INTRODUCTION WEEK 6: The Gospel and Sin
READ:
Hosea 2:5-23
ASK:
1. How would you define sin?
2. How could you try to replace God in your life? In our worship?
3. Using the marriage metaphor, how would you describe your present relationship with God: a.)Getting acquainted?, b.)Good friends? c.) Engaged? d.) Newlyweds? e.) Having problems or unfaithful? F.) Growing old together?
REFLECT:
As we began to explore last week, sin and shame are two of the main obstacles to centering our lives and worship on the gospel. We discussed how shame distorts our understanding of God and ourselves last week and this week we begin to discuss sin by exploring our vocabulary (or lack of vocabulary) about sin.
As we define sin we usually come up with answers such as ‘breaking God’s law’ or ‘missing the mark’, and those are not bad definitions, just incomplete. Breaking God’s law is important in scripture, but only as part of a much larger problem of broken relationship with God. We can see this in Hosea 2:5-13, which echoes the prophesies of Jeremiah and the other prophets:
She said, 'I will go after my lovers, who give me my food and my water, my wool and my linen, my oil and my drink. 'Therefore I will block her path with thorn bushes; I will wall her in so that she cannot find her way. She will chase after her lovers but not catch them; she will look for them but not find them. Then she will say, 'I will go back to my husband as at first, for then I was better off than now.'
She has not acknowledged that I was the one who gave her the grain, the new wine and oil, who lavished on her the silver and gold— which they used for Baal. "Therefore I will take away my grain when it ripens, and my new wine when it is ready. I will take back my wool and my linen, intended to cover her nakedness. So now I will expose her lewdness before the eyes of her lovers; no one will take her out of my hands. I will stop all her celebrations: her yearly festivals, her New Moons, her Sabbath days—all her appointed feasts. I will ruin her vines and her fig trees, which she said were her pay from her lovers; I will make them a thicket, and wild animals will devour them. I will punish her for the days she burned incense to the Baals; she decked herself with rings and jewelry, and went after her lovers, but me she forgot," declares the LORD."
Here we see God not solely as a judge passing down sentence on a guilty lawbreaker, but as a husband betrayed by his unfaithful wife. The narrative is about Hosea, the prophet, who is called by God to marry Gomer, a prostitute and ‘loose woman’, to show God’s love for Israel. Gomer betrays Hosea over and over again by turning to other lovers, just as Israel betrays God by worshipping other Gods. Gomer had a problem not uncommon in relationships…she was unsatisfied with Hosea. He was just not enough for her, so she went looking for other men who would fulfill her needs….though in the end she would only beaten and abused.
For Gomer, Hosea was not good enough; she thought she needed something else to feel fulfilled and loved, though nothing would ever fill the void and she would always come crawling back, beaten and abused, to her husband. In this prophesy God is telling the Israelites that they are doing the same things; they are running to other God’s because they think that their God is not enough, though they only get hurt in the end.
God shows a remarkable vulnerability in this prophesy and others. He is not depicted as a emotionless, perfect, wholly other God, but a passionate, frustrated, betrayed lover, who has just been rejected by the ones he loves the most. All of us know the sting of betrayal and rejection, and we all know that betrayal or rejection by someone we love hurts the most. And here we see that God feels that same betrayal when we disobey him or choose another God before him.
This passage illustrates that sin is not so much breaking the law of God but breaking the heart of God, putting ourselves or some ‘thing’ in God’s place, which breaks the loving God’s heart. God is a lover, and He desires an intimate, loving connection with his children, likened throughout the scriptures as a marriage. But we, like the Israelites, want God AND something else……God and success, God and my art or my music, God and money, God and my wife. We can expose these other gods in our lives by asking ourselves honestly the simple questions: what can I not live without? What would devastate me and throw my life into turmoil if it were taken away? What defines my worth and value in the world? As we answer those questions we begin to see that at times we place our hope and worth in other places than God. So at the core sin is nothing but a God replacement program, and when we do this we don’t just cause break God’s commandments, earning his wrath, but we break God’s heart, betraying the one who loves us most.
