Well, thought I would add a new weekly feature to my blog and call it Music Mondays. I know, original, right? But I figured I come across enough new or unconventional music that I can make it interesting as I mix it up with some artists or bands that are pretty well-known. This week, I thought I would start off with a band whose reputation precedes them, while simultaneously they are severely underappreciated

If you somehow are not familiar with Jars of Clay, very simply they are one of the most important Christian bands of the last fiteen years.

Their contribution to music in general and to my life as a soundtrack has been enormous. The stories they tell, the questions they ask, the challenges they present, the music they write have all been consistently excellent, and drenched in the grace of the Gospel.

Do yourself a huge favor and check out this new Jars of Clay sampler issued by Noisetrade. Just click on the pic above, provide your email address and zipcode, and you’ll receive a download link for the sampler. This sampler includes some remakes as well as some never-before-released tracks. Here’s the track listing:

• This Land Is Your Land
• Closer
• We Will Follow (featuring Gungor)
• Oh My God
• Stay (Forgive Me re-imagined by Stephen Mason)
• Safe To Land
• Save My Soul
• Body And Wine
• Run In The Night (featuring Thad Cockrell)
• Water Under The Bridge
• Flood (New Rain Mix)

Do yourself a huge favor and grab this one while it lasts.

Because I am a worship leader (and future church planter), I found this post by Donald Zimmerman over at The Resurgence to be interesting. It reflects a number of insights that I find quite helpful to see articulated this way.

Most helpful though is this simple observation:

“…consider the following: if your average church-goers attend a 90 minute service, three times a month, they will give you 54 hours of their attention annually. Depending on liturgy, your worship leader will get roughly 18-27 of those hours. Your worship leader sounds like a wise place to invest your time, doesnʼt it?”

Did you get that? Potentially a full third to a full HALF of the time a congregation spends in church services throughout the course of one year is given over to the worship leader. This fact could have been at the top of the post, framing and contextualizing the rest of the post, which challenges the pastor or church planter with some values-based suggestions.

But there is one thing this post does not do (and this is where my experience as a worship leader might prove helpful) – it doesn’t tell me, the potential church planter or pastor, which value to place higher on the priority scale.

So here is some practical wisdom. If faced with the decision to have worship led at your church by either a skilled musician (who lacks gospel maturity) OR a not-so-skilled musician (who demonstrates gospel maturity), always err in favor of the person who demonstrates gospel maturity. The reason is very simple:

Musical skill can be learned with some very simple steps, gospel maturity (or Christian character) is only learned over time and through many disappointments, toils, snares, humiliations, failures, etc.

In this situation, one of the best things you can do for the great musician who can’t articulate the Gospel to save his life is to (gently) place him under the leadership of someone who can demonstrate character and encourage him to grow in grace by modeling a life separated for the Lord. And, conversely, one of the best things you can do for the mature believer who may need skill development is to put them in a position where they are challenged to improve their skills by someone whom they are leading (AND tell them to go take lessons). This provides an opportunity for both people to be challenged in the area that they personally need to be challenged in, and avoids each of them turning their area of strength into a vice or an idol.

Obviously, meeting with, encouraging, praying with each of these kinds of people is going to be necessary as you lead the flock by the grace of God, and this where the initial observation comes back in. Regardless of who is standing at that microphone on a week-to-week basis, invest in your worship leader(s). FIND THE TIME to talk, not just about leading worship and things that have to do with Sunday, but know your worship leader, know their life, their ideas, read what they read, hang with your worship leader, show your worship leader that they are important to you. This single element will go a long way towards developing a leader you and your people can follow.

I am the Ministry Assistant and web-master at Manchester Vineyard Community Church in Manchester, NH, and every year our pastor opens the pulpit during the summer months to a group of us who make up a sort preaching/leadership cohort. If I sound rushed, I was.

I hope you enjoy it, but more I hope someone will comment back with some helpful instruction, exhortation, rebuke or encouragement.

For our entire Summer series page, click on the image below:

Thoughtful and helpful, as Dr. Trueman always is. I say dear chap, why not put a conference like this together yourself? I’ll even be one of the no names!

Kevin DeYoung has some things to share with us about David Platt’s new book “Radical“

In return, David Platt also responds.

The exchange is both respectful and firm. In the end, I’m not exactly sure what DeYoung is really getting at. And Platt isn’t saying anything the John Piper hasn’t been saying for over thirty years, as captured by this talk from the Passion Conference over a decade ago:

Anyway, the exchange is fun to read, and inspiring in terms of the brotherly love shown for one another.

Thoughts?

