Worship - With New Songs

Well, my name is Greg.

If we've never met before,

I would love to meet you,

maybe grab a coffee with you sometime.

Even if it's just after service out in the lobby or at a place like Theo's,

we'd love to get to know you and hear your story.

The first song that popped into my head was,

it's just another day for you and me in paradise.

I don't know why, that's just the first song that popped into my head.

I have what's called,

I call them default songs.

Do you guys have these?

Where they're not,

I don't think that they're an earworm.

An earworm is something different.

An earworm is a song that you do not want in your head and it gets stuck.

I think a default song is more like just when your brain doesn't know what else to do,

it starts singing this thing.

I have two primary default songs.

One is Revelation song.

I've never led that song,

I think a single time in my entire life and yet for some reason,

it is stuck in my head somewhere in the deep recesses of who I am.

The other one is,

I don't know the words to it,

but I will inevitably start singing the colors of the wind from Pocahontas.

I don't know. I don't know why.

I didn't even know what it was until I think it was Cindy or someone else was like,

you know what you're whistling right now, right?

I was like, I have no idea.

It's just the thing that keeps,

I just always come back to that.

I just, and she's like,

yeah, that's colors of the wind from Pocahontas.

There's songs and music have this influence over us.

That is why, while the first week we said that worship is not the songs,

songs are also a powerful part of how we worship God.

We started that first week saying that worship is the everything that we have.

We can worship God with anything and everything.

We went to the Shema in Deuteronomy.

Worship the Lord your God with all your heart, your soul, your mind,

your strength because our God is one.

He's worthy of all of it.

Jesus reiterates that in the New Testament saying that if there is

a command that is most important, it is this one,

and then it leads us to then love our neighbors differently.

Last week, Scott drew our attention to looking at the Psalms as something that we can pray as a form of worship.

The Psalms, I don't know if you guys know this about the Psalms,

but the Psalms are what would be called the Songbook of the Jewish people.

And while it's common to think that King David wrote all the Psalms or even most of the Psalms,

it's actually a little less than half.

And that's being a little gracious.

There's a lot of Psalms that scholars would say this is attributed to King David,

whether he wrote it or not, but 73.

There's 150 Psalms, 73 of them were either written by or attributed to King David.

You'll see if you look at the top, it'll have the number,

and then I'll say a Psalm of David or a song from the chorus leader for King David, etc.

Now, that is an important little tidbit if you want to understand the Bible.

It's an important tidbit to understand that David didn't write all 150.

And the reason is because David only lived to be 70 years old.

He wrote 73 songs or had 73 attributed to him in 70 years, and he only...

The other 80 were written over the course of a thousand years.

It's important to realize that the same thing happens with the book of Acts.

You read the book of Acts and you go, wow, there's so many...

There's miracle after miracle after miracle after miracle after miracle after story after story after story.

And then you come to find out that the book of Acts actually describes a 50 to 70 year period.

It's describing, it's condensing all of this greatness that God did into a single book

where you can read one thing after another.

And when you read the Psalms, you might go, wow, like these guys were just popping out songs like every other day.

And the reality is is that it takes a long time to write a song that lasts.

Like there's 150 Psalms that and they've all lasted as part of the Jewish Songbook for thousands of years at this point.

But even now, there's ones that everybody knows or everyone is familiar with.

Psalm 23, right?

Yeh, though I walk through the valley of shadow of death.

Like we have songs that are based off Psalm 23.

There's some that just seem to resonate in a way that just seems to last no matter what.

And it seems like as you read through the Psalms that nothing was off limits.

Their successes, they could write songs about those.

Their failures, they wrote songs about those.

Their loneliness, they wrote songs about those.

Their celebrations, they wrote songs about those.

David and the other writers, they'd experience life and then they'd write a song about it.

It is my theory, my personal belief that much more than 150 Psalms were written.

It's just that it's these 150 that lasted, that made it into the book, that made it into, hey, these are the ones that we should all sing together.

When you read through them, you find out that they're actually singing their history.

A lot of it is they're singing their history.

It's broken up into different parts to tell different stories, to have different themes.

They're singing their covenants.

They're singing about the liturgy that they had.

There's actually songs, if you look at it, it says Song of Ascent.

Song of Ascent is describing the idea that this is a song that you can sing on your way to go worship God.

Because let us go to a high place and worship the Lord.

They would sing with wisdom and poetry.

