Do you know all there is to know about the latest worship album, but are barren when it comes to knowing Scripture?
I’m not here to guilt you. I want you to know God. I want you to have a history of seeing God move and seeing His promises at work in your day to day.
I don’t want you to look back on the glory days of your faith. I want each day to bring new perspectives, adventures, divine appointments and experiences that show the reality of God to the world.
That’s why the biblical understanding of worship needs to be kept paramount in our minds.
How True Worshipers Experience Art
Being impressed by talented people and feeling good through the force of their performance is not enough. The wise worshiper will enjoy that, bless that, encourage that, but will also see through it to the Giver of all gifts.
The true worshiper learns to sing through the storm—cry out through the confusion of life.
The true worshiper knows how to scour the Scriptures for daily bread.
The true worshiper knows how to pray.
The true worshiper isn’t just moved by powerful music. They are moved by the weight of God’s glory. They are hushed by the magnitude of His presence.
It’s not that great art is wrong or unnecessary. The worshiper of God just knows how to use it. It’s never an end in itself but a gateway to seeing more of the glory and perfection of God.
C.S. Lewis says it better than I ever could (emphases mine):
“The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself, they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of the tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”
Question: How do you guard your heart, your team, your church from loving worship more than loving God? How do you use your full talent in the local church without swaying the hearts of God’s people away from Him?
