Let me introduce myself…I am Jerry Wood, I am the worship pastor at Open Bible Christian Center in Rapid City, SD… I have been in ministry for over 25 years and have a passion for writing songs, leading worship, and discipling people…
Worship is my life…which makes since it is a lifestyle not an event…it is a shame we have reduced worship to events we call services….since worship demands much more that just playing music and participating in a church music culture. So, hopfully we can foster some good discussions on this blog…
Here I’ll start things off…
Worship A Priority:
A Priority is something that takes precedence, or has preference in regard to privilege (Webster’s). The root word is prior which means previous. The idea then stating that worship is a priority is that it gets our attention first. It is more important than other things. And in the case of worship it is more important than anything.
First Things First—
Worship is the honor of God… Putting him first in everything is the true worship of God.
Passion is a level that we operate in everyday or maybe the better way of saying it is we operate by our passions, or physical, & mental persuasions, scripture teaches us that we have a sinful nature that wants it’s lusts and desires fulfilled. We sin because we are drawn away by our lust, The lust of the flesh the lust of the eyes and pride of life. The members of our bodies become engaged in sinful activity because of these things. Worship then is means by which we honor God with everything that we are, each member of our body becomes an instrument of worship as we dedicate it to the Lord.
Because we are people of Passions and we are use to giving ourselves to the sinful nature it is easy to even let our “Worship” Become polluted. When we give the playing of our instruments and the singing and the songs over to the self-centered mentality of the American entertainment mentality, or for that matter the professional musician mindset, we look to what our performance looks like over the honor of God. How we play becomes more important than whom we are playing to, or who we are worshiping. We play to God not for God. Our playing is an act of surrendered worship not performance for the congregation. The pollution comes when we are more concerned about the style of the song and the quality of the performance that we are in laying at the feet of Jesus. He is the object of our worship not the songs, the team or the opinion of the congregation…