Awe isn’t manufactured. It can be cultivated. The fields don’t grow themselves, but they don’t grow without a farmer either.
When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them?
Psalm 8:3-4 (NIV)
What’s actually going on
Awe isn’t really the problem when a song is brand new. The chorus hits you in the chest the first three times you lead it. The bridge wrecks you on the way home. You text your worship pastor a wide-eyed paragraph about the lyrics.
The problem is twelve months later. You’re singing the same chorus for the forty-third time and it isn’t landing in your chest the way it used to. The volunteer guitarist still loves it. A handful of people in the room are wrecked by it for the first time. You are watching them be wrecked by it and not feeling much.
And you wonder, quietly, if something is wrong with you.
Familiar things lose their weight. That’s a feature of being human. You stop feeling your wedding ring after a few weeks. Your brain has filtered it out so you can pay attention to other things. The same wiring filters out the lyric you’ve sung forty-three times.
And yet what the song says is not less true on the forty-third Sunday. The mercy of God isn’t worn out. The cross isn’t smaller. You are.
What’s true
David in Psalm 8 has presumably looked at the stars before. He still looks at them like he hasn’t. “When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place.” He’s not pretending. He has paid attention on purpose.
Awe is what happens when we let the truth get past our familiarity. And that getting-past part is a craft for the worship leader. You learn to attend, deliberately, to what your team is being asked to sing.
It looks like reading a verse out loud the day before you lead it. It looks like walking outside on a Saturday afternoon and trying to mean the words on Sunday morning. It looks like letting Tuesday have a sentence of awe before Sunday has to.
Awe isn’t manufactured. It can be cultivated. The fields don’t grow themselves, but they don’t grow without a farmer either. A worn-out worship leader is often someone who has stopped doing the small things that wake them up.
For your team
- Which lyric in our setlist this Sunday have you stopped meaning? Be honest with yourself.
- What’s one thing you can do between now and Saturday to make that lyric true again for you before you ask the room to sing it?
- How does the person of Christ feel different to you today than He did six months ago? Could you put words to it?
Pray this
Lord, You are not less wonderful for being familiar. Wake me up to who You are again. Make me a worship leader who arrives at Sunday already astonished. Amen.
This Sunday
Pick one lyric in your set and stand under it on Saturday night. Let it be true for you for one minute before it has to be true for you in front of the room.
Go deeper
Listen: Formation to Transformation, “When Familiar Songs Lose Their Weight.” Dr. Loche on attention as a spiritual discipline for worship leaders.
This devotional is part of The Church Collective’s free 52-week worship team devotional series. Get the first 12 as a free PDF and a fresh devotional in your inbox every Monday morning.
Leading the Team That Feels Stuck