Clueless Church Meetings?

By David Hobbs

I am dismayed at the mentality prevalent in many American churches. For all the talk about a personal relationship with Jesus, how many of our actions actually stand in contradiction to that! Alas, how deep go the traditions of the fathers and this American idea of “doing church services.” Do we really come together to meet with Jesus or do we merely come together to have a church service? They are not the same thing!

Let’s consider singing as an example. Say your church sings the old gospel songs and you have to pick some out for the service. You find some songs you like, but which one do you start with? Does it make a difference? If you’re only a song leader and your idea is to have a lively service, you start with some fast, upbeat ones, then transition into a few more worshipful ones and call it good.  Or you could do it like one song leader I know: no matter what 4 songs she picks out, she always sings them in the order they appear in the hymnal.

But what if you are a worship leader wanting to draw the people into an encounter with Jesus? What then? The Bible is clear about God’s preferred pattern: “Enter into his gates with thanksgiving and into his courts with praise,” from the Psalms.

It’s like this: When we come together at church, Jesus also comes and is “peering in the window” at us. (Because we meet in Jesus’ name, He is always there, according to His word.) Therefore our first duty is to acknowledge Him, welcome Him, and give Him what He loves: praise and adoration. Some people have been going to church their whole lives and still don’t have a clue that God is a Being who loves to be praised and worshipped. He loves it so much that Psalm 22 says He inhabits the praises of His people!

When we welcome Him, acknowledge Him, thank and praise Him, He enters through that “window” into our midst. Then we sense His presence and know we have connected with heaven. Now we can really have church!

But way too many song leaders seem to be oblivious to this reality and start with any old song, most of which are aimed at the believers instead of to Jesus: songs like “When the Roll is Called up Yonder,” or “I’ve Got a Home in Glory.” Even petition songs like my favorite “Just a Closer Walk with Thee” are inappropriate for starting a service. Let’s first welcome Jesus into our midst with a song like “Praise Him! Praise Him”), then warm Him and feed Him with praise and worship with a song like “Jesus is the Sweetest Name I Know” before we start asking Him for things. Otherwise it would be like your wife meeting you at the door as you’re coming home from a hard day’s work with a plunger in her hand telling you the toilet’s plugged up! How about a hug and a kiss and a “welcome home” first?

Sound like making a mountain out of a molehill? Recently I was at a service that began by singing “Fill My Cup Lord.” We sang other songs in similar vein; Jesus was never welcomed, invited in, thanked, honored or praised—just asked for things and treated with familiarity like our pet cat. What a way to treat the One who died that we might live! Jesus never showed up; there was a noticeable lack of anointing; then we went into prayer with similar results. At the end, I imagine the dead meeting was blamed on inclement weather keeping many people home.

Singing “Fill my cup Lord; I lift it up Lord; come and quench this thirsting in my soul” right off the bat before the anointing comes is a lie anyway. We are not even aware of a thirsting for God until we are breathed on by the Holy Spirit—He has to awaken our thirsting before we can sing about it!

This is not rocket science. This should be Christianity at a very basic level. Jesus didn’t die so we could walk on streets of gold, have a home in glory-land and be reunited with predeceased loved ones. He died so we could be with Him where He is (John 17:24), and that includes here on earth now, as well as in heaven in the hereafter. But often His attempts to meet with us and be with us are stymied, like they were at that meeting, by our cluelessness.

The whole focus and purpose of our meetings should be on meeting Jesus through the Holy Spirit. After that we can proceed according as He leads. Until that happens we dare not push ahead with “business as usual.” Jesus said, “Apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15:5). Sadly too many churches are very busy “doing nothing.”

Paul said to the churchgoers in Corinth (1 Cor. 15:34), “there are some [of you] who are ignorant of God—I say this to your shame.” That is still true in the churches of our day. Going through the motions of doing church meetings doesn’t cut it. 

