Woh. Did you catch who led the army out front? The singers! Now, it has always made sense to me that God would use praise and prayer to defeat demons and Satan himself, but are you seeing that this story is about God defeating people with praise? And did those singers sing “Hey you, we’re gonna kick your butt!”? or, “God, come wipe them out!”? Nope. They sang (it should sound familiar), “Give thanks to the Lord, for His love endures forever.” Wow.
God doesn’t do anything like we think should happen, like how we would do it, or even what makes good common sense!! Could you imagine if the United States had sent singers and musicians ahead of the Coalition Forces in Iraq? And they wouldn’t have had any weapons in the way we think of weapons – no guns, no bombs, no grenades. What do you think would have happened? Bloodshed. Slaughter. Total wipeout.
The Israelites, specifically King Jehoshaphat, were so scared of the coming invasion that they had no choice but to trust in the Lord. So, instead of going out with confidence in their own strength and might, they did the first thing that we should be doing – they prayed and asked the Lord what to do. Then (of all the crazy things) they actually obeyed Him. God understands one amazing thing – the power of praise. That is, praise directed toward Him, because it releases Him to do all that He is able to do in that situation. This is how Bob Sorge in his book Exploring Worship puts it, “But these singers were not recommending battle strategy to God, nor did they bother to curse the enemy. In its essence, their song of praise said, ‘Lord, we recognize that you are the omnipotent God and that you have promised to fight for us today. So we thank you and praise you for the victory, rejoicing in what we know you have already determined to do on our behalf.’ Words like that release God to act in the way he knows is best” (pg 48).
What do you think might happen if we have the faith and courage to do that, too? For every day battles at home or at work. For the battles of the church? For the battles of our country? I know I have been looking at this economic downturn all wrong – I need to praise God now that He is already in control, that He will put into place the person He wants in leadership, and that He will do all that is needed to turn people towards Him. Our best effort means nothing without Him.
Challenge: Take time to pray each day for our world leaders. Forget your personal opinion, and open your heart to listen to God. Pray for God to lead you, to lead the population, and to lead the government leaders. Praise Him. For who He is, for what He has done, for what He does now, for what He is going to do. Put Him in control of the country and the world.
Luke 10:38-42 As Jesus and his disciples were on their way, he came to a village where a woman named Martha opened her home to him. She had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet listening to what he said. But Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made. She came to him and asked, “Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!”
“Martha , Martha ,” the Lord answered, “you are worried and upset about many things, but only one thing is needed. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.”
This story has two kinds of worshipers. One worshiped by service, the other worshiped by basking in His presence. First we’ll start with the one that we are more familiar – Mary. She sat at his feet and listened. Wouldn’t that be awesome? Just to sit at Jesus’ feet and listen to His teaching. She knew that He was the Messiah, the Son of God. Mary knew that He was worthy of worship, He and His message was worth sitting and paying attention. She cleared her mind from worries of the day, and concentrated on Him. She probably also had a feeling that there wouldn’t be much time to get to listen to Him and learn from Him. How can you do this kind of worship today? Can this be done in your daily life? Do you take the time to do it?
Now, usually Martha is given the bad rap when people teach about this story because Jesus does obviously reprimand her. I would say, though, while Martha did get off-track in her worship, she still was worshiping Jesus. She was serving him and his disciples – she had the gift of hospitality. How many times do we forget to worship by serving other people because “someone else will do that” or “I’m singing or playing and that is more important”? This one hits me square between the eyes. It is very easy to get lazy about not serving other people directly and being hospitable to them. How can you show more hospitality to others? How can you serve others as if they were Jesus in your house? (Remember back 2 weeks ago with the woman who cleaned and anointed Jesus’ feet.)
So, is it better to worship by spending time in His presence? Or is it better to worship by serving Him (and other people)? Jesus says here that Mary did choose the “better portion”. I think that He is saying that service without spending time in His presence doesn’t mean anything. Martha lost focus on who she was doing this for, what He was about, what she had already learned from Him. Service and hospitality is important, but if you are doing it for someone you’ve never really spent any time with (Jesus) than you will loose focus on what is really important. I think that Jesus would’ve received Martha’s worship if she hadn’t let herself focus on Mary and what she was doing, and had stayed focus on the One she was serving.
