Psalm 100:2
“Worship the Lord with gladness; come before him with joyful songs”
There’s a worship song we sing with the title, A Thousand More. The theme of the song: God is so good I could sing a thousand more times of his goodness. A pretty incredible statement when you think about it. Here’s my question, it’s easy to sing lyrics, it’s much harder to mean the lyrics we sing.
Songs such as “You’re all I need” or “I surrender all” are great little hymns, but the magnitude of those words have incredible implications. Am I really willing to surrender all? Could I actually sing a thousand more times of God’s goodness? Am I just the biggest liar ever for singing these songs when my heart isn’t actually in that place?
Well, I have some good news for you. Worship is so much better than that. When we sing songs in worship two things happen:
1. We honor and glorify God (which is pretty incredible in and of itself).
2. We reorient ourselves to God.
Here is what I mean by “reorient…” Every day we face circumstances that invite us to be the god of our own lives. However, as we see all throughout human history when we are our own god’s things fail pretty badly. Worship helps our hearts come under God’s covering making him God and us… not-god. Here’s where the song lyrics come in: God knows that when we sing songs we will fail the words. We will sing “you’re all I need” and go running to our boyfriend after making him all we need. We will sing “I could sing of your love forever” and literally stop two seconds later. We will sing “I will build my life on your love” and literally go make plans for our future careers without even stopping to pray.
Here is the amazing thing when it comes to God – worship isn’t about being perfect it’s about him perfecting us. While we are all flawed; when we sing and worship it begins to bend our hearts toward him and over time we begin to look more and more like Jesus. That’s the amazing thing when it comes to a relationship with Jesus. It’s not about being perfect, it’s about the relationship. We sing songs of who we want to be, and will eventually be knowing that we are flawed now but hopeful that He loves us still.
And the amazing thing is how he tells us over and over in the Bible that he does truly love us still. So may you sing songs of worship this week not because you feel obligated but because you get to practice becoming more like Jesus. And may the words not hold you hostage but may they free your heart to take another step toward Jesus from wherever you currently stand.
