I recently finished a book I mentioned last week, “Too Busy Not To Pray,” by Bill Hybels. I highly recommend you read this book if you are interested at all in strengthening your prayer life. One of the challenges from this book that spoke to me was the challenge to pray specifically. In other words, don’t just send up vague, general requests to God – ask Him specifically for what you need.
Beasley's Blog Posts
One of the things I’ve tried to do so far in 2016 is get back into reading a lot of books. Fortunately, law school did not rob me of my love of reading (there is so much required reading to do as a law student that some of them have had enough by the time they graduate) but I have found that unless I specifically make it a priority, it gets pushed out of my schedule. I’m going through two great books right now (I can’t read just one thing at a time). One is “Too Busy Not to Pray,” by Bill Hybels. I’m listening to this one in audiobook format since my church is emphasizing prayer this year.
As a lifelong performer, I can share a ton of stories about times when I stepped out to perform and things went very wrong. There was the time in high school where I was singing a solo on “Who Wrote the Book of Love” and forgot the lyrics (a very common issue for me.) I started trying to make them up and keep singing but if you know the song, you know that the lyrics rhyme. My lyrics most certainly did not rhyme or even make a lot of sense!
Last week, I shared with you the idea that the best way a church can grow in worship is for the individual members to grow in the area of their private worship. This is certainly not a truth that only applies to worship. Churches grow in prayer, in serving, in truth, in all good things when the members individually focus on those areas in their own personal lives. But while it might be easy to figure out how to grow in our personal prayer life, it’s less clear how we grow as a personal worshiper. Do we get by ourselves and sing? Play the guitar? Maybe – but the singing or playing isn’t the important part. You can be a private worshiper even if you don’t play an instrument or carry a tune.
With the ever-increasing emphasis in mainstream churches on “worship” (put in quotations because here I am using that word specifically to refer to the music portion of a church service, especially in churches that have a “worship time” in their services somewhat delineated from the preaching of a sermon), advice abounds on how to improve that aspect of the service. As a sometimes worship leader, it is certainly a goal that those in the congregation would be engaged in and get some benefit from the music I’m leading and this portion of the service. Many worship leaders (myself included) get frustrated from time to time with the feeling that people aren’t as engaged as we feel they should be and might even feel discouraged thinking it is their fault that every single person isn’t singing and raising their hands in all-out worship. So we look for answers on how we can improve, thinking that if we as worship leaders just do the right things, we can lead a congregation that worships in this way.