overflow of the Holy Spirit VS Abundance of experience

A friend of mine once challenged me about 2 things that at that time made for interesting spiritual and intellectual ruminating.

- He said that we should be careful that as worshippers we were engaging in ministry out of an overflow of God pouring into us and our deep relationship with him rather than from an abundance of experience.

- He also said that we should learn to tell the difference between a service that had a high because of musical excellence and a service that had a high point because of God's presence and power at work in his people.

At the time that he made these comments, we were on a worship team that somehow (please do not ask how) led worship at 3 morning services and one evening service. Because we played together a lot and because we were fairly good musicians, we were able to achieve really good sound (in our estimation) and over the 6 years that we did this, rack up sunday service experience that most people on worship teams elsewhere in the country and in the world would take years to accumulate.

I think that his challenge to us came out of an accurate observation about the fact that we had unknowingly (or even knowingly) come up with a formula for what worked at our church and with our congregation and all we had to do was hit the right buttons to see the "result" we were looking for.

The more I thought about his challenge, the more I came to realize that it was addressing an issue that christians who are involved in ministry over long periods of time have the tendency to take for granted. This is the issue/area of a growing relationship with Jesus. I know that I have spoken about various aspects of it over the previous entries, but as people that find ourselves at the frontline in spiritual matters because we choose to engage in ministry, we have to be sure that our walk with God is right and that our ministry and warfare is not resting on the shaky foundation of experience, but on the solid rock of our relationship with Jesus.

I also found that in my life I had began to treat my time in service and ministry as a substitute for the time that I should have spent in personal relationship-building time with God. This is especially true for churches like the one to which we belong that maintain a very high number of activities and demand lots of time and commitment from their volunteers.

Time spent in ministry is not a substitute for time spent in your prayer closet or in your personal bible study...

God is also more concerned about your spiritual growth and relationship with him than he is about whether you are involved in ministry or not.

As the leader of the worship ministry at woodvale, I am working hard to promote excellence as a cornerstone value. However, even for myself, I have to remember that excellence without the infusion of the work of the Holy Spirit yields no lasting result. The result may be a great-sounding worship set, but because our mandate is to CONNECT PEOPLE WITH GOD, we fall way short of our primary objective. Obviously excellence is needed in what we do because God is not honored by the lack thereof, but it is not an end in itself and so I extend the challenge to us all about this.

Do you bring your gift of worship leading before the congregation and God himself based on your experience or on your music ability... or do you allow Jesus to inspire the gifts that he has given you to connect the people that you lead in worship to a God that wants to touch and transform his people?