They'd sing their joys.

They would sing their sorrows, anything that they experienced, anything that we experience, think or feel in this life can be shaped as a song of worship to God.

And the truth is, when you look through the Psalms, somewhere between 30 and 70%, depending on how you break down how many verses of the Psalm were lament,

between 30 and 70% of the Psalms are actually what's called laments, are called complaint songs.

That's the most literal translation, a complaint song.

And all but one of them, Psalm 88, all but one of them ends, even though it is a complaint, they all end by saying, and yet I will praise the Lord.

Think about that.

Think about all the things that you've been through.

Someone could write a song about the thing that you were going through.

And then the grand majority of the times that something got written about what you were going through, it still ended with, and yet I will praise the Lord, even though, even though all of this.

Today we actually sing two songs that I wrote for important reasons.

In the fall and winter of 2014, I wrote a song called U-Turn.

It was that second one.

It wasn't until later that I realized after naming it that people are going to think I'm talking about a car that's making a U-Turn.

But it's U-Turn, talking about God, U-Turn, over and over, all these things.

You can turn this into this.

You can turn this into this.

And I wrote that because my son was in the hospital.

We were basically living in a hospital going through the most difficult thing that we had ever gone through.

I needed to say to God, I think you can take this woundedness and turn it into something else.

I think you can take this fearfulness and turn it into something else.

This brokenness.

Maybe you can actually turn me into the likeness of your son.

Maybe I can still say that you are great, that you are mighty, that you are awesome in every way.

In the moment of our greatest sorrow, a song saying, I remember the moment.

I was sitting in his room in the hospital in Chicago, it's Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, where he was still on Vents when we got there.

And he was doing therapy every day and they had a TV hanging from the ceiling, kind of like this.

Like some hotels or hospital rooms do.

It wasn't on the wall. It was kind of like hanging out in the middle of nowhere.

And I was sitting there and I was looking up at it and it just dawned on me like,

even now, my attention, things are trying to pull my attention to something else.

Even now, as we're going through this, the desire of the world around me was to pull my attention away from either my son or my family or from my Lord.

And so in that room, I started to go, all of my affection.

In the moments of our deepest sorrows, there are songs that can be born.

The song at your house, I started that in the summer of 2022.

It took probably nine months to finish it because when I started, I still have the voice memo on my phone.

I was in California. I was on sabbatical.

I was visiting one of my mentors, one of our overseers, Michael Ummenauer.

He's at a church in Woodlands, California, about 45 minutes, maybe an hour from Sacramento, north of San Francisco.

And I was sitting in his sanctuary as he was doing other things between when we were going to get to hang out.

And I was in California. And so the border was on my mind a lot and immigration was on my mind a lot.

And I just sat and I just plucked you open every broken border because I know that the way that we look at borders in our countries,

in our world, in our modern day, with our eyes and with our solutions, are broken.

There's Andy has this joke. I think you're the one that told me is like, if you if you if you don't like our problems, wait till you see our solutions.

Right. That is so I'm sitting there.

You open every broken border, so every orphan daughter and son will come home again.

That's all I had. That's all I had.

Then I came home and I kept working on it, working on it by the end of this by the end of December.

I had kind of written that and I'd written the middle verse that said you're calling every hurting mother, every distant father.

But it was still it was melancholy. It was slow.

It was finger picked. The sound guy hated it. Now, I was like this time I had to turn up the guitar so he could hear it.

And and it was it was yeah, it was just this melancholy kind of lament that even though the door is always open at your house.

And I remember. Adding a little rhythm to it.

And then realizing that, wow, this this song that's speaking of different sorrows, that song that is that was originated in the idea that the way that we do things,

the way that we have borders in our country are so broken.

But there's something about God's house that is always open.

Suddenly, it turned into a song of celebration.

Just by changing the rhythm, it's the same exact songs, same exact melody, same exact words.

And yet changing the rhythm. Causes it to be something that like I want to go, hey, you want to clap.

Songs have this way of comforting, encouraging us.

And I think that new songs have this way of reminding us of and renewing our hopes.

They don't fix everything. They probably don't fix much of anything.

But they put word and melody and harmony and lyric to our feelings, to our experiences, to our emotions.

It's as though it takes the coat off of our heart and it hangs it up so that you can stand back and look at it.

What a song does. It has a way of weaving together the things that you have felt and experienced and been through and turning it into something that is now suddenly external to you.

