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Posts Tagged ‘christianity’

A Lofty Title

Posted in Church in Crisis, Worship in Cirisis, Worship, Praise and Music, tagged , , , , , on November 16, 2024| Leave a Comment »

I have been a musician since 1965 and I have been involved with writing Christian music since 1971. I am a product of the Jesus Revolution. If you saw the movie, it is a story about my wife and I, there are so many similarities. We were part of a group of newly saved young people, and we had a key role in starting a church in the early 1970’s in northern Illinois. I played at church, and I played in a Christian band that played in parks, campgrounds and coffeehouses all around the Midwest. In 1977, the band traveled to Denmark and Sweden for a 5-week outreach. Those were exciting times for us. It was all about outreach and preaching the Gospel.

It wasn’t until about 1981 that I had ever heard the term “worship leader”. Someone we were visiting told us we needed to come to church with them because they have a great worship leader. I had never heard of that before. In those days, we just had an overhead projector and a bunch of musicians sitting off to the side.

I have always thought that “worship leader” was such a lofty title. Can you be a worship leader and not be a worshiper of God? Yes you can! In many churches you can be hired to lead purely based on your talent. It used to be in church that you could be a minister of music, someone who led the congregation in praise unto God. But that is not such a lofty title.

Recently, there have been famous worship leaders who have come out and said they now doubt Christianity. Huh? How did they get a worship leader position? When churches hire musicians, is it based more on talent rather than their real walk with the Lord? I think so! We are now so far removed from what real worship is that if you ask someone, there are like deer in headlights.

The modern church has thrown praise and worship into the same bucket, we make no distinction between the two. We have minimized what true Biblical worship is, to our own hurt. I used to hear it all the time, people go to specific churches because they like the worship there. I then ask them; you mean you like the music??  Invariably, that is really what they mean, and it is OK to prefer what you like, but lets not call it worship, call it praise.

Being a true worshiper of God has nothing to do with what you like, or your taste in music. It has to do with what your walk with the Lord, your obedience, your sacrifice, taking up the cross daily, preferring one another in love and bowing before Him. When Abraham was going to sacrifice Isaac, when he was going on the hill to worship, the was no music. We are losing our understanding of what Biblical worship is! If that is lost, we are at peril.

If you love to praise the Lord, do it with gusto with your preference of music. Enjoy it! But let’s rethink worship and how much more serious it is. When it comes to worship, God sets the standard. When it comes to praise, we have liberty to have music we prefer.

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Knowing God

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on September 24, 2024| Leave a Comment »

Is it possible to know God? We are far removed from the days when Jesus walked the earth. It would have been wonderful to see Him, to see Him having mercy on people and healing them. And His wisdom when He spoke would have been unsurpassed. And to see Him after He rose from the dead, that would have been amazing. It would have been much easier to believe in Him then than it is now, in our troubled world. In John 20 when Thomas still doubted, he saw Jesus risen from the dead. Jesus told Thomas to put his hand in His side and Thomas exclaimed, “My Lord and my God”. What did Jesus say then? Verse 29 says “Because you have seen Me, have you now believed? Blessed are they who did not see, and yet believed”.

It is a prophetic word to our generation, to all of us who did not see what Thomas saw, “Blessed are they who did not see, and yet believed”. For those of us who have believed in Jesus without seeing Him in the flesh, Jesus has pronounced a blessing, a blessing on us! We are blessed when we come to know Him.

How do we really know that we have come to know Him? This how we know, if we accept Jesus and obey His commands set forth in the scriptures. 1 John 2:3-6 says “By this we know that we have come to know Him, if we keep His commandments. The one who says, “I have come to know Him,” and does not keep His commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him; but whoever follows His word, in him the love of God has truly been perfected. By this we know that we are in Him: the one who says that he remains in Him ought, himself also, walk just as He walked”.

When I came to know Him, the way that I walk changed! I used to walk to please myself, doing whatever was good for me. When I came to know Him, I wanted to walk as He walked on the earth. We are to keep His commandments. If we keep them, that is how we know that we have come to know Him. In our hearts, we desire to be like Jesus. It is a hard saying, “If you say you have come to know Him but do not obey Him, you are a liar”. Those are His words, not mine. It is possible then to have some religious beliefs and not really know Him. There is a kind of Christian religion that embraces some of the moral aspects of the teachings of Jesus, but in reality does not fully obey Him. Matthew 7:21 says “Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of My Father who is in heaven will enter“.

We should search our hearts and seek to know Him better thru understanding His words. And we should work toward being obedient to those words. Let those words of Jesus spread in to all areas of our lives, and live in a manner worthy of the calling that He has on us.

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