Stone Speak A symposium on worship, arts and the prophetic,
here and across the pond...

Just for a moment, I want to encourage you to take a look back and try to remember your favorite corporate worship experience. What was is like? What made it so great? For me, there are so many moments where I knew that I was, without a shadow of a doubt, in the presence of the King. It caused me to question what it was about those moments that were so much different than the rest. Was is because God was not present during the other times? Absolutely not! “For where two or three come together in my name, there am I with them.” (Matthew 18:20 NIV) Was it the band? Was it the worship leader? As I recount some of the times that I felt the presence of God the most, I am astonished how many times I use the words “I” or “me”. It has made me come to the reality and conclusion that the basis for which I was forming my opinion on whether or not the worship was good or bad was actually on whether I got anything out of it or not.

How many times have we come into a corporate worship setting with expectations for God to fulfill our needs? We make statements like, “I need a touch from God during worship today” or “worship was great because I could really feel His presence.” Yet, the purpose of gathering to worship God is not really about us and our feelings. It is about Him. I am so thankful that we serve a God who is gracious and compassionate enough to give us gifts of love, joy and mercy when we come to spend time glorifying Him. It’s very easy, though, to confuse the expectation of those gifts with our sacrifice of praise.

I was very encouraged by something I once heard Brian Doerkson say at a worship leader’s conference back in 2005. In reference to songwriting, he challenged writers to focus on the words “we” and “us” and stop using “I” and “me”. That forces the writer to think on a broader scale and what is going on when we come together as one voice and focus our attention on the Lord. The fruit of this is that we, as the congregation, glorify God on a scale of what He is doing in our church, in our city and in our nation instead of what He is doing in my life. After we re-direct our focus off of ourselves as individuals, our eyes are then opened to the greatness and grandness of the Lord. Our worship becomes much more focused on the attributes of God and less about what He is going to do for me that day.