Last Sunday morning I had to make an unexpected trip to pick up my guitar from where I had inadvertently left it the night before. The trip was about 90 minutes return & as I was driving along I found myself tuning in to Melbourne’s Christian radio station “Light fm”.
I tuned in during their presentation of worship music & once I identified this via what I thought was a fairly cheesy song, I went to change the station. It was one of those moments when I felt a distinct check in my spirit; fortunately being the ripe old age that I am, I have learned not to ignore these moments so I focussed in on what the check was about. Here is a little of what transpired as I prayed through the next 10 or 15 minutes of my drive.
As a person who has worked for the last 20 or so years to try & educate people about what worship is/can be/could be/should be, one recurring theme is that “to say that you got nothing out of the worship tonight is like saying that you got nothing out of the offering”. The basic premise of this thought is that the quality or style of the worship should not in any way detract from your conviction to worship God in any setting. Worship is a choice & an offering & yes, even though as humans there are certain musical stimulants that will work better for us than others, nothing should detract from our conviction to worship God. As I was driving along & these thoughts were bouncing around, I knew that I had turned on light fm because I wanted some “God” time; I was down to lead worship in our church that night & I was hoping to use the trip to get my spiritual house in order.
So the question then presented itself more personally. Why is it that I have spent much of my life teaching this stuff (above) & yet turned off the radio when clearly I had turned it on to engage myself in some “musically based” worship? In that moment, I made the choice to turn the radio back on & just spend whatever time I could as I was driving along using whatever music was on the radio to give honor & praise to God. When I turned the radio back on, the first song that I heard was the first song that we had chosen to do in our church that night “Come, now is the time to worship” by UK Vineyard. . The rest of the music was challenging; when it’s all said & done, I am very opinionated about what people put out in the name of worship music, but I stood by my decision, to choose to worship God in those all too brief moments that were available to me that morning. This leads me to my second thought for the trip……
Psalm 66 verse 4 says “Everything on earth will worship you; they will sing your praises, shouting your name in glorious songs”
This is a familiar recurring theme through scripture. It doesn’t say “the whole earth will shout your name in glorious songs that I happen to like a lot, & played in a style that I happen to enjoy”. As these thoughts rolled around I found myself wondering at how much this is actually happening right now? There are millions of songs being sung all over the world even as type this that echo similar intent about God. Stylistically they vary from culture to culture, but they are all essentially the works of people in places all over the planet who have had their hearts & lives touched by God, & as a result they make the choice to worship him. It was as if God was challenging me to reconcile this one simple point about worship. That the cacophony of sounds, many of which I don’t particularly like, are in fact the outworking of the sentiment of Psalm 66 above. Maybe it was my attitude about this that needed to change. I know that I will never buy a c.d. of music that I wouldn’t ever play, but maybe my attitude about what is being played needs to have a different perspective. It left me asking the question “if the whole earth is going to be filled with worship, what will that look like, what will that sound like, & has it already started?”
Next article “The little drummer boy, humility & my own standards”
For now, Your thoughts?

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