Fall In Love With The Storyline
Yesterday I had the opportunity to meet Leeland and Matt Mahar. They are currently on tour together with Phil Wickham, they had a stop in Lenexa Kansas and decided to swing by the House of Prayer in the morning. Matt Mahar ended up coming into our briefing before the Noon set. He was a super nice guy and has a genuine heart for worshiping the King. Leeland stayed out in the prayer room and wept before the feet of Jesus. Matt was interested in the model and how it all worked, so I had a chance to explain it a little bit to him. He was super jazzed about how the whole thing worked and blown away that we gave it all away free of charge.
Matt Candler had some tickets to the show and asked if I wanted to go. Of course I said yes. Over all it was a great time of worship but there was one thing that troubled me. It wasn’t the lights or the sound or the performance aspect of what they were doing. It was the disconnect with more eschatological songs during Phil’s set.
If you have not heard Phil Wickham’s new album ‘Heaven and Earth’ you should pick it up. It is awesome. It takes you on a journey from Eden to the return of Jesus. Anyway back to the main issue…
While the 500 or so people that were there could easily enter into the songs that I will call the ‘Happy Jesus, Everything Will Be OK!’ songs there was an immediate disconnect that happened when Phil started his song about eagerly awaiting the return of Jesus to the earth. I looked around and Matt C., myself and the various other IHOPer’s that were there were the only ones singing and proclaiming ‘We are waiting, anticipating, Your arrival, Your arrival’. It was the strangest thing in the world. My initial reaction was that of ‘If you can sing about the happy Jesus with so much fervor, how much more should you people be singing about the return of Him?!’
Then it hit me, we need to reacquaint the Body of Christ to the timeline, we need to be messengers of the story. Not just messengers of the ideas, but the actual storyline. The disconnect comes from not hearing the storyline only hearing ideas of heaven and 30 second ‘it’s gonna be so goods’. The Church, for the most part, as a whole does not realize their place in the storyline because it is not getting preached from the pulpits. So many messages in this day and age are about tolerance, or our economy and the ‘what is in it for you’ messages. A watered down gospel of false grace and peace is being proclaimed and therefore the church is looking for those ‘everything is gonna be alright’ songs and connecting to those.
So what does that mean for those who are called to proclaim the message of the forerunner? It means we need to be in love with the storyline and let it gush out of us. If we ourselves don’t have the storyline down how can we share it with those who never hear it? We need to know it all! The covenants, the promises, the prophesies, the history and the restoration! Heaven on earth, oh the glorious day! (Revelation 21) The Church needs to start to hear the storyline. They need to hear about the return of the King to the Earth to take His rightful place. You can only get so far on ‘everything is gonna be alright’, if you base all that you are on that mentality it is inevitable that you will lose sight of the end goal, or lose sight of Love.
Jesus, our King, is our hope and our reward is coming with Him when He splits the sky and returns with a shout and the last trumpet sound. (1st Thessalonians 4:16, Matthew 25:31-32, Revelation, 11:15, Zechariah 14:4)
Why are comments closed on the prophetic worship post? I was going to respond. It doesn’t make sense to close comments. I have two year-old posts that get comments every now and then, and i welcome the opportunity to engage people in conversation long after I wrote it.
Comments are now open, I did not realize that the comments were closed. Please forgive me, feel free to comment away.
Wow, that’s weird about the disconnect but it makes sense if you think about what the current diet of the church is…. western gooshy happy love. I think people are disconnected from the end-times because they don’t understand that it is a good thing when this life gets fully redeemed. :)
I think that the disconnect happens because we are comfortable with the way things are working for us right now. We don’t want to think about how things will change upon the arrival of the King. No one really likes change. We say we want Jesus to return, in the church, but do we really mean it or realize what it means for the world?
Loved the post! I think the reaction you observed is connected to Easter celebrations in the church. Specifically, not that they cause the misunderstanding, but that they tell the story up to a point in the timeline which then seems to stop. Easter is often celebrated as the finale. I think the Church is waiting for the artists to wrap a visual around the end times. In other words, to tell the next chapter of The Story and to be equipped biblically and spiritually to support the content.
I think that is a very good point, the Church likes to read up to the point of the Resurrection and that is as far as they go.