I believe in the value of music in a believer’s life as I wrote in an earlier blog. I strongly believe in the value of music in the corporate worship experience. I do believe, though, that we have made the music the central focus of worship. How often have you heard people refer to the musical portion of the service as “worship” and the pastor’s part as “preaching,” as if the two are mutually exclusive? The so-called “worship wars” that have pervaded many churches indicate we have crossed an idolatrous line and have begun to worship worship.
My point is not to argue worship styles or to defend one style over another. I like them all as long as they are done with energy, enthusiasm, and genuineness. My point is we have made the wrong thing central to our worship. The church is in a mess because PREACHING is no longer central in our worship experience. I once heard the joke about a young child critiquing his first visit to “big church” by saying, “The music was good but the commercial (preaching) was too long.”
Here are my thoughts on what we need to do to recenter our worship around the Word of God preached.
- PREACHERS – stop slacking! Spend the necessary time to deliver to your dear people a Bible centered message. Quit stealing sermons from the internet, quit filling the time with cute sound bites, quit tickling ears, but proclaim the Word and apply it to life. Make it interesting and make it meaningful, but by all means preach it! That is the PRIMARY task to which God calls us. (2 Timothy 4:1-5)
- PREACHERS – pray! You cannot deliver a WORD from God if you don’t have a Word FROM God. A sermon is not a speech. It can be erudite and alliterated; it can be humorously illustrated and cleverly applied; it may be entertaining, but it cannot accomplish with human instrumentation anything of Spiritual significance. Bathe your message in prayer and preach with confidence that only comes from the anointing of God.
- CONGREGATIONS – come hungry! Don’t come to church with your mind already made up about what you want to hear or not hear. Expect that God knows what you need better than you do and come with an empty heart to hear what God has for you.
- CONGREGATIONS – free the preacher to preach. I have been misquoted as saying that I am a preacher and not a pastor. That is wrong on at least three accounts. First, I never said that nor do I believe that. Second, you cannot be one without the other. I cannot connect my people to the Word of God if I do not sympathize and move among my people. I love them and because I love them I want for them what God wants for them. Third, preaching is pastoring. The term “pastor” sounds an awful lot like “pasture” which conjures up shepherding images. The pastor’s primary task is to lay spiritual food before Jesus’ sheep. Free the pastor up to give ample time to study and pray. You will NOT be sorry you did. (Acts 6:1-7)
When we return preaching to the place of prominence in our public worship – as God prescribes – we will be inching closer still to revival.
See also 1 Corinthians 1:21 and Romans 10:14