Encouraging the Next Generation

By David Hobbs

The life of every person is built on a foundation of many seemingly inconsequential things. History is full of stories of how famous people’s lives were directed often in their youth on the path that later took them to earth-changing accomplishments, either for good or for evil. Vincent Van Gough really wanted to be a preacher, but after having that door repeatedly slammed in his face, became the famous (though tragic) artist we know today.

As adults, and especially parents, we have enormous influence over young people’s lives, more than we imagine or are aware of at the time. We never know when a "prophetic moment" might occur that can alter their life course.

There are two incidents that happened long ago that I still remember (and came back to me in prayer today). The first involved a lad whose name I never knew. We were installing a new youth pastor who was up on the platform. The senior pastor called up the elders and Servant Council members to lay on hands and pray over him. He also called the young people of the church to come up and join in.

I was on the platform as a member of the Servant Council. As we gathered to pray, the Holy Spirit came upon us. There happened to be a lad maybe 10-12 years old standing by me. As we moved in, there was only one spot left to get in and lay hands on the new pastor. I was about to fill the gap when I became aware of this young lad. I could tell he wanted to go in and pray but he was hanging back, unsure if he was “old enough” to play such a key part. Part of me wanted to move in myself, since I was so “important” of a person. Wasn’t this the province of adults? And spiritual ones at that? What did his prayer matter anyway? But the gentle Holy Spirit laid His hand on me and held me still. “Let him go." I turned to the lad and invited him in with a wave. Eagerly he stepped forward, laid his hands on his new pastor and joined in the prayer for him.

The Holy Spirit had obviously moved on him and he was open and sensitive to His leading. What if I, out of an inflated sense of ego, had shut him out. In his disappointment, might he have said in his heart, “There’s no place for me in this religion stuff,” and from that time on begun looking elsewhere for a place to fit in? Hard to believe? It happens all the time in just such small ways, but we don't realize it until much later, when it’s too late to do anything about it. Thirty years down the road, when we're ready to retire, we look around and suddenly realize there's no one coming behind to take our place.

There was another time: I was out with my two young sons, Joe and Jon. Joe was about 5 and Jon maybe 3½. We were exploring down at the railroad tracks and were under the bridge where it crossed a creek. We had been throwing rocks into the creek and were now trying to get back up to the tracks. The slope under the bridge was very steep, but it was concreted so there was good traction. Joe zipped right up, but Jon, looking at the steepness of the slope, was afraid to try. “I can’t, I can’t,” he kept saying. I could have carried him or pulled him, but I wanted him to see that he could do it for himself.

Jon had self-esteem issues because he was slower than others to catch on to things and so seemed less bright. He used to come home from kindergarten and tell Marcine, “I’m stupid.” She realized that it must be the kids at school telling him that. He was the classic kid who would have fallen through the cracks in the public schools because it took him longer than the other kids to figure things out, and the teachers wouldn’t have had the patience to wait, but would have moved the rest of the class on without him, leaving him hopelessly behind and convinced that he was stupid just like everybody said.

That was the main reason we took them out of public school and began homeschooling all three of our boys. After Jon was free to proceed at his own pace, we saw that once he grasped a concept, he owned it forever.

So I wanted Jon to discover that he could climb the steep slope all by himself. I began encouraging him, “Come on Jon, you can do it. Daddy’s right here; I won’t let you fall; go for it!” After much encouragement, Jon went for it. Once his feet hit the cement and didn’t slide, in an instant he realized that he could make it and scampered the rest of the way up just like his brother had done.

Wow, what a victory! I shouted “Way to go Jon; you did it!” And shared in his triumph.

But what if I hadn’t been there? What if Jon had been raised without a father, as many boys are? What if, in a similar situation, he had had a fearful mother who screamed: “Don’t try and climb up there! You’ll fall and break your leg!”

One little victory; I’m sure mixed with many others. And now Jon is an extremely competent electrician, able to fix most things, with a lovely wife and a new baby girl.

My point is that with Jon it could have gone either way. It was not a done deal, how he turned out. Parenting him took some effort (and many others in our church played an important part too!) With the other lad it took a sudden moment of spiritual sensitivity. But wasn’t it worth it? And isn’t that what we’re called to?

