Worship Gardening

"Let the message about Christ, in all its richness, fill your lives. Teach and counsel each other with all the wisdom he gives. Sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs to God with thankful hearts.”

Colossians 3:16

The message fills us.

Teaching/counseling one other edifies us.

Psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs give us a framework.

But gratitude fuels us.

Many of us spend a lot of energy on the framework. The structures of worship.

Some of us focus our time on education and conversation.

A few of us do all we can to make sure we are feasting on the Bread of Life. That we sing the gospel. That Jesus is not only the object of our worship, but the subject as well.

But I don’t hear a lot about the fuel.

Except at Thanksgiving. Okay… 2 weeks around Thanksgiving.

Maybe this is why our worship is sometimes sputtering, even when the content is rich, the framework is spot on, and the people are knowledgable. We need more fuel.

We need thankful hearts.

Have you ever tried to shut down someone who was genuinely grateful? Their life was spared. Their child came home. Their best friend got saved.

Worship for them is not a Sunday activity; it’s a condition of the soul—fueled by a heart filled with thankfulness.

So worship leaders, cultivate thankfulness. Don’t convince your folks they SHOULD sing; help find that place where they can’t help but sing. 

Cultivate thankfulness. Don’t make worship about forms, functions or musical style, but the fertile soil of the heart. 

I suspect you’ll have a hard time shutting them down.

Do NOT Sing from the Heart

It was an unlikely source of insight… a recent airing of the TV show “Code Black.”

In the story line a small rock band, Escalade, was in an accident. There’s a guy in the band talking about his musical gift compared to that of his girlfriend. He tells the doctor, "The truth is, she's better than me; she is. Look, I sing from my heart. But she... she sings from her bones.”

I’ve spent decades trying to get people to sing from their hearts. Maybe I’ve been doing it wrong.

“For the word of God is alive and powerful. It is sharper than the sharpest two-edged sword, cutting between soul and spirit, between joint and marrow. It exposes our innermost thoughts and desires.” (Hebrews 4:12)

This makes me wonder, what if we invested more time (in and out of rehearsals) using scripture and worship lyrics (and other resources) to disciple those who sing in our churches? What might happen if the Word gets into our bones and then we sing it out?

Isn’t this what the best preachers do?

They don’t study the Bible so they can teach it like a Shakespeare sonnet, a mathematical theorem, or a chemical equation. They immerse themselves in passages of Scripture, they swim in the deep waters of theology, they walk with their congregants through the joys, sorrows, and monotony of every-dailyness. And then they stand in a pulpit and the truths God has shown them are squeezed from their bones, through their heart and mind, and across their lips.

I’m not suggesting worship leaders—song leaders—start preaching. I am encouraging us to think of our Biblically rich song lyrics as pre-written sermons that we can declare with great authority, clarity, and expressiveness.

Think of the worship leaders you have found most impactful. I suspect you’ll see evidence of this. Maybe it was hard for you describe and this helps. 

It’s not emotionalism. It’s not intellectualism.

It is deeper than our hearts and our minds. It’s nestled in between our joints and our marrow.

"I sing from my heart, but she sings from her bones."

Selah in Modern Worship

            VS.

Not sure about you, by my life more often feels like roller coaster than a Sunday drive. Okay, I lied. I’m pretty sure I do know about you, and your life is the same. Probably more roller coaster-ish than mine.

Perhaps, also like me, you have wondered what it would be like to live in the days of David, the shepherd and song writer. Slow paced. Quiet. Peaceful. No iPhone. No TV. No laptop. No social media.

And so, when reading his lyrics (mostly in the Psalms), and I see the word “Selah,” I ignore it. I fly by. This roller-coaster rider ain’t got time for that shepherd-boy pace.

Take Psalm 46, for example:

Three verses, Selah

Four verses, Selah

Four more verses, Selah

The pause button is for playback on Spotify, not for life.

Or, evidently, for worship.

Most of our worship gatherings abhor the vacuum of dead-time. We plan our transitions to avoid the deadly pause.

This is, in my opinion, good and right. Time is valuable—no, priceless—and we should use every moment the best way we can.

May I gently suggest that sometimes the best use of a moment is to pause? To be silent? To rest?

At the end of a song in a recent worship gathering at my church, we repeated the chorus of the old hymn, “Turn Your Eyes upon Jesus.” At the end of the singing was a “Selah” moment. No one moved. No one spoke. The moment was too holy to stomp on with words. It didn’t last long, but it was magnificent, memorable.

Perhaps we should plan for these moments. Holy deep breaths.

Sometimes we would benefit from a few seconds to let something sink in. Deeply.

Other times we could improve the worship flow by allowing for a moment of anticipation.

Great preachers do this well.

Great worship leaders do too.

Are there ways you have experienced this? Created Selah? Share in the comments!