Give. It’s a transaction. It’s the act of transferring ownership of something that now belongs to me and allowing someone else to, essentially, take over ownership what was previously mine. We give time, we give talent, we give treasure. We give soup. We give music lessons. We give cars, guitars and fruit bars. When we give we don’t usually expect anything in return. “Look, I’m giving this to you, I don’t want your money…”

Thanks. It’s the expressing of gratitude for something I’ve been given. I thank my wife. I thank my God. I thank my pastor/father-in-law. I thank my friends. I thank American soldiers. In thank my kids’ violin teacher. I thank someone for something I have been given.

I give thanks.

It’s almost as if the two words were really meant to be together all the time. In my giving I receive and have something to be thankful for. From my gratitude and thankfulness the giver experiences a reciprocity that is meant for them to receive in their giving and for me to give in my receiving.

Give thanks.

Giving thanks is like worship. In worship I am caught up in a beautiful cycle of giving and receiving; a cycle of pouring out (giving) my thanks as I am filled up with God’s gifts. It’s amazing, wonderful, beautiful and mysterious.

For more on this fascinating idea read Harold Best’s Unceasing Worship.

For John Piper, the idea that we would show up to worship on Sunday mornings, or any time, with only the purpose of giving, and not also receiving from God, is actually not even Biblical. And I think I agree.

Many churches, depending on the tradition, place an emphasis on worship as a way of giving back to God. It’s about giving Him something that he deserves, i.e., our praise, our attention, wholly, undivided. But that is at least incomplete. A worship service, at least one in which there exists a time frame in which corporate, congregational singing happens (take, for example, a typical Vineyard or Sovereign Grace worship service), should be a time of purposeful connection with God the Holy Spirit in such a way that there is an offering from the people of God that occurs, and a corresponding receiving from God that occurs. In this way, the people of God outpour as they are renewed and refilled by grace. It is a two-way interaction; a dance, rather than a performance before an empty concert hall. We receive our joy. We receive healing. By opening up this “channel”, so-to-speak, we receive his love and affection, his correction and encouragement, his grace and his truth.

In addition, this kind of two-way interplay does something else for us, the worshipers. It serves to remind us of our utter dependence upon God for life and breath and everything. It recalls to our minds the reality that from and through and to him are all things, and so, to him be glory forever. Amen. I am able to worship God because he enables me to worship him. The idea that I could ever bring anything to him that would adequately honor his value and dignity is simply foolish. Thankfully he has made a way through the shed blood of Jesus.

But the thing that this kind of interaction with God does for me, and this is where I move from the objective to the subjective, is change. It changes me. Little by little. More and more. Day by day. It changes me ever more into the image of Jesus. As I look into this dark mirror, I can see, more and more clearly, the image of Christ (1 Corinthians 13:12). That is revelation. That is freedom. That is obedience. That is worship.

Give. Thanks.

~a

Soli Deo Gloria

We see this at work everywhere. We see it at work when we save money in a CD. We see it at work in our jobs. If I work well, and contribute much to an organization, I should reasonably expect I’ll get more fulfillment, better promotions and more money as a result. We see it at church. The more people there are putting their hands to the plow, the higher the quantity and (hopefully) quality of impact that church should have. It’s really very simple.

The point of tension comes in the decision of what we should sow our time, talent and treasure into. Those are the three main categories of ‘stuff’ God gives us to make decisions with. Recently, my family made the decision to cut back on television. We decided that, given the current state of our finances and the current national economic conditions, we didn’t need to be ‘sowing’ our time and treasure into that electronic-moving-picture-brain-sucking-zombie-creating box and paying for the services necessary to run it. As a result, we’ve freed up treasure and we’ve freed up time that we can now sow into other things.

Often we don’t see the results of our sowing immediately (besides sometimes God uses our sowing for someone else’s reaping; see John 4:36-38, also the example of the church above). And that can be tough, but this is also a Biblical principle as well. Our culture focuses so much on right now, my way, right away (like that snotty little twerp, Veruka, from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory), but Biblically we should be living in light of our last day. The apostles Paul and Peter hammered this all through their letters. Pressing on toward an ultimate goal is how Paul explains it. Like a runner training for a race, so that he might finish well. In addition we see this principle at work in the parable of the ten virgins and the parable of the talents. Sowing faithfully, waiting faithfully, reaping joyously. Or not.

I don’t know if my family will see any short-term, instant gains as a result of shutting the TV off, but some things I can point to as a direct result of this one decision are:

1. More relaxed evenings in our home.
2. Less noise and confusion at the end of the day.
3. More time spent talking around the dinner table on nights that I’m home.
4. I’ve seen more books open around my house.
5. The girls practice their violins without feeling like they’re going to miss Phineas and Ferb.