This is a startling way to look at God and it changes our understanding of our own sin and how we are to lead worship. We firstly understand that often we promote the idea of God AND something else in worship…..God and spiritual gifts, God and great worship or preaching, God and the church building, God and excellent music, God and great spiritual prowess or righteousness, etc… And secondly we often forget that God is a passionate lover and wants to connect with us in worship….often worship becomes about getting something and not just getting God. Just think about what it feels like to meet someone you deeply love……when was the last time we felt like that in worship and how do we promote that connection with God in worship? Lastly, in worship we always remember that the loving God has always responded to his own betrayal and frustration at our idolatry with self-sacrifice, compassion, mercy, and grace. As God writes through Hosea, about Gomer, but also about Israel and all God’s people:
"Therefore I am now going to allure her; I will lead her into the desert and speak tenderly to her. There I will give her back her vineyards, and will make the Valley of Achor door of hope. There she will sing as in the days of her youth, as in the day she came up out of Egypt. "In that day," declares the LORD, "you will call me 'my husband'; you will no longer call me 'my master.' I will remove the names of the Baals from her lips; no longer will their names be invoked. I will betroth you to me forever; I will betroth you in righteousness and justice, in love and compassion. I will betroth you in faithfulness, and you will acknowledge the LORD.
The word ‘allure’ in verse 14 literally means “to deceive, to mislead, to go astray, to persuade”. So, though Gomer deserves punishment, Hosea will not give her as she deserves. He will literally go as far as to trick her or persuade her, to get her away, and then to tenderly remind her of his love. God never gives us as we deserve, but always seeks us, and instigates relationship with us, though we try to replace Him. In worship we can trust that God is alluring all people into the desert so that he can speak tenderly to them and transform them in His love. Sin breaks God’s heart, but God responds to sin with amazing grace. This is the gift of the gospel and the message we are called to proclaim in word and song every week.
ADDITIONAL SCRIPTURES (to read throughout the week):
Jeremiah 3:6-25, Psalm 25:1-10, Isaiah 1:18, Luke 15:1-7, Romans 5:1-11, Hebrews 4:14-16
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
Astonishing Grace: studies on Gospel centered worship leadership, week 5
INTRODUCTION WEEK 5: The Gospel and Shame
READ:
Philippians 3:12-21
ASK:
1. How would you define shame? How does shame feel like? Is shame primarily healthy or unhealthy?
2. How could shame connect us to and/or keep us from living in the hope of the gospel?
3. How is your life different when you live by grace and not unhealthy shame?
REFLECT:
Do you ever feel like there is something wrong with you? Something just not right and it doesn’t ever get better? Do you ever feel like you want to hide from others; that there are shameful, begrudging, lustful, or selfish thoughts that you don’t want the world to see? Do you ever feel, at your lowest points, that you are just not good enough or not worthy of love? That if you really showed someone your whole self you would be rejected? If you have ever felt any of these feelings, there is shame in you. David Atkinson defines shame as “a sense of unease with yourself at the very heart of your being.” Unhealthy shame is the feeling at the pit of your stomach that you are not the person you should be or that you are somehow not good enough, no matter what you do or do not do.
Lewis Smedes, in his book Shame and Grace, discusses that there are two types of shame: healthy and unhealthy shame. Healthy shame has to do with what we do or have done: ‘I hurt my friend and now I feel shame about it.’ This kind of shame can often lead us to growth and health as we respond to those feelings by trying to reconcile or repent. Unhealthy shame though has to do with who we ARE, not just what we do: ‘I hurt my friend and this just proves that I am a terrible person’. Unhealthy shame often distorts reality and keeps us from feeling forgiveness, growth, or grace, because everything goes back the reality that I didn’t just DO something wrong, but I AM wrong.
