A friend of mine told this to me over coffee. He said “We need to forget about our roles as church leaders, and put all of our focus wholly on Jesus”. Meaning, we get so caught up in being leaders, pastors, counselors, babysitters, etc…..that we often lose our focus on the One true cause.
Over the past week I have prayed over this concept and found myself in the Psalms. I was inspired by Psalm 145:1-5 “I will extol you, my God, O king! I will praise your name continually! Every day I will praise you! I will praise your name continually! The Lord is great and certainly worthy of praise! No one can fathom his greatness! One generation will praise your deeds to another, and tell about your mighty acts! I will focus on your honor and majestic splendor, and your amazing deeds!”
This is such an amazing piece of scripture because it is a declaration of faith. I love how each verse ends with an exclamation point. Verse 5 specifically stuck out, “I will FOCUS on your honor and majestic splendor, and your amazing deeds!”
I would love to stand before you and say that I am 100% of the time fully focused on Christ; sadly I know this is not true. I’m broken, just like everyone else. I cry and hide from world when things get tough in my ministry and sometimes I just want to scream. I doubt I am alone in this. It is so easy to allow our human nature side to take over and be prideful in our roles, this then leads to loss of our focus.
The positive to this, is that my friend is correct. Forget about your title or role that you play in your church/ministry and hand it over to the Lord, place your focus entirely on Jesus and see what happens. I know this sounds really simple on the surface and in many ways it is. Turning the statement into an action is where the challenge lies. This is why Psalm 145 stuck with me through this. We proclaim, “I will extol! I will praise! I will FOCUS on your honor!”
I have begun to talk about this with those in my congregation while we are in worship. I encourage them to find that perfect place for themselves, where they can meet the Lord face to face in praise and honor…..in full focus. Not to worry about the person next to them, or any other thoughts that come to them, but to wholly worship God.
In turn this allows us as the “leader” to lay down our role and turn our focus on Him. If we can learn to let this side of ourselves go a little and shift our focus even greater towards Christ I believe the church body will begin to move more freely than it ever has before.
Our focus must always be placed on Jesus, our audience of one.
Worship Review // Bryan & Katie Torwalt // Kingdom Come
Good reminder, Scott. I think this is one of those healthy tensions that we have to manage as worship leaders–we need to focus on playing/leading well, but we also need to focus on Jesus–he should be our ultimate focus. I’ve heard it said that we should “practice like it all depends on us, but lead worship knowing it all depends on Him.”