Not everything is all hunky-dorey and peaceful. We still have stresses. We still feel rushed; like we’re a couple of steps behind the pace of our lives, trying to catch up. Shutting the TV off doesn’t fix everything, but I wonder what other decisions we might make along these same lines that will together add up to reaping a harvest of righteousness, peace and joy as we sow more and more into God’s Kingdom and less into ours. Living in light of the end so that our last day will be so much more glorious than our first.

Sow for God, Reap for God.
~a

Jesus, I want money! Jesus, I want happiness! Jesus, I want to be loved!

How about: Jesus, I want you!

In the end, when all of life is over, the Scriptures tell us about a day when all of our whole lives, the totality of everything we’ve ever done, will get placed on the alter and will be tried like gold in a refinery (1 Corinthians 3:13; 1 Peter 1:7). You see, when we think about this for a moment, we can begin to feel the pull of the love of the things of this world tugging us from a pure devotion to Christ. If we allow it, a little at a time, our love and devotion wanes completely.

I often think about that day. Will I be sad to lose the bulk of the efforts of my life in the fire? Will I be ashamed as I stand before Christ on that day? Will I look on the flames with tears in my eyes as I watch all I’ve worked for dissolved?

Or will my heart leap for joy as I realize that to live is Christ and to die is gain? Will Jesus be enough for me on that day? If my answer is anything other than a resounding “Yes, Jesus is enough,” I’d better do some rethinking, restructuring, praying, seeking. This is the most basic form of idolatry: Jesus is not enough. Listen. If Jesus is not enough, then nothing ever will be.

Idols lie. Idols steal. Idols fail.

Jesus tells the truth. Jesus gives. Jesus conquers.

Is Jesus enough for you? Is Jesus your most valued treasure? Is he your supreme joy?

More importanly for me, is he mine?

Worship Jesus.
~a

1. The excess water would be full of dirt and residue from the clothing. If the bulk of this water was not removed quickly, the dirt and remaining residue would dry on the garment.
2. It helped the garment dry faster so that it could be put back into use relatively quickly.

Now, when we use this term in our everyday comings and goings, we are usually using it in reference to tough situations that we’ve gone through. Difficult situations. Undesirable situations. We say things like “My boss really put me through the wringer today!” or “This year’s been so tough, I feel like I’ve been put through the wringer!” Something to that effect. Well, it’s interesting, but we only typically use this phrase in relation to half of its meaning! Think about it! Wringers are helpful. Wringers are used to assist in the cleaning of dirty laundry. Wringers help increase usability of the item being wringed (wrung?). The garment of clothing gets gets squished going through, but comes out the other side clean, dry, not smelly, and usable!

So, I wonder if we could take this phrase, and more commonly use it for expressing our wonder, gratitude and joy at how God has put us through the wringer. So many of us complain about our experiences, focusing on the pain, harping on the negative, that, unfortunately, we all too often forget that “for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose. For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers.“ In addition, James 1 tells us that our trials should cause us to fill up with joy. Why?

Well, I think it’s kinda like this: What teacher doesn’t test her students? What coach doesn’t drive his team into ever harder challenges testing wills and sharpening skills? What good pastor doesn’t teach hard things to his congregation? How much does God really care about conforming you into the image of his Son? And to what extent was Christ unwilling to go in order to attain our salvation, that we would one day see him, and look just like him? God, in this way, is a lot like Jack Bauer, we have no idea how far he is willing to go to acquire our cooperation! You see, being conformed into the image of Jesus is about more than just being nice. It’s about being nice when you want to scream at someone in aggrevation. It’s about more than giving when we have excess. It’s about giving in faith all that we have to God and His purposes all the time (see Mark 12:41-45). It’s about more than just singing hymns on Sunday. It’s about living my life in such a way that worship becomes endemic.

What must God do in order to work these things into his people? Well, I would point to the wringer as my illustration. It’s not necessarily what gets worked into you, but what gets worked out of you that matters. We were meant to live as children of God. We were meant to reflect the imago Dei to the world. That image, that nature, is in there for all children of God, and as he works the life of Christ into us, there must be also a working out of the dirt, residue and imputrities that are in us, and the happens by going through the wringer.

Next time you’re going through something really tough (which will probably be tomorrow), think about how you’re going through the wringer and take a moment at the end of the day, before you drift off to sleep, to just consider possibility that, just maybe, the wringer is a good thing.

Peace.
~a