. . . honesty is where it’s at. You have to be honest about how you present yourself when you lead worship.
Teach me how to live, O LORD. Lead me along the path of honesty, for my enemies are waiting for me to fall. Psalms 27:11
It can be so easy to present yourself falsely in front of a group when you are leading. I mean, after all, you want to look good right? You want people to think that you’ve got it all figured out and you know what’s going on. But if you present a false self to a group and then try to lead them into worship, you are doing everyone a disservice.
Good people are guided by their honesty; treacherous people are destroyed by their dishonesty. Proverbs 11:3
Look, just don’t be a phony okay? Don’t. That means you. And if when you read that last sentence you thought, “Was he talking about me?”, yes, I was talking about you.
Something that goes with honesty is meaning what you say. HE’S FINALLY GOING TO TALK ABOUT PRAISE AND WORSHIP MUSIC!!! Have you ever been standing there in a service singing your little heart out and thought, “I have no idea what this song means”? I have. Guess who’s responsibility it is to explain the meaning of a song if someone is confused? Yup, the worship leaders. So then guess what that means? Yup, you have to know what you’re singing about. Here’s an example. I was singing the song “Indescribable” with the youth group at my church. Great song. Powerful. But there’s this one part that says, “Who has told every lightning bolt where it should go? Or seen Heavenly storehouses laden with snow?” Okay, lightning bolt part makes sense. But Heavenly storehouses laden with snow? What does that mean? I realized I’d been leading this song for a while and did not know what it meant. I had to put it away until I had figured it out. I’m still not exactly sure what it means. So, know what you are singing. You are leading the group into a spirit of worship, you are responsible for understanding the meaning of what you are singing. Do preachers preach sermons about things they don’t understand? Sometimes, but it’s not good when they do.
One of the most humbling experiences as a person who is seen as knowledgable is to say, “I don’t know”. But it is far far better than making up some willy nilly definition you just pulled out of the top of your head. Be honest. Be truthful. Don’t hide behind a false impression of know it allness.
Next up is understanding your environment. In preparation, go hug a tree.
