Of Music and Ministry Nowadays, I listen to music…
Of Music and Ministry
Nowadays, I listen to music and i feel it doesn’t speak or say anything anymore. Its like a lifeless tool. Yet logical arguments dictate that it has a message and meaning all the time. Music does not hold any special place in my heart anymore. It doesn’t entertain, it doesn’t edify. Its been reduced to technicalities, running notes, fast fingers and varying dynamics. Worship through music in this condition seems more than ever before like grasping for the wind. This clearly speaks of an issue in my heart that I am failing to see. Or rather, am seeing but failing to acknowledge. I like to concentrate on the words of a song more than ever nowadays because I’m so distracted by the music. Its so hard to keep focused on the words all the way through a song. It astounds me that I’ve done that for most part of my life. I’m so disillusioned by the music. Whats it for anyway? Just because we can we must? The hammer that makes everything a nail? I know we must give our best to God, and that includes our music. Its just that personal experience tends to try and negate those immutable facts. After I stopped playing my clarinet for worship a few things (actually 2) have become evident.
1) It really doesn’t matter
2) I’ve become jaded by that very fact
Now, the question is why was I playing then? I don’t even know anymore if what i really believed about myself at that point in time was real. I think I can safely say about a year or more of morning worships went up in a puff of smoke. Totally worthless to me and to everyone else. If it doesn’t matter in this short stint on earth, whats it going to matter in eternity? If it didn’t matter for eternity, what in the world am I doing it for?
I’m just suddenly pondering the possibility that I’ve served in the flesh all my life and the great futility of that. Maybe its been that way all my life. Maybe I’m having a bad day. Maybe I’m having a thinking too much day. Maybe I’m having a dump my mind on my blog day.
One not-maybe is that God don’t need my service and he wants me. I want to rest in his care but I’m finding it so hard to let go of everything. Oh dearie me. Whatever will become of me.
I feel like I have control of this body and mind but i have no power over it. Yet to ask for the power over it is the very opposite of what we really need. That is to bring them to him and let him take care of it.
Romans 7:19-25 (New King James Version)
19 For the good that I will to do, I do not do; but the evil I will not to do, that I practice.
20 Now if I do what I will not to do, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me.
21 I find then a law, that evil is present with me, the one who wills to do good.
22 For I delight in the law of God according to the inward man.
23 But I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members.
24 O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?
25 I thank God—through Jesus Christ our Lord!
So then, with the mind I myself serve the law of God, but with the flesh the law of sin.
“O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?” Indeed this is my plea tonight. To be saved from myself. Everyday.
Sigh.