So often we respond to unhealthy shame by either constantly beating ourselves up or by spending our lives trying to prove ourselves. For ‘beaters’, when someone criticizes you, you are devastated and you beat yourself up. When you do something wrong or make a mistake, you beat yourself up. Even if you did something wrong years ago, you beat yourself up about it. For the ‘provers’, you feel good about yourself because of the way you look, the things you have, the friends who hang out with you, the image you portray, the schools you went to, how ‘hot’ or ‘cool’ you are, how much money you make, what you have made or done, etc…. You avoid unhealthy shame by doing well, yet as you know, you can never do well enough, so you always find yourself struggling to keep the image up.
So, to the ‘beaters’, the gospel says to us…Jesus was beaten up for you, why are you still acting like you aren’t good enough? Jesus was whipped; he was tortured and killed for your sins, why are you still trying to pay for them? God has made you, God accepts you, God has redeemed you in Jesus Christ…..you don’t have to hate yourself anymore! And for the ‘provers’ the gospel tells us: ‘you want to be a workaholic? You will never understand grace. You feel like you have to have fame, or position, or image, or reputation, or money to feel significant? You’ve missed the gospel and you are still trying to save yourself….you are trying to add something to salvation.
The gospel says to us that if we put our faith in Jesus Christ we are accepted, and as we begin to believe this and live in this assurance everything changes about how we see ourselves and others. Because we are saved by grace, we know that we are worse than we could know, but also that we are blessed more than we could ever imagine. And out of this we can be honest with ourselves. We can feel healthy shame and respond when we fail. We can know that we are not the sum of our failures but children of God, saved by GRACE, and accepted by Jesus Christ.
As worship leaders, musicians, and artists, as we seek to be ‘gospel centered’, it is essential for us to confront our unhealthy shame and the ways it causes us either to beat ourselves up or try to prove ourselves. This is an inward journey that sometimes will expose parts of our lives that we are not proud of as we dig to the roots of your shame. Yet if we don’t take this journey we are in danger of missing the gospel entirely and of preaching, through music, songs, expression, and words, a graceless gospel because we haven’t experienced grace.
The Grace of God in Jesus Christ is the only cure for unhealthy shame, the only way we can know God and be transformed by the love of God in Jesus Christ. As Lewis Smedes writes:
Are you ready for grace?
ADDITIONAL SCRIPTURES (to read throughout the week):
Genesis 2:23-25, Psalm 34:1-5, Proverbs 3:35, 1 Corinthians 1:20-21, Ephesians 2:4-8
REFERENCES (for further reading)
1. Shame and Grace, Healing the Shame We Don’t Deserve by Lewis B. Smedes
“I Thirst”, a sermon by Timothy Keller, Redeemer Presbyterian Church, March, 2008
READ:
Philippians 3:12-21
ASK:
1. How would you define shame? How does shame feel like? Is shame primarily healthy or unhealthy?
2. How could shame connect us to and/or keep us from living in the hope of the gospel?
3. How is your life different when you live by grace and not unhealthy shame?
REFLECT:
Do you ever feel like there is something wrong with you? Something just not right and it doesn’t ever get better? Do you ever feel like you want to hide from others; that there are shameful, begrudging, lustful, or selfish thoughts that you don’t want the world to see? Do you ever feel, at your lowest points, that you are just not good enough or not worthy of love? That if you really showed someone your whole self you would be rejected? If you have ever felt any of these feelings, there is shame in you. David Atkinson defines shame as “a sense of unease with yourself at the very heart of your being.” Unhealthy shame is the feeling at the pit of your stomach that you are not the person you should be or that you are somehow not good enough, no matter what you do or do not do.
Lewis Smedes, in his book Shame and Grace, discusses that there are two types of shame: healthy and unhealthy shame. Healthy shame has to do with what we do or have done: ‘I hurt my friend and now I feel shame about it.’ This kind of shame can often lead us to growth and health as we respond to those feelings by trying to reconcile or repent. Unhealthy shame though has to do with who we ARE, not just what we do: ‘I hurt my friend and this just proves that I am a terrible person’. Unhealthy shame often distorts reality and keeps us from feeling forgiveness, growth, or grace, because everything goes back the reality that I didn’t just DO something wrong, but I AM wrong.