Challenge: Find a daily time to spend at Jesus’ feet, and then also find ways each day to serve others.
Yay! I was lookin’ around at the Twinsburg MYF website, because I used to work for that church and I got to help out with the youth. I’ve been thinking about them and wondering how they are doing, so I happened along a video one of the youth made of the mission trip to Decatur, Illinois we went to in 2005. I’m totally excited that they put it up on Tangle, and so I can put it here!
Hehehe, when I decided to include J. S. Bach in my 2nd article about Martin Luther, I just couldn’t resist the musical pun for the title. Do you think you can Handel it, just this once? (groan) The Liszt goes on and on…
Okay, all levity aside, Bach is the epitome of the powerful musical legacy Martin Luther left in his reformation of the church. However, Luther wasn’t an unskilled composer of a few hymns that happened to turn out okay, but in fact he was a very able amateur musician that if he had not been so engrossed in theology and wanting the church to change he might have become a great composer. While they agreed on justification by faith, one of the main differences between Luther and the other leaders of the Reformation, Zwingli and Calvin, is that Luther had a great love and respect for music and believed that music was a vital part of Mass and the Christian life. He said in a letter to Ludwig Senfl that music is next to theology, and he felt that music and the word of God are closely related – most especially that the word of God is best expressed and taught through music (Westermeyer 144-146).
In Luther’s quest to bring the Gospel to the people where they were, through the Mass and the Bible being in the vernacular (the language of the people in whatever region they lived) and other such innovations, like writing hymns that would be easier for the average person to learn and sing, he tended to be fairly loose in his differentiation of the secular and the sacred. To him, the distinction between sacred and secular was not nearly as strong as it is for us, but at the same time he did distinguish what was appropriate for worship.
There are stories that he used bar songs and other “popular music” for the tunes to his hymn texts, but most musical scholars agree that while he did use a couple of folk melodies that were not used much at the time he did not use “popular music” in the church. He did, however, take some Gregorian chants, medieval hymns, and a few lesser-known folk melodies and reworked them in the same form as the German composers of the time – which was called “bar form”. God gave him a gift of uniting old and new, high art and folk art, and rural and urban styles with his chorales, so they appealed across all lines. He made it so church music was not just for the professional musicians and out of touch with the common person because they had been written hundreds of years earlier, but made them in the contemporary style of the day in their own language so that the songs met people right were they were at in their day-to-day living and they “stuck in their head” with people singing them throughout their daily work. Secondary only to the invention of the printing press, his music helped Luther’s message spread quickly and widely throughout Europe, so that instead of a local heresy that would have been quickly squashed by the Roman Catholic church it became an event that changed the course of Western history forever.
About 200 years later, a Lutheran organist brought Martin Luther’s chorales to a whole new musical level and has helped them even more endure through the ages as the one of the most beautiful artistic expressions of love for God imaginable. This organist was Johann Sebastian Bach. “More than anyone else, J.S. Bach symbolizes music that grows out of, yet moves beyond worship” (Westermeyer 240). His contribution not only to Sacred/Christian music, but also to Classical music as a whole is phenomenal. In spite of how complex his music is, it grew out of and affirmed the congregation’s song – the preludes and fugues were meant to be an instrumental introduction to the congregational singing of a chorale (in our language today, a hymn).
The best thing about Bach is that his music was not about simply writing music for the beauty of music itself, it was his attempt to express the beauty of the Gospel of Christ and his love for His Savior. Because he did not want to claim glory for himself from his music, when he signed his manuscripts, he also wrote something which you might recognize from my following in Bach’s footsteps, “Soli Deo Gloria” which is Latin for “To God Only be Glory.”
That I may one day be able to use the gifts God has given me to create something a fraction as meaningful for the Kingdom as anything Luther and Bach ever did.
