Welcome to the latest iteration of my blogging experience! The blog has a new look and feel that is intended to set a much different image and tone than the majestic mountains (or sheep or paintings or …) that I’ve previously been using. It’s edgier … more creative … filled with energy … it has a trombone player (‘nuf said). There are a few reasons for this change, but most importantly, more than even his name, the Lord has blessed me with a measure of musical talent and I can feel the immediacy of his joy when I use that talent to help lead his worship through music and song. It’s an awesome feeling!
There was a time when I ran away from this joy in my selfish pride, much as Jonah ran from God. But the Spirit has lately been pressing on me the need to feel this joy in all aspects of my life and so I’m being led to be more active in the living out of my faith, not passive, not academic, not focused on the minutia, but to live out loud! Those “not”s are traps that I fall in and when I do, I tend to lose track of why I’m a Christian and a husband and a father, and instead become a wretched, selfish creature.
When this happens, only the Almighty God can provide the grace and forgiveness that I need. 2 Corinthians 12:9 says: “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Christ asks that, rather than fight to overcome our frailty, we offer our broken lives to Him so that His power will be worked out for all to see. Through His power is joy and in some small way, I hope that the continued discussions in this blog are a joyful offering that will bring glory to the sufficiency of His grace in my life.
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For those who stopped by this virtual home this afternoon… you may have seen a note that I was shutting down the blog and moving into new quarters. I’ve reconsidered. I like this blog and what it means to me. So I’m taking the makeover approach rather than throw the baby out with the bathwater. I still like the phrase “the joy of worship”, which was going to be the new blog name, but I’ll find other ways to work it in. That choice of words came from a recent comment left by Mitch Guthrie – I believe in giving credit where credit is due and his choice of words was inspired.
As your post and your link remind us, worship is both a high joy and a solemn duty. Personally, I struggle with the following concerning worship:
–How do I celebrate whole-heartedly before the Lord, without putting on a self-conscious show? In other words, how do I avoid the deadness of being stiff and the hypocrisy of being falsely demonstrative?
–How do I explain (even to myself) the power and sense of the Lord’s presence that I sometimes feel in charismatic worship, and avoid the charismania that is all to evident in “Christian” television and books?
–How do I stay alert and awake during a fine sermon that happens to cover ground I’ve been over many times before? After the emotional energy of musical worship, my body clamors for sleep, even if I’ve slept longer than usual the prior night. Am I alone in this? If not, would it be better to have a sermon early in the time of worship instead of toward the end?
–What is appropriate in terms of volume? How do we balance between praising the Lord with all of our might, and protecting the ears of people? I almost always bring ear plugs, popping them in and out as the volume varies between such things as a loud vocal solo or a soft trumpet solo.
I didn’t mean to write so much; maybe you’ll give your comments on one or more of these topics some day.
Great questions, Jim. I started to write some responses, but ended up with something longer than the original post! I’ll try to tackle those issues as I can.
I’m glad you didn’t close down and start a new blog. That way you would have lost a lot of people. And “He is sufficient” is a great name.
If you want you can change the name of your WordPress blog without losing any links, subscriptions etc. I recently did this. But this way you have to keep the URL which would then end up being inconsistent with the blog name.
Thanks for the vote of confidence in this blog, Peter. I was building the other site in “private” mode, trying to put in the transition links and even though I actually did launch it for a few hours, it just didn’t click. I know about just changing the name of the blog, but some part of my brain won’t accept the inconsistency between URL and blog name.
Understood. I didn’t have the name inconsistency issue because I host my own blog; in fact my hosting provider set up the WordPress as just /blog and I left it that way.
Yes, I’ll probably add hosting to my current “heissufficient.net” domain service at some time or another – just need to keep scraping up the dollars. For now, WordPress’s free blog service has been working fine, and would be even better if I purchased the upgrade to customize the CSS file.
[...] but not overly staged or show-like, I had the opportunity to regularly play my trombones with the worship band, my wife was involved in children’s ministry, there were many young couples with and without [...]
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