So often we respond to unhealthy shame by either constantly beating ourselves up or by spending our lives trying to prove ourselves. For ‘beaters’, when someone criticizes you, you are devastated and you beat yourself up. When you do something wrong or make a mistake, you beat yourself up. Even if you did something wrong years ago, you beat yourself up about it. For the ‘provers’, you feel good about yourself because of the way you look, the things you have, the friends who hang out with you, the image you portray, the schools you went to, how ‘hot’ or ‘cool’ you are, how much money you make, what you have made or done, etc…. You avoid unhealthy shame by doing well, yet as you know, you can never do well enough, so you always find yourself struggling to keep the image up.
So, to the ‘beaters’, the gospel says to us…Jesus was beaten up for you, why are you still acting like you aren’t good enough? Jesus was whipped; he was tortured and killed for your sins, why are you still trying to pay for them? God has made you, God accepts you, God has redeemed you in Jesus Christ…..you don’t have to hate yourself anymore! And for the ‘provers’ the gospel tells us: ‘you want to be a workaholic? You will never understand grace. You feel like you have to have fame, or position, or image, or reputation, or money to feel significant? You’ve missed the gospel and you are still trying to save yourself….you are trying to add something to salvation.
The gospel says to us that if we put our faith in Jesus Christ we are accepted, and as we begin to believe this and live in this assurance everything changes about how we see ourselves and others. Because we are saved by grace, we know that we are worse than we could know, but also that we are blessed more than we could ever imagine. And out of this we can be honest with ourselves. We can feel healthy shame and respond when we fail. We can know that we are not the sum of our failures but children of God, saved by GRACE, and accepted by Jesus Christ.
As worship leaders, musicians, and artists, as we seek to be ‘gospel centered’, it is essential for us to confront our unhealthy shame and the ways it causes us either to beat ourselves up or try to prove ourselves. This is an inward journey that sometimes will expose parts of our lives that we are not proud of as we dig to the roots of your shame. Yet if we don’t take this journey we are in danger of missing the gospel entirely and of preaching, through music, songs, expression, and words, a graceless gospel because we haven’t experienced grace.
The Grace of God in Jesus Christ is the only cure for unhealthy shame, the only way we can know God and be transformed by the love of God in Jesus Christ. As Lewis Smedes writes:
“Grace overcomes shame, not by uncovering an overlooked cache of excellence within ourselves but simply by accepting us, the whole of us, with no regard for beauty or ugliness, our virtue or our vices. We are accepted wholesale. Accepted with no possibility of being rejected. Accepted once and accepted forever. Accepted at the ultimate depth of our being. We are given what we have longed for in every nook and nuance of every relationship.
We are ready for grace when we are bone tired of our struggle to be worthy and acceptable. After we have tried to long to earn the approval of everyone important to us, we are ready for grace. When we are tired of trying to be the person somebody sometime convinced us we had to be, we are ready for grace. When we have given up all hope of ever being an acceptable human being, we may hear in our hearts the ultimate reassurance: we are accepted, accepted by grace.”
Are you ready for grace?
ADDITIONAL SCRIPTURES (to read throughout the week):
Genesis 2:23-25, Psalm 34:1-5, Proverbs 3:35, 1 Corinthians 1:20-21, Ephesians 2:4-8
REFERENCES (for further reading)
1. Shame and Grace, Healing the Shame We Don’t Deserve by Lewis B. Smedes
“I Thirst”, a sermon by Timothy Keller, Redeemer Presbyterian Church, March, 2008
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
Astonishing Grace, Week 4: Religion Based and Gospel Based Worship Leading
Astonishing Grace: studies on Gospel centered worship leadership
INTRODUCTION WEEK 4: Religion Based Worship Leading and Gospel Based Worship Leading
READ:
Philippians 4:4-9
ASK:
1. Based on our previous discussions, what is the general difference between gospel and religion.?
2. What are the differences in motivation, practice, and performance between ‘gospel based’ worship and ‘religion based’ worship?
