Interesting Valentine's Day at Life Church. Rebecca Charles led worship this morning, and had a great list ready to go. We practiced every song in rehearsal but one - and that wound up being the only song we did this morning. So here's our setlist for today...
Irresistible - in G (Darlene Zschech, Hillsongs, CCLI #3375710).
This was intended to be our "walk-in" song, and we didn't practice it in rehearsal. Sometimes we do that with a song we're at least somewhat familiar with, because people aren't paying that much attention when we start playing it, and so we have a bit of opportunity to refresh ourselves as we go (great plan, huh? Hey, it works!).
But today, as our pastor Tom Bedford came to exhort us to worship at the beginning of the meeting, we just kind of got caught in one of those 'spiritual updrafts' that carry you into the presence of God - or releases His presence to us - or causes us to become aware of His presence - theologically, it's one or more of the afore-mentioned, but I can't honestly say I know which. At any rate, we found ourselves past the 'warm-up', past the 'enter-His-gates-with-praise' songs and the 'transition-from-fast-to-slow-by-slowing-down-the-last-chorus-of-the-last-fast-song' spot, and there we were in the presence of the Lord. There's no going back, songwise, at that point, and we wouldn't want to.
We worshiped with this song and free songs of worship for around 45 minutes. Rebecca sang a prophetic song about being bought by the Lord, we are His, He is ours - she sang it first to the Lord personally, then boiled it down to a two-phrase chorus that she led us in, as we all sang it together in worship. Awesome.
Tom preached basically just from his heart about being set apart to God, separated from the lives we lived without Him, separated to the life of holiness and blessing He's designed us to live in for His glory. Some of the couples who went on this weekend's marriage retreat came up and spoke about the impact of the weekend on them, and related it to what Tom was talking about, in terms of living separated, on holy ground, in our marriages as well as in every area of life.
If you're from Life Church, please leave a comment about what you feel like God's been doing among us lately. If you're from elsewhere, feel free to leave a comment as well, and I hope you had a great day in the presence of God also.
Read about what happened in worship all over the place at Fred McKinnon's Sunday Setlist blog at theworshipcommunity.com. God bless, and have a great week!
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