Understanding worship as Spiritual Warfare (1)

During last evening’s service, pastor Dorothy was given an opportunity to give a report about the alpha weekend that some of the alpha participants had been on. She made mention of the fact that leading up to the weekend a rather large number of the group faced various challenges – mostly physical.

It got me thinking about the numerous times I had been a table leader at the alpha course and how we always seemed to face such things leading up to the alpha weekend. For those of you that might be reading this blog and not be familiar with the “Alpha weekend”, it is a pivotal point in the course where the facilitators lead the participants deeper in their journey of knowing who God is and coming in touch with the Holy Spirit and the power that he has to touch and transform a life.

Most intriguing about this weekend was the fact that every time we returned from the retreat filled with joy and wonder at how God had touched his people, I found myself right in the middle of a firestorm. Something would always be wrong at work; random ugly fights would flare up between the people I lived with, worked with, served with and myself. There always seemed to be a tremendous amount of opposition to just about everything that I did or put my hand to as soon as I came back from the weekend.

The reason I was able to see a trend was because I was an alpha facilitator – table leader and eventual teacher – for six years and over those six years, I went to almost 18 alpha weekends because we ran the course all year round.

Three years ago I agreed to volunteer as one of the facilitators of worship at citywide worship and prayer and eventually had the privilege of serving on the servant leadership team. It was only last year when I realized that a similar trend – similar to the one I mentioned above - was happening around the weekends that I was scheduled to lead worship and prayer. It seemed that I would walk through a battle zone during the days leading up to the event and the days leading out of the event.

I am not one to read into spiritual things all the time because I have been in too many situations where there is an unhealthy fascination with the work and power of evil spirits…

More to that, many of you know that my personal experiences with people claiming to be “under the influence of the spirit” have been negative and so my tendency is to be skeptical about such things unless the evidence is undeniable.

So even though I noticed a trend in the events that were happening in my life, my first response was not to think about the happenings in a spiritual-physical sense, but in a rational, spirit-less sense. However, the more I thought about it, the more I began to face the truth of the fact that because I was putting myself in positions that made me a facilitator of people meeting with God, I was walking into territory that the enemy – the devil – fights the hardest.

The enemy’s agenda is really simple and we all know it from John 10: 10 – it is to steal, kill and destroy.

If you put yourself in a position to lead people to the will of Christ for their lives – that they might have life more abundantly – you put yourself up in direct opposition to the destroyer of all that God has created and called good – the enemy. This makes you a target and I think that this is why Pastor Mark’s first point to us during yesterday’s morning service sermon was that if you are walking under the anointing, you should naturally expect opposition because as much as God wants the best for you, there is an enemy that prowls like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour… and he wants to destroy you.

I have come to understand even more that there is a special vendetta against people like myself who make connecting people with God their highest priority. The enemy works doubly hard to put us under fire because we are right on the front line reclaiming what he has stolen from the kingdom of God. I believe that every worship leader and worship facilitator has to come to this realization and operate with this knowledge. You may think that you are just standing on stage singing a bunch of songs, or tweaking knobs in the sound booth area, but we all need to realize that because what you do leads people to connect with God, you are standing in dead center in a very volatile part of a spiritual battle between the advancement of the kingdom of God and the agenda of the devil. Whether you acknowledge it or not, by being on a worship team whose goal is to connect people with God, you put yourself in a war zone with no demilitarized area.

The battle is not heated and dangerous from the plush cushions of the church pews. It is hottest among the areas of service that bring people into a deeper relationship with Jesus and the knowledge of his transforming power.

The books of Samuel, Chronicles and Kings record the ascent to power of a shepherd boy who became both an incredible warrior and one of the most prolific poetry and songwriters of all history. Who says you cannot be an uber-macho jock and be into poetry and song writing at the same time? Heh!

The story of David is one of the best examples that I know of that helps us see the picture of an incredible worship leader under tremendous attack. His master, the king, tried to kill him… his sons tried to steal his kingdom… his family was majorly MESSED UP… and he had moral failure. David’s transparency with God is evident through his psalms and his psalms were definitely anointed; all you need to do is search through scripture and find all the times psalm 134 is sang and God shows up in battle, or in worship. But even in the face of all that transparency, and closeness with God, the agenda of the enemy to destroy him is always present in his story.

I am no theologian or spiritual guru, so I may be way off course here, but my take on his story is that after the enemy failed to destroy him through his moral failure, he decided to attack him through his family. If you track his story, you shall find that some pretty messed up stuff happened in his family.

If you have been on worship teams for a long time, you know that there is no end to tensions and dissention. There seems to be no end to backbiting and backstabbing and people on worship teams say some of the most hurtful things that I have ever heard in church to one another. I think it speaks to the fact that the enemy’s plans for the worship team are to destroy it and make it ineffective… make the worship team members focus on killing each other than on the more important task of facilitating an encounter between God and his people.

This is the reason why I said that I would not (and for future reference WILL NOT) tolerate negative politicking on any of my teams. I think that it is the single most widespread cancer in churches and communities of faith that follow Jesus. It causes us to be ineffective and useless – wasting sideways energy trying to kill each other or put out fires when we should be focused on the more important task of bringing people to God. Soldiers fighting in the same army – the army of God – cannot be caught striking at each other… that sort of thing is reserved for the armies that are against God (2 Chronicles 20, Judges 7, etc…).

What encourages me in my journey as a worship leader and facilitator is that this is not a battle I should be afraid of being a part of because I am on the winning side. The battle has already been won and all we need to do is claim that victory for ourselves and walk in the knowledge and conviction of this fact. Does this mean that the enemy is not going to try to get at us? No it does not, but we stand in the power and authority that Jesus gives to us through his triumph over sin, satan and death.

When I used to play rugby, I was on the same team as two of the most muscular men I have ever known – my buddy Michael and his brother Andrew. A few years back we were playing against a team that we were beating quite severely and one of the guys in frustration yelled out at me

“If you touch me again, I’ll kill you!”

Michael yelled back,

“If you touch him, I’ll kill you!”

And that was the end of that! I have never felt so powerful in my life! Heh! Michael’s presence on the field ensured that even though I received threats and sometimes hidden jabs, nothing could really happen to destroy me because I had a full-time protector.

Michael’s presence on the field is a fitting illustration to God’s presence and power at work in our lives. Even though we are standing in a battlefield, we can rest in the confidence that the battle has been won.

We must, though, always remember that we are not frolicking in a field of flowers, but we are down in the trenches of the Lord’s army reclaiming the territory that the enemy had previously claimed as his sovereign territory – the hearts and minds of people.

My friends, leading worship is serious spiritual warfare and grabbing a hold of this concept and incorporating it in our understanding of what we do is key to getting to places that we have not experienced before. We must be wise, therefore, and do all we can to prepare for battle through prayer, meditation on God’s word and sharpening one another through meaningful and healthy fellowship.

We shall continue with this theme of worship as warfare next week.