REFLECT:
Last week we discussed the difference between religion and the gospel, which can be encapsulated in a quote by Timothy Keller: “Religion is ‘if you obey, then you will be accepted’. But the gospel is, ‘if you are absolutely accepted, and sure you are accepted, only then will you ever begin to obey. Those are two utterly different things. Every page of the Bible shows the difference.”
This week we are going to focus on how this difference affects our worship leading. In our church do we primarily provide worship leadership that is gospel based or religion based? Below we see how this difference shapes our motivations, practices, and performance.
1. Motivation:
So often we confuse the true order of things. Often we can slide back into the belief that if we obey we will be blessed, and in the same way, if we don’t obey we will be cursed. And this motivation can seep into our worship of God and our leadership so easily. Yet the true order of things that drips from every page of the gospel is: you ARE blessed, so obey. We are accepted by God through Jesus Christ, so now we can serve God freely, as children and not slaves. This changes everything about our motivation as worshippers and worship leaders. We no longer judge worship by whether we received an emotional high, listened to great music, or heard a powerful message. As leaders we are freed from the tyranny of seeing our attendance at a worship service as a way to gauge success or to be a good leader. Instead, we begin to see our worship service as an expression of the freedom we have in Jesus Christ and the love relationship we have in Him.
Religious motivations often have to do with either personal preferences or self-righteousness. As Tim Keller writes in his excellent book “The Reason For God”: “Religion, generally speaking, tends to create a slippery slope in the heart. Each religion informs it’s followers that they have “the truth” and this naturally leads them to feel superior to those with differing beliefs. Also, religion tells its followers that they are saved and connected to God by devotedly performing the truth. This moves them to separate from those who are less devoted and pure in life. Therefore, it is easy for one religious group to stereotype and caricature other ones. Once this situation exists it can easily spiral down into marginalization of others or even to active oppression, abuse, or violence against them. “ Religious motivations can also work the other way…..instead of leading us to feel superior they lead us to always feel inferior, never good enough, and then they fill us with fear and worry.
Motivations in scripture though have a decidedly different tone. We see throughout the Old and New Testaments the primary reason to worship is RESPONSE….a response to God’s goodness, love, and faithfulness, and a way to express our gratitude, joy, trust, peace, and love. Paul encapsulates this perfectly in Philippians 4:4-8: "Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: Rejoice! Let your gentleness be evident to all. The Lord is near. Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things."
So ultimately, our gospel motivation is a desire to praise God and be shaped by the gospel. And our task as worship leaders is to emphasize these themes over and over again, and to make sure we are not falling back into self-centered, graceless, self-righteous religious worship in the words we say or songs we sing.
2. Practices
Our motivations then inform and transform our ‘practices’ in worship. Our practices describe our liturgical structures, worship styles, the lyrics and music of the songs we sing, how many songs we sing, the content of the liturgy and sermons, and the ways we lead worship. If we primarily lead worship out of a ‘religion based’ motivation then our practices will be rigid, unyielding, and marked with, a lack of faith, gratitude, and love. There will also be a sense of superiority over others that makes any changes in worship a huge fight…..as evidenced in why we call the conflicts on worship in churches “the worship wars.”
Years ago I was working in a church that was in the midst of a ‘worship war’….we were trying to introduce a contemporary service in the midst of a very traditional church. At elder meetings I was surprised at how many people were livid at even the suggestion of altering the service in any way. Then there were those on the contemporary side (including myself) that were just as angry and judgmental at the other side’s close-mindedness and lack of faith. The situation almost spiraled out of control until one of the elders gently diffused our anger and helped us to see just how far from the gospel we had gotten in our quest to promote a certain worship style. We had forgotten that we are called to ‘love one another as Jesus has loved us (John 13:34) and we had denigrated to religiously judging each other on our opinions on worship.
So we took a step back as a church and focused again on loving and forgiving each other, and when we began to discuss the subject again, we realized that our struggles with worship styles (and each other) didn’t really have anything to do with the gospel, but with our own preferences and our own religious mis-conceptions (that only traditional or contemporary worship is REALLY worship or REALLY able to bring us closer to God.). As we were able focus on God’s desires in worship and our response as Christian brothers and sisters to the gospel, we were able to see that both contemporary and traditional worship styles fit into gospel worship.