You can show it to somebody else. This is what I was talking about.

This is what I meant when I was in that hospital room. This is what I felt when I was in that sanctuary alone thinking about this.

This is what I felt it was like just wanting everyone to get to come home.

The hardest line to come up with was the last line, that last verse, because obviously you want things to follow the same patterns.

You want to follow some rhyme if you can. You want there to seem like there was some reason to where this song was going.

It took forever, nine months to get to the place where finally it was, you offer dignity and honor.

You strip my shame of its power. Why? Why?

Because so many of us don't come home because of what? Because of shame.

Because we're so sure that if we come home, the first thing we're going to be handed is a bucket full of shame.

Here you go. You should feel bad that you came home.

But Jesus strips the power from that.

And then he sets a table for you.

New songs don't fix everything, but they give language and melody and structure to what we felt.

And it may not fix anything or everything now, but it reminds us that everything will be fixed someday.

And so today, with a little bit of time that we have left, we'll see how this goes. We're going to work on a song together.

You can come up afterwards and tell me if you want your name on it.

I'm not going to take a mental picture of everyone that was here, but I want us to work on writing a song together today.

And we're going to use Psalm 96 as an example, as the structure, not necessarily the structure,

but as inspiration for what we're going to do.

And so what I've done is I've printed it out.

There's four different translations or versions around the room.

And that's because those different versions use different words for some of the key things throughout that scripture.

And what I want us to do is you're also welcome to open up your own Bible or to get to open up the app or go grab one from the bookshelf.

But the first thing that we're going to do is we're just going to read it.

We're going to sit with it.

We're going to look for the Lord to give us some inspiration of how to write this.

And then I'm going to need one volunteer that thinks they've got good penmanship.

Ready? Who is it?

Don't make me pick someone who's going to have to volunteer.

Oh, you got awesome. Yes. All right.

So I'll tell you when you come into the scheme.

OK, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to read this aloud and then I'm going to give you four minutes.

To sit with it, to take a pencil from the table, to circle words that you feel are important,

to underline the sentences that you think are the most important to you and what you're experiencing.

Now, this is not a lament. That does not mean that your lament cannot relate to what is being said.

Amen. All right. Here we go.

I'm going to read it and I'm going to give you a few minutes to just sit with it and don't give up.

Listen, do not phase out. Do not stare out into nowhere unless you're imagining the words above you in the sky.

Give your attention to this, all of your affection.

Let's turn it towards the Lord and see what God does with this passage.

It's Psalm 96. Sing a new song to the Lord.

Let the whole earth sing to the Lord, sing to the Lord, praise his name.

Each day, proclaim the good news that he saves. Publish his glorious deeds among the nations.

Tell everyone about the amazing things that he's done. Great is the Lord.

He is most worthy of praise. He is to be feared above all gods.

The gods of other nations are mere idols, but the Lord made the heavens.

Honor and majesty surround him. Strength and beauty fill his sanctuary.

O nations of the world, recognize the Lord. Recognize the Lord is glorious and strong.

Give to the Lord the glory he deserves. Bring your offering and come into his courts.

Worship the Lord in all his holy splendor. Let all the earth tremble before him.

Tell all the nations, the Lord reigns. The world stands firm and cannot be shaken.

He will judge all peoples fairly. Let the heavens be glad and the earth rejoice.

Let the sea and everything in it shout his praise.

Let the fields and their crops burst out with joy.

Let the trees of the forest sing for joy before the Lord, for he is coming.

He is coming to judge the earth. He will judge the world with justice and the nations with his truth.

Alright, you got four minutes. Give it your attention. Let's see what happens.

Alright, 30 seconds.

Alright, what are we going to do? Remind me your name.

Gracie, Gracie, will you be the person that writes words on the whiteboard for me?

Alright, very cool. Come on up.

And this is the first thing we're going to do. Just so you know what we're aiming for.

We're going to aim for at least one verse in the chorus.

So first thing is, starting over here, a single word that stuck out to you.

Just shout it out, but wait to move across the room.

Okay, ready from over here? Sing.

You can kind of make a long list of the words. Sing. Equity.

Fields. Fields of equity. E-Q-U-I-T-Y. I-T-Y. And then fields. F-I-E-L-B-S. And what? Grand. Grand-ger.

U-E-R. G-A-R-N-D-U-E-R. E-U-R. Grand-E-U-R. Grand. And then E-U-R. Grand-E-U-R.

