PK’s Ponderings
What to do with Sunday Morning’s Worship Guide – after Sunday Morning
So it is sometime
between 12 noon and 12:30 pm on Sunday Morning and you have a very important
decision to make: “What will I do with
this piece of paper, this bulletin, this worship guide, now that we’re done
this morning?” Well, there are a
couple of options:
1.
You can just
leave it there on the chair or pew for the pastor or deacons to pick up later
after the services. I mean, let’s face it, these poor guys probably have nothing better to do
anyway but to pick up what you leave behind.
And if you’re very thoughtful, just throw it on the ground so that they
have to bend over more, resulting in a few more calories burned, helping to
keep the leadership more fit and trim. (Whew! There! 14 years of frustration finally spilled out
and done with! Don’t worry, only those
who are guilty will get upset.)
Or,
2.
You can stuff
them in your Bible only to be forgotten, until finally the binding of your
Bible finally gives way and bursts into a shower of sacred confetti for all to
enjoy. This has the added benefit of
making others believe that by the presence of all those worship guides and
sermon notes sticking out every which way in your Bible you must be one really
industrious student of God’s Word.
Or,
3.
You can take
them home and use them to help light the fire on cold mornings in the winter.
Or, (and here we are moving away from the humorous satire and getting to
the serious stuff)
4.
You can reuse
them during the upcoming week. This of
course is the recommendation I would like for you to give a moment to
consider.
Many of you who
read these ponderings also look over the notes from Sunday’s message during the
week that follows. You recognize the
time spent by your pastor in preparation, and sometimes you want to glean over
those notes some more, impressing them into your heart through repetition. Or perhaps your pastor moved so quickly
through the listed cross-referenced verses that you had no time to look them
up. Therefore, Monday morning, or
Thursday evening, or some other time of personal devotion, becomes a time of
reviewing what you have learned and spending more time with the passage and
with the One who authored that passage.
Good for you, truly you are a diligent student.
But let me suggest
that not only are the sermon notes worthy of reviewing, so also are the songs
you sang, or the responsive readings read.
These will remain available to you through the worship guide that you
have kept. Most pastors and ministers of
music will try to pick songs not at random, or in a five-minute frenzy just to
put in some songs to sing on Sunday.
Rather, they will deliberately and prayerfully seek songs that have some
tie-in and relationship with the sermon.
So take some time to look back over the words of those songs and see how
they may have been related to the sermon.
It might surprise you how doing this will make you see connections that
you never observed or experienced on Sunday morning. And having sung a song on the previous
Sunday, you, now knowing the tune, can sing it again in your devotions, making
your own personal moment of worship with Word and with song.
And you know that
new song that was used? Try to find some
Scripture that undergirds the message of the
song. Did it come straight from
Scripture? Find the verse or verses in
their context and meditate on those verses now with a tune in your heart as you
do! What theme or topic is discussed in
that song? What other Scripture verses
speak to those topics? And before you
know it, the worship guide from this past Sunday is also your worship guide for
the whole week.
And you know that
old song that was used? Try to read the
words without singing them. Sometimes,
because some songs are so familiar and sentimentally dear to our hearts, we can
be guilty of singing the tune lustily but the words mindlessly. Go back and re-read those words and engage
your mind to discover whether or not the words are biblically sound.
Does your pastor
tell you who wrote the music and tunes?
Do you have a hymnal at your house?
See what other songs have been written by those authors. You might find an author who writes the
worship language of your heart and enables you to draw closer to God through
biblically informed, God-centered worship music. John Newton, a pastor of another time and era,
who wrote new hymns for his congregation, is such a one for me.
Did you have
responsive reading this past Sunday?
Re-read those verses. Did you
mean them then? Do you mean them
now? Did you understand them as you read
them aloud a few days ago? Perhaps spend
some time to read them again and take time to meditate on them before the Lord.
So, what will you do
with your worship guide after the service this upcoming Sunday? I hope you will consider using them again so
that they become not only your Sunday morning worship guide, but your Monday
morning worship guide, your Tuesday evening worship guide, your Wednesday . . .
