Don’t Love the World

Knowing that you know Jesus_t

While I am a part of the crew that creates the worship services, I was shocked at how much I was personally impacted today.  I felt like I was on a roller coaster ride a couple of times, and I felt the story was told in such a heavy way today.

We started with an acoustic and just vocal song to encourage people to sing out into worship.  We then continued the theme and lifting Jesus up and getting out of the way.  After reading some Scripture about Jesus’ temptation, we then sang “It Is Written” as a call for us to obey God’s Word instead of our desires.  Some of our college students then did a fantastic job of doing the “Everything” drama set to music by Lifehouse.  As that ended dramatically, we began to sing, “Knowing you, Jesus, knowing you, there is no greater thing.”  And then the message that was full of truth!

I don’t know why – but it was heavy for me today.  I was blown away by some of the comments today after services and some of the stories that I was hearing of how individual elements spoke to different people.  There are people who were on the verge of throwing their lives away that are turning away from this world system and turning to Jesus.  Overwhelmed!

Today, we worshiped to:

Still feeling very heavy, but I am grateful to what God did among us today.  Can’t wait to jump into NSU this afternoon and some other great stuff coming our way!

Funny story from today.  Someone asked me why we had an empty microphone on stage at 11:00.  Some people thought we were trying to have some deep hidden meaning with the empty microphone.

Actually, one of our singers didn’t show up for the service.  This person was there at 9:30, but was MIA for the 11:00.  As we began, we had to reconfigure some things on the fly because this person was leading one of the songs, and no one knew where they had disappeared.

When I had an open moment, I went looking.  I found our band member in my office discipling a young man.  The Word was so rich and the time was going so quick, they thought they still had 1 hour left when they looked at the minute hands on the watch.  When I came in, they told me, “We are about to leave, I’ll be there in 10 minutes ready to sing.”

When I educated them on the actual time, they were devastated.  I was overjoyed.  You know you are blessed when one of your volunteers is late to sing because he is using free moments on a Sunday morning to disciple a young man one-on-one.  So, the worship service may have missed something (you may or may not realized it), but I am thrilled with the caliber of people I serve with and how they get the big picture!