It's All About Him

Our focus can get off in many ways. This can happen when a song leader or worship team talks to the congregation and tells them to try harder, sing louder, move around more, and so on. It happens when the worship leader thanks the congregation for their singing or when they tell them that their singing was particularly good that day. It happens when we applaud after the worship team sings or after a person sings a solo. It happens when the leader comments about the nature of choruses and hymns, giving validity to the one or the other, rather than pointing out how the lyrics call our focus toward God. It happens when we overemphasize the experience of worship and feeling worshipful rather than on concentrating on the words of truth in the songs which testify to the power, majesty and awe of God. Sadly, many contemporary songs do not draw our attention to God because they are about us. Rather than telling God we want to worship Him, that we will worship Him, or that we are hungry for Him, we ought to go ahead and actually praise Him. We sing an entire song talking about the fact that we need Him when we ought to be praising Him in light of that fact.

Another thing that detracts from the awe is breaking up services with announcements or a time of greeting that is really too short to accomplish much that is of real value anyway. This really draws our attention back to ourselves and to our schedules. We ought to try to get the announcement back to ourselves and to our schedules. We ought to try to get the announcement out of the way before the call to worship or just create an expectation that people must read the bulletin. During the Lord's Supper, if we do not regularly explain what it is for and truly take time to remember Christ's suffering and sacrificial death, our minds will wander from the awesome encounter with God. When the pastor preaches, if he makes it too casual, often by joke-telling and story-telling for the first fifteen minutes, we will lose our focus on God. We might become enraptured with God. We need God's Word to encounter God. Stories, jokes, gimmicks, props and vocal inflections will not get the job done. Worship is through truth.

How the pastor approaches the word of God also will affect our ability to see how awesome God is. If he casually references a verse here and there or reads a passage and than talks only on abstract things hardly related, we will likely fail to encounter God because we have journeyed outside of His Word. We begin putting more emphasis on what the pastor says and how he says it then on what the Word says and God says it. We must approach God in reverence, awe and fear. If we could lean to approach Him as such, believing He is such and worshipping as such, then we will likely experience His awe as a corporate body. We are those under authority of One deserving all praise, glory, and honour. When we do anything to put the focus on ourselves, we steal His glory. May it never be, for God will have none of it.

- Brent Barnett