This Sunday I have the pleasure of introducing our congregation (or most of them, anyway) to a new song as I lead worship. The song is “Hymn of Heaven” by Phil Wickham and you can find the video for the song below. The song is about the joy we will experience in heaven as we sing together in worship around the throne of God. One line of the song has always stood out to me: “And every prayer we prayed in desperation, the songs of faith we sang through doubt and fear, in the end, we’ll see that it was worth it, when He returns to wipe away our tears.”
Category: <span>Worship</span>
We stand on the brink of one of the strangest Holy Weeks of my life. Unable to go to church because of the COVID-19 pandemic, I am pretty sure this will be the first Easter Sunday that I don’t visit a sanctuary and worship.
In church life, you hear the word “worship” used to describe many different aspects of Christianity. Many times it is used as a description of how the entirety of our lives should be lived to please God. Paul was using it this way when he said, “I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.” (Romans 12:1) Evangelist D.L. Moody famously said that that problem with a living sacrifice is that it keeps crawling off the altar!
Last week, God closed the door on a prayer request my family had been praying toward for several months. We were extremely disappointed even as we fell back on our faith that God always knows what He is doing. We got our answer Friday evening and one of the many thoughts that ran through my mind was that it might be difficult to lead worship on Sunday singing an uptempo song about the great things that God has done. I certainly didn’t feel like it in that moment.