Singing

By David Hobbs

For 7-9 years I got up in the middle of Saturday night and went to the church and prayed for several hours. I’ve given accounts of this elsewhere in this blog and in my book Walking in the Spirit. I had no idea when I started it would continue as long as it did, but that’s one of the exciting things about walking in the Spirit—you don’t know things like that until they happen. That’s how God instructed the Israelites as they journeyed through the wilderness: once He showed them where to camp for the night, they had no idea if He would call them to leave the next morning or if they would end up there a week, a month or even years. Or they might even be called to leave in the middle of the night (see Numbers 9:18-23).

So once I started, I had no idea how long it would last, and once I got in the groove, I didn’t want it to ever end. That season did end, but the experiences I had during those prayer times I will treasure for a lifetime.

Music has always been an important part of my life, even before I got saved. It has periodically been able to move me at the deepest level of my being, so much so that at one point in college, before Christ, I dedicated my life to music. After salvation I loved to sing and worship. So in these prayer times in the middle of the night, that’s mostly what I did—not “praying” in the sense of asking for things or interceding for others, but praising out loud and singing to the Lord.

There was one time I was praying a kind of complaining prayer, wistfully wishing that God had given me a great singing voice. My soul had just been stirred by Josh Groben singing “You Raise Me Up”—how I longed for a voice like that! In fact there were many times when my soul would be stirred to the depth by a great singer that I would cry out inside, “I would give everything I have to be able to sing like that!” Now I was thinking, “Lord, you have given me such a heart for worship and a spirit that loves to sing; why couldn’t you have given me a great voice to go with it?” I wanted to be able to stir others like they stirred me.

Often when we pray it’s like we’re thinking out loud, and we don’t really expect an answer. Therefore I was surprised when God spoke to my heart, “I like your voice.”

“Say what?”

 Then He quickened the passage from Exodus 4:10+ where Moses complains to the Lord about his slowness of speech. God had just commissioned him to return to Egypt, confront Pharaoh, deliver the Hebrews and be a spokesman for God, and yet he had this terrible speech impediment (some say he stuttered). It was like “God, why have you sabotaged me from fulfilling your call by these limitations to my speaking ability?” But just when we think God had overlooked something, He answers that Moses’ speech impediment wasn’t some fluke of nature that snuck past Him, He actually gave it to Moses intentionally!

So what was God was saying to me? “I love your voice! Who do you think created it in you? Would I give you a voice that made me cringe every time I heard it? Why would I put something in you I didn’t like when I loved you enough to die for you?”

Wow, that was really comforting. But it left me with questions: “then why couldn’t you have given me a voice like Josh Groben’s, so I could thrill the crowds?”

 Once again He surprised me by answering, “If I had given you a voice like that, you would have built a career singing for man; I want you to sing for me!”

That set me free! Once I knew that the God of all the universe was pleased by my singing to Him…! That revolutionized my time with Him. I started singing out more and more with gusto and abandon. And the faithful Holy Spirit began instructing me how to sing—how to project, how to breathe from the diaphragm—things I had been taught in college as a music major but never really used. Out there in the deserted church in the orchards by the freeway in the middle of the night, I could let it all out and I did.

The Lord kept instructing me also. He showed me that many successful singers do not have great voices (think Bob Dylan!!). But they have something else: they have an anointing that moves people independently of their vocal quality. Anointing can come through the Holy Spirit (think Darlene Zschech), it can be a soulish anointing garnered through hard times (think Ray Charles), or as in Dylan’s case, it can be a life-gift bestowed from above. All anointings are enhanced by suffering.

The Lord instructed Samuel--when He had him pass over Jesse’s other sons but choose David to be the next king--that while man looks on the outside, the Lord looks on the heart (1 Sam. 16:7). Likewise He instructed me that when a person sings to the Lord, God is little concerned with the quality of their voice (as people would judge); rather He listens to what is coming out of their hearts. When we sing to Him with love flowing from our hearts, in His ears it is the most beautiful sound imaginable!