Evangelist and teacher Judson Cornwall puts the difference between gospel and religious worship practices this way: "Whenever the method of worship becomes more important than the Person of worship, we have already prostituted our worship. There are entire congregations who worship praise and praise worship but who have not yet learned to praise and worship God in Jesus Christ."
As we lead worship as musicians, singers, leaders, liturgists, or preachers, we keep away from religious practices by examining our motivations regularly and then focusing every week on the gospel proclamation that God loves his people and has sought to save them throughout history, culminating in the person and work of his son Jesus Christ.
3. Performance
As we approach the distinction between gospel and religion based performance, we have two main issues to consider: a.) how we view performance in our worship services, and b.) how we view excellence personally and in our worship teams/choirs.
As we base our worship more and more in gospel our worship services become more focused on congregational participation in the gospel story, and less focused on performance for performance’ sake. At times we can go to a church and remark upon how great the music was but have a very hard time understanding what they were singing about or what their reason for singing the song in worship was in the first place. So often our motivations for performance in worship have decidedly religious undertones….we often want to produce and perform amazing music so that the congregation will like us and think we are doing a good job, or we sometimes perform to show the community that our church has an amazing music program. At other times we perform to produce a certain emotional response, and at other times we just want to perform ‘quality music’ and show people what ‘high quality music is.’ Those are not all terrible reasons to perform, but they are not gospel reasons.
As we as worship leaders are immersed in the gospel we realize more and more than the goal of worship music and all our ‘practices’ of worship is not performance but participation; to give our congregations the opportunity to participate with the story of the gospel and experience the grace and love of Christ as a community of faith. I am not saying that we shouldn’t grow in excellence as musicians, choirs, as worship teams (we will discuss ‘gospel excellence’ later in the study) but that our primary objective is not merely to be excellent, but to be excellent with a purpose….to invite participation with the gospel and the author of our gospel hope, Jesus.
This relates then to how we view excellence as musicians/worship leaders, and worship teams/choirs. Our main goal is to ‘lead the congregations’ song’, and we are called to do that with excellence, so that we don’t distract people from the gospel. But so often we can make excellence an idol……excellence as the ultimate goal instead of knowing and being known by the risen Christ.
One of our worship leaders brought up an example of the confusion surrounding what is ‘gospel excellence’ last night with an example of two worship leaders she has worked with. One was very accepting and basically let anyone participate who wanted to, regardless of their skills. The result was a very graceful atmosphere but often very poor quality worship. Another was a professional guitarist for worship and had a very high standard for worship. If you were not good enough he would tell you that you were not gifted as a musician and should find another ministry. And he was often harsh and demanding at practices. So the result was very high quality musicianship with very little grace.
In gospel based excellence we want to strive for the middle ground. We don’t want to settle for mediocrity, but to see the development of our gifts (and others gifts) as a response to the grace and freedom we have been given in Jesus Christ. We don’t also want to make excellence an idol that becomes ultimately more important than the gospel. As we focus on the gospel we understand that all people are loved by God and have abilities and talents that need to be encouraged. So we focus as much on development as excellence, and strive to help each other grow in our skills as well as in our relationship with God and understanding of worship.
Please e-mail or write on the blog your responses to this. I am especially interested in how you practically incorporate this understanding of grace and religion into your worship and worship leading. I have spoken a lot in generalities and extremes, so personal examples would help us all incorporate this into our daily lives. Thanks!
ADDITIONAL SCRIPTURES (to read throughout the week):
Psalm 51, Isaiah 53:1-12, John 1:15-18, 1 Corinthians 15:1-11, 1 John 5:1-5
INTRODUCTION WEEK 4: Religion Based Worship Leading and Gospel Based Worship Leading
READ:
Philippians 4:4-9
ASK:
1. Based on our previous discussions, what is the general difference between gospel and religion.?
2. What are the differences in motivation, practice, and performance between ‘gospel based’ worship and ‘religion based’ worship?
