and fellow church members. You have relationships with these people. You have lived life with them. That makes the time a little bit sweeter.

So after laying both of the sides out, which one comes first? Can you do one without the other? How much does one filter into the other for you? The floor is now yours.

Take My Life (Here Am I)

You Are God Alone (Not a god)

God of Wonders

Holy is the Lord

You Are My King

I told you! We took it back today. What is being sung in your church today?

Check out what some other people are singing this week here.

http://www.christianpost.com/news/ending-the-worship-war-without-a-truce-41771/

I often wonder about this process. Granted, I have found a job using this medium and have found it beneficial in helping others as well. But I am intrigued as to how we approach finding someone to lead our churches. I mean, words can be typed to say whatever we want, but I wonder what matters most to churches in the Worship Leader Sweepstakes. Obviously we want them to be talented musicians and want them to have some sort of ability to lead a team. But how much is really dependent on their theology and approach to worship? Before I continue, let me say that I am not speaking as someone who is upset about being turned down by a church or anything like that. I’m asking questions because, from the worship leader side I believe that we should be as strong theologically as we are musically, if not more. I wonder just how much churches dig into the brains and hearts of the people they bring in to make sure that the person is where they want them to be.

Honestly, my prayer goes out strongest for the smaller churches. Smaller churches are always looking for someone to come in and lead music and handle that portion of the service. A lot of times leaders will use churches of that size as stepping stones to something bigger and better, which leaves the smaller church in a bind more times than not. And so I wonder if small churches have the tendency to maybe overlook some theological discrepancies for the sake of a talented musician…

Is there a better way to do this? Is there a better way to find someone to lead your congregation musically and spiritually? Is this approach a non-biblical one? Should we approach finding leaders in a less corporate way? Is this just a way for the church to take advantage of the technological world that we live in? As always, I’m just throwing the questions out there. What say you?

I was reading a book this morning that got me to thinking about the never ending argument that is contemporary versus traditional or old versus new or hymns versus praise choruses. Whatever you want to call it, this book dealt with that. Like most, it started out really good. The theology was spot on and the points being made were very well stated. Articulation was immaculate. Everything was going well until the appendix. That’s pretty much all you needed to read of this book to get where the author was coming from. Without going into too much, it’s safe to say that we still have people out there on both sides that don’t get it.

At the end of the day I feel that we have to get people to talk. There’s no way this book would have been written the way it was had the author sat down and talked to some songwriters and worship leaders of today. I want to find a way to get people in the same room together to have this conversation. People are writing books and blogs that are attacking the other side, but many of these people aren’t getting together. I think that’s wrong. No, I KNOW that’s wrong. So let’s fix it. I don’t know who I have to talk to, but someone who knows someone who knows someone famous needs to contact me so I can share my idea. I don’t want to just write another book about it. I want to create a conference or a panel discussion, or a round table with doughnuts or something that will get people in the same room talking about all this stuff. So this is my plea to someone out there. Let’s see if we can lay egos aside and just talk. Anyone out there? Anyone?

⁷ And this occurred because the people of Israel had sinned against the Lord their God, who had brought them up out of the land of Egypt from under the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt, and had feared other gods ⁸ and walked in the customs of the nations whom the Lord drove out before the people of Israel, and in the customs that the kings of Israel had practiced…

¹⁵ They despised his statutes and his covenant that he made with their fathers and the warnings that he gave them. They went after false idols and became false, and they followed the nations that were around them, concerning whom the Lord had commanded them that they should not do like them. 2 Kings 17:7-8, 15

I can’t help but be blown away by this passage. For a little back story, we are in the midst of some pretty ridiculous kings. There is a lot of treachery and horrible practices taking place with these guys. At this point in the story, Israel has fallen and has been exiled to Assyria and we are getting an explanation as to why. There is no big philosophical reason that is hard to understand and needs to be reviewed by brilliant judges. They get exiled because of their idolatry and the results of their actions.

In out Bible study we began to talk about how that would look in our lives today. These guys were building idols and putting them everywhere. The conclusion was that we have just as many idols today, but they are hidden. Our idols aren’t put up on hills and under trees so that we can go and worship them at specific times. Our idols are in our pockets and on these screens and we can obsess about them in the secrecy of our own homes.

As a worship pastor, I began to think about the never ending question of contemporary vs. tradition. Praise chorus vs. hymn. And it caused me to at least ask the question: Are we fighting for our own musical idols…in the church? I’m convinced that God doesn’t care about this as much as we do. But down here on Earth, we have blogs, books, websites, magazine articles, conferences and other things devoted to this one conversation. This is sad for a few reasons. It’s scary, at least to me, for one reason in verse 15. “They went after false idols and became false.”  Yikes. Sometimes we become so attached to something that we aren’t even ourselves anymore. The Internet has done this faster than anything I can remember. We are allowed to create profiles and make ourselves whomever we want to be. We have these profile pictures that don’t look anything like us, or they are that one picture we all have that we think we look the most amazing we have ever looked. So we use that one. We create an idea in the heads of others that we are this person.

In church, we have created this idea about the way worship should go and we have crafted it and shaped it and worked to make it look prettier than any other worship style. However, I believe in many ways people end up looking at the person that is arguing more than the argument itself. The fight goes away from glorifying God and turns more toward our righteousness and winning the argument. We become the idol. We want our voices to be heard and so we try and say something more profound than the next person. We become the idol. We think that we are going to reveal something new that has NEVER been discovered that will blow the top off of this age old discussion. So we put ourselves in situations and create conflict about who worships God better. Who worships God better. Hmmmm…we become the idol. We become false.

Has winning the argument become more to you than worshipping God? Have you worshipped this idol to the point of becoming false yourself? Where do you stand?

Victory in Jesus -Opener

Song Set

How He Loves

You Are Good

Your Love Never Fails

So Good to Me- After Sermon

I should start doing video for some of these Sunday mornings and then putting the videos here. Then we could look and see later if the songs actually did what I wanted them to. Either way, that’s what we are singing this week. I hope your Sunday will be a blessed one! Listen to what God has to say to you today because I guarantee you that He is speaking.