Monthly Archives: February 2007

Law of the First Date

My latest book, Worship Theory, had a working title, The Laws of Worship.  As I considered what I was writing, the perspective I was writing from, and the fact that I have to admit that I don’t know everything, I ended up changing the title and cutting some of the content.  Some of that content were “laws” I try to follow and encourage others in when leading worship.

One of these laws can be entitled, The Law of the Dynamic, and it states “A worship service should employ and be a mixture of the different levels of music.”

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Choose the Cross

As I toy around with ideas for my next writing project, I tend to start elaborating on some of the concepts running through my mind. Here is one of those “start-up” ramblings.

So often we bypass the Cross in our lives.  Sometimes we don’t mean to, sometimes we do.  Take for instance, a benign occurrence one day.  I received two free devotional booklets from an international publisher of devotionals, the kind they send out in an effort to get pastors to purchase a case of them for their congregations for the days leading up to Easter.  A friend of mine was with me when I opened it up, and I offered him one.  One was titled after the blessings of the Cross, and the other for blessings for day to day.  I honestly don’t know why he chose the latter of the two, but you have to wonder how many decisions we make that avoid the Cross each day.
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Elementary Worship

The author of the book of Hebrews told his readers, “you need someone to teach you again the first lessons of God’s message” (5:12b, NCV).  In my wandering thoughts this week, I came to think about worship as one of these first lessons, or “elementary principles” (NKJV).

You see, we talk a lot about reading our Scriptures, praying, having our devotional times with those classics by Charles Spurgeon or Oswald Chambers.  But what did people do before the printing press brought books to be available to the masses?  What about when the Scriptures were only in Latin, and the average person couldn’t read, much less read the Bible?  What did these people do for their “devotions”?  Surely we cannot say that they didn’t serve God, did not truly know Him because they didn’t read their Bible or have My Utmost available to them. 
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