REFLECT:
Last week we discussed the difference between religion and the gospel, which can be encapsulated in a quote by Timothy Keller: “Religion is ‘if you obey, then you will be accepted’. But the gospel is, ‘if you are absolutely accepted, and sure you are accepted, only then will you ever begin to obey. Those are two utterly different things. Every page of the Bible shows the difference.”
This week we are going to focus on how this difference affects our worship leading. In our church do we primarily provide worship leadership that is gospel based or religion based? Below we see how this difference shapes our motivations, practices, and performance.
1. Motivation:
So often we confuse the true order of things. Often we can slide back into the belief that if we obey we will be blessed, and in the same way, if we don’t obey we will be cursed. And this motivation can seep into our worship of God and our leadership so easily. Yet the true order of things that drips from every page of the gospel is: you ARE blessed, so obey. We are accepted by God through Jesus Christ, so now we can serve God freely, as children and not slaves. This changes everything about our motivation as worshippers and worship leaders. We no longer judge worship by whether we received an emotional high, listened to great music, or heard a powerful message. As leaders we are freed from the tyranny of seeing our attendance at a worship service as a way to gauge success or to be a good leader. Instead, we begin to see our worship service as an expression of the freedom we have in Jesus Christ and the love relationship we have in Him.
Religious motivations often have to do with either personal preferences or self-righteousness. As Tim Keller writes in his excellent book “The Reason For God”: “Religion, generally speaking, tends to create a slippery slope in the heart. Each religion informs it’s followers that they have “the truth” and this naturally leads them to feel superior to those with differing beliefs. Also, religion tells its followers that they are saved and connected to God by devotedly performing the truth. This moves them to separate from those who are less devoted and pure in life. Therefore, it is easy for one religious group to stereotype and caricature other ones. Once this situation exists it can easily spiral down into marginalization of others or even to active oppression, abuse, or violence against them. “ Religious motivations can also work the other way…..instead of leading us to feel superior they lead us to always feel inferior, never good enough, and then they fill us with fear and worry.
Motivations in scripture though have a decidedly different tone. We see throughout the Old and New Testaments the primary reason to worship is RESPONSE….a response to God’s goodness, love, and faithfulness, and a way to express our gratitude, joy, trust, peace, and love. Paul encapsulates this perfectly in Philippians 4:4-8: "Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: Rejoice! Let your gentleness be evident to all. The Lord is near. Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things."
So ultimately, our gospel motivation is a desire to praise God and be shaped by the gospel. And our task as worship leaders is to emphasize these themes over and over again, and to make sure we are not falling back into self-centered, graceless, self-righteous religious worship in the words we say or songs we sing.
2. Practices
Our motivations then inform and transform our ‘practices’ in worship. Our practices describe our liturgical structures, worship styles, the lyrics and music of the songs we sing, how many songs we sing, the content of the liturgy and sermons, and the ways we lead worship. If we primarily lead worship out of a ‘religion based’ motivation then our practices will be rigid, unyielding, and marked with, a lack of faith, gratitude, and love. There will also be a sense of superiority over others that makes any changes in worship a huge fight…..as evidenced in why we call the conflicts on worship in churches “the worship wars.”
Years ago I was working in a church that was in the midst of a ‘worship war’….we were trying to introduce a contemporary service in the midst of a very traditional church. At elder meetings I was surprised at how many people were livid at even the suggestion of altering the service in any way. Then there were those on the contemporary side (including myself) that were just as angry and judgmental at the other side’s close-mindedness and lack of faith. The situation almost spiraled out of control until one of the elders gently diffused our anger and helped us to see just how far from the gospel we had gotten in our quest to promote a certain worship style. We had forgotten that we are called to ‘love one another as Jesus has loved us (John 13:34) and we had denigrated to religiously judging each other on our opinions on worship.
