Use Your Head

As a worship leader, I feel a great responsibility to lead the Church through a well-rounded, theologically sound song-list every week. But I’ve always been hesitant to put certain songs into a worship service that have a central theme of “I need Your presence” or “come now,” or “saturate me,” and so on. To an extent, those statements are Biblically sound on a personal level, but if you take a historical look at worship in the corporate sense, songs like that don’t really appear too often, if ever. Often when you see corporate songs of praise in the Bible, they tell a story of remembrance for what God did (see Moses’ song of praise in Exodus 15:1-18), how we are going to respond to him (see Psalm 9:2), or simply praise his name. I haven’t searched the Bible all the way through to check—haven’t managed to find the time—but I don’t think you really see people coming together for corporate worship and then singing “I need” and “come now.” Truthfully, those are very immature statements, like what young children scream to their parents. And these statements don’t really lend themselves to edification of the church body, which is the purpose of coming together for worship services. Additionally, isn’t it true that when we meet together in his name, God is already there with us? So saying “sweep through this place!” is kind of redundant if he’s with us already. I would much prefer leading the church in “It is written, Christ is risen, Jesus You are lord of all” than “Saturate us now, God”. I feel we are reminded of the purpose of our existence