i am an offering

As I was recently re-listening to Come Weary Saints I couldn’t help but notice an interesting choice of instrumentation on the title track.  I’m not sure exactly because I purchased the mp3 set and don’t have the pdf handy to check instrumentation, but I’m pretty sure they are using a harp at the end of the song.  It very well could be a nylon stringed guitar - but I think it’s a harp.  I had never thought of using harp as a worship team instrument before, but now I think I could definitely find some ways to do it - which leads me to my question:

Apart from David Crowder’s crazy rigging of a Guitar Hero© controller, what is the most different or unusual instrument you’ve seen used by a worship team? I’d love to hear it all - even if you’re from another country and think that using a guitar is unusual!

Let’s hear it!

Scripture will never cease to amaze me.  It truly is “living and active” as the book of Hebrews says.  So often I will come across a verse that I’m sure I’ve read before but all of a sudden it will become alive and breathe amazing new life into me.  It is also amazing that God chose to use Greek as the primary language of the New Testament.  More on that in a minute.

Hebrews 10:14

One of the verse that has jumped out at me lately and spoken to me over and over again is Hebrews 10:14.  Let’s take a look:

For by one offering He has perfected for all time those who are sanctified.

At first glance this might not look like a particularly amazing verse of Scripture - but it is so packed full of truth that it is mind-blowing.  The part I want to take a quick look at now is the phrase “perfected for all time.”

Greek’s Perfect Tense

Unlike the English language, Greek has a lot more ways of saying things just by switching to a different tense.  We English-speaking folks think of past tense, present tense, and future tense.  In Greek there is the perfect tense, combining all three tenses into one, signifying that:

1. Something happened in the past.
2. Even though it already happened, the results of what happened are continually happening in the present.
3. The results of what happened will continue to happen forever in the future.

The phrase “perfected for all time” is in the perfect tense in Greek.  So what’s amazing is, Jesus’ sacrifice on the Cross not only happened - it happened with lasting results. And these lasting results won’t fade.  In fact, they’re eternal.  Do you realize what that means for us?  We change daily.  We can’t rely on ourselves.  We will not go a day in our lives without sinning.  But if we trust in the Cross and what Jesus did there, the power of what happened didn’t stop! It is continually applied to us if we are trusting in the blood of Christ!  Even though we waver and fall, our status in Christ doesn’t! Even though we offer imperfect offerings because of our sin - Jesus has made them perfect forever through His blood!

What an amazing promise!

I hope you’re all enjoying a lovely Tuesday morning!  I wanted to point you to a few resources today:

From the Rebelution: Brett Harris just posted this great article on worship. Very cool to see the younger generation stepping up.

National Worship Leader Conference: If you’re like me and have a hard time getting to any worship conferences lately, you can “go there without going there” in a couple of different ways.  A couple worship leaders I’ve connected with are currently attending the National Worship Leader Conference in Austin, TX.  Jim Drake is keeping a pretty regularly updated twitter feed. And Fred McKinnon will be blogging and posting to his twitter feed as well.  Slake, Worship Leader magazine’s new blog, will be blogging from the conference as well.

Also, I will be preaching at our church this week.  For the rest of the week, I’ll blog on thougths that God leads me to as I prepare for the message.

Sunday Recap

Yesterday was a great day - full of family times, which I really loved.  It was also a good, albeit, slightly stressful day at Living Word.

Our service starts at 9:20.  I had the day off from leading worship yesterday but of course, like most of you out there, I was still keeping an eye out for anything that might be amiss.  Well, 9:20 comes and I realize that no one is sitting at the projection computer.  I quick find Pastor Wade and ask if the person who usually sends the file for projection had sent it or if she was coming.  Minimal panic ensues.  When I say minimal, though, I really mean it - it was quite amazing how much peace I ended up feeling, even knowing that we might not have any words for the screen.

So, after a phone call and a few minutes we realize we have the words on Pastor’s laptop, but no jump drive.  He makes a transition into announcements and calmy asks if anyone has a jump drive.  Someone does and we’re able to get up and running with all of the lyrics with a few, but not many hiccups.  The worship service goes well and God was glorified.  However, He could be glorified even more with a little bit better planning and communication.  Moral of the story - always, ALWAYS have many people in the communication loop when you’re all at different locations.  I’m really looking forward to being in our building early next year so some of these problems will hopefully go away - but at the same time, we need to work harder to make them go away now, so that we don’t face the same problems in the building.

But God was good, and blessed us anyway with great music and great teaching on “You shall not Murder.”  We sang:

• We are Called to Be God’s People
• Bless That Wonderful Name
• Knowing You
• Thou Art Worthy,  CCLI  14789
• The Wonder of it All

And Pastor Wade led us in two choruses of “I Have Decided” after hearing the pianist playing it as a music bed under the prayer time.

Subscribing to This Blog

Many of you are aware and many of you might not be that you can subscribe to this blog to get the content coming to you instead of remembering to visit every day.  Now it’s a little easier as I have added a link to subscribe at the top right corner of the blog.  Just click on the link and your browser or feed reader should automatically tell you what to do with the subscription.  If you don’t have a feedreader - you should get one.  Here is a good one for PC and here is a good one for Mac.

Also, if you happened to subscribe to this blog without using the feedburner link at the top right but used the default feed link, would you mind please resubscribing using the feedburner link at the top right that is now available?  It helps me keep track of visitors to the site and I would really appreciate it!  Thanks so much!

Hello all!  Friday is here and the weekend is almost upon us!  I wanted to share a couple of random things:

Music Theory at The Worship Community

My first article at The Worship Community has been published.  Check it out, especially if you’re wondering why it’s important to know music theory as a worship leader.

Gravatars

Secondly - do you wonder how some people get cool little images next to there comments in the comments section and some don’t?  I wondered about that for a long time as I was visiting other blogs as well and as I was designing the new theme for this one I figured out the secret - Gravatar.com! What this site does is allow you to register email addresses and assign an image to them or, a globally recognized avatar.  Every time you sign in somewhere to post a comment or something similar, if the website is set up properly, it will automatically grab your gravatar and post your image.  Pretty nifty!

Have a great weekend!