So we took a step back as a church and focused again on loving and forgiving each other, and when we began to discuss the subject again, we realized that our struggles with worship styles (and each other) didn’t really have anything to do with the gospel, but with our own preferences and our own religious mis-conceptions (that only traditional or contemporary worship is REALLY worship or REALLY able to bring us closer to God.). As we were able focus on God’s desires in worship and our response as Christian brothers and sisters to the gospel, we were able to see that both contemporary and traditional worship styles fit into gospel worship.
Evangelist and teacher Judson Cornwall puts the difference between gospel and religious worship practices this way: "Whenever the method of worship becomes more important than the Person of worship, we have already prostituted our worship. There are entire congregations who worship praise and praise worship but who have not yet learned to praise and worship God in Jesus Christ."
As we lead worship as musicians, singers, leaders, liturgists, or preachers, we keep away from religious practices by examining our motivations regularly and then focusing every week on the gospel proclamation that God loves his people and has sought to save them throughout history, culminating in the person and work of his son Jesus Christ.
3. Performance
As we approach the distinction between gospel and religion based performance, we have two main issues to consider: a.) how we view performance in our worship services, and b.) how we view excellence personally and in our worship teams/choirs.
As we base our worship more and more in gospel our worship services become more focused on congregational participation in the gospel story, and less focused on performance for performance’ sake. At times we can go to a church and remark upon how great the music was but have a very hard time understanding what they were singing about or what their reason for singing the song in worship was in the first place. So often our motivations for performance in worship have decidedly religious undertones….we often want to produce and perform amazing music so that the congregation will like us and think we are doing a good job, or we sometimes perform to show the community that our church has an amazing music program. At other times we perform to produce a certain emotional response, and at other times we just want to perform ‘quality music’ and show people what ‘high quality music is.’ Those are not all terrible reasons to perform, but they are not gospel reasons.
As we as worship leaders are immersed in the gospel we realize more and more than the goal of worship music and all our ‘practices’ of worship is not performance but participation; to give our congregations the opportunity to participate with the story of the gospel and experience the grace and love of Christ as a community of faith. I am not saying that we shouldn’t grow in excellence as musicians, choirs, as worship teams (we will discuss ‘gospel excellence’ later in the study) but that our primary objective is not merely to be excellent, but to be excellent with a purpose….to invite participation with the gospel and the author of our gospel hope, Jesus.
This relates then to how we view excellence as musicians/worship leaders, and worship teams/choirs. Our main goal is to ‘lead the congregations’ song’, and we are called to do that with excellence, so that we don’t distract people from the gospel. But so often we can make excellence an idol……excellence as the ultimate goal instead of knowing and being known by the risen Christ.
One of our worship leaders brought up an example of the confusion surrounding what is ‘gospel excellence’ last night with an example of two worship leaders she has worked with. One was very accepting and basically let anyone participate who wanted to, regardless of their skills. The result was a very graceful atmosphere but often very poor quality worship. Another was a professional guitarist for worship and had a very high standard for worship. If you were not good enough he would tell you that you were not gifted as a musician and should find another ministry. And he was often harsh and demanding at practices. So the result was very high quality musicianship with very little grace.
In gospel based excellence we want to strive for the middle ground. We don’t want to settle for mediocrity, but to see the development of our gifts (and others gifts) as a response to the grace and freedom we have been given in Jesus Christ. We don’t also want to make excellence an idol that becomes ultimately more important than the gospel. As we focus on the gospel we understand that all people are loved by God and have abilities and talents that need to be encouraged. So we focus as much on development as excellence, and strive to help each other grow in our skills as well as in our relationship with God and understanding of worship.
Please e-mail or write on the blog your responses to this. I am especially interested in how you practically incorporate this understanding of grace and religion into your worship and worship leading. I have spoken a lot in generalities and extremes, so personal examples would help us all incorporate this into our daily lives. Thanks!
ADDITIONAL SCRIPTURES (to read throughout the week):
Psalm 51, Isaiah 53:1-12, John 1:15-18, 1 Corinthians 15:1-11, 1 John 5:1-5
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