And yet, and yet…

Recently I had the opportunity to attend a conference, and as part of that conference they opened with worship. While this was a noble way to get things started, it became quickly apparent to me that it was going to be dreamy and slow in style, which doesn’t jive well with me at 9:00 in the morning. I found myself distracted as the worship leaders did their best to rocket the attendees from a position of getting to know complete strangers to entranced in deep state of worship singing after 2 songs. It was an odd juxtaposition.

Writing this today is not an attempt to criticize worship styles, but rather an attempt to observe some things about the quality of how we worship. Ludwig Wittgenstein said it well, “What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent…The limit [to the expression of thought] can, therefore, only be drawn in language and what lies on the other side of the limit will be simply nonsense.”

I wonder sometimes when it comes to worship, to highly programmed sets of singing, to in-ear tracks, to hymns with language dating back to the 1700s, to the improvised hums and extra lyrics sung to fill the space, to the “can I get an Amen,” how much we actually know what we’re saying.

What are we being rescued from? What does it mean to ask the Holy Spirit to be in a place? What does it mean to ascribe majesty to God on this terrestrial ball? What does it mean for God to be eternally set apart, or does that statement even make sense? Do we ever take time to say what it is we mean to sing?

I think we have a problem in our worship of jumping from everywhere other than devotion and prayer to immediate transcendence. In order to get to the right vibe or feeling in the room, we go from the “hey everybody, here’s a great event coming up” to “I surrender every aspect of my life to God.” My point is that when we don’t cultivate our hearts to meaning what we say, do our words actually still impact, still matter? When we worship, do we have a tangible subject in mind? Or are we worshiping worship itself? Or worshiping the way things used to be?

I really enjoy and treasure the times when I can sing alongside my brothers and sisters in worship; and yet I fear for all of us that sometimes we mouth the words because we’re supposed to (if we even sing at all) without allowing the prayers and Scripture inherent in worship songs to challenge our souls. When we adore the mood of worship and the way it makes us feel, I fear that we lose sight of the One we worship.

What if we took time to understand, embrace, and challenge ourselves by the words that we sing? Would that change the way we live, the way we hear Scripture, maybe even in how we perceive God? Perhaps God would use that kind of singing to begin chipping away at our hearts of stone. What a joy to sing the song of the redeemed!