Y'all just throwing, you're finding the hardest. Okay, moving across. True.

True. That's an even more true. Gracie didn't realize that she's going to be tested this way today.

All right, moving this way. Jubilant. J-U-B-I-L-A-N-T. Jubilant.

I-L-A-N-T. Okay, over here.

Splendor. S-P-L-E-N-D-O-R.

Strength. Strength. S-T-R-E-N-G-T-H. Strength. Denise. Proclaim.

And you can start in a row once. Okay, moving this way. Worthy.

Okay, on the back. Tremble. T-R-E-N-V-L-E.

Rejoice. R-E-J-O-I-C-E. And then over here. Anything? Radiates. R-A-D-I-A-T-E-S. Joy.

All right, so now, is there anybody in the room that had a sentence that you were like,

this is a sentence that came to my mind as I was reading this? What do you got?

Yep. All right. Andy, will you come up and write that so that she doesn't have to?

Start to the right of the word worthy. You can move that eraser.

No, I don't care. So move that eraser so you got plenty of room up there at the top.

It's going to have to be big enough for me to read it.

Don't go muddy in the waters.

He's like an 11th pawn.

The songs of old no longer do justice to my heart. My song is added to your chorus and you delight in me.

Does anybody else have a sentence that came to your mind or that you wrote?

Yes, you might have to come and write it. Africa. We can both. You can both, Africa, first.

The trees of the forest sing for joy. Will you come write it? Yeah.

And then dad, what did you say? He treats everyone fair and square.

You all want to see my dad's handwriting? Come on, Bob. Come on.

The trees of the forest sing for joy.

The trees of the forest sing for joy.

Oh, better than mine.

This is bad shoulder he says. He treats everyone fair and square.

All right, so I see the trees.

I see the trees.

Okay.

All right.

Okay, I lift them and rejoice.

Okay.

This is the process.

The process.

Oh, I see the trees. They're singing out for joy. My heart, my song.

I lift them and rejoice.

You are worthy.

You are worthy.

You are worthy.

You are worthy.

I see the trees. They're singing out for joy. My heart, my song. I lift them and rejoice.

You are worthy. You are worthy.

You are worthy, Lord.

All right. So with good penmanship, I need your help. Let's write that out, what we have so far, and let's fill that last line, and then let's worship God with this, okay? All right, so who wants to help?

Marissa's got one? Okay.

You have a line?

No, no.

Okay.

If Jen was here right now, she might go, Greg, that sounds a little bit like something you wrote back in 2003.

My heart, my song. I lift them and rejoice.

I think we can remember the you are worthy part, but let's think about that, what should come out.

I see the trees. They're singing out for joy. My heart, my song. I lift them and rejoice.

What about, come sing along the splendor of the Lord or something like that.

Something that can be really important about a worship song is not to sing about ourselves but to turn it outward. There's a lot of the Psalms that he's inviting others to come sing this with him.

Come sing along the splendor of the Lord.

All right, so let's try that out. You got good knees, Marissa. Good for you.

I haven't stood up yet.

I was going to say, you need help? Because that would hurt.

Here you go, ready?

All right, so let's try this. I see the trees. They're singing out for joy. My heart, my song. I lift them and rejoice. Come sing along the splendor of the Lord.

Let's sing that one more time. I see the trees. They're singing out for joy. My heart, my song. I lift them and rejoice. Come sing along the splendor of the Lord.

Because you are worthy. You are worthy. You are worthy, Lord. You are worthy. You are worthy, Lord.

Let's turn our hearts to God now. I see the trees. They're singing out for joy. My heart, my song. I lift them and rejoice. Come sing along the splendor of the Lord.

Let's tell them together, he's worthy. You are worthy. You are worthy, Lord. You are worthy. You are worthy, Lord.

All right, let me lead you. I encourage everybody just to close your eyes. Don't forget that we are with each other, but simultaneously center in.

I'm aware that the Spirit of God is in his place. That while there have been thousands upon thousands of words written about our God, there's still new things he wants to say to you.

There are old songs he wants to renew, to rewrite, to wrap around you like clothing that will warm your heart.

Let your imagination be involved here.

I see the trees. They're singing out for joy. My heart, my song. I lift them and rejoice. Come sing along the splendor of the Lord.

Let's worship God together.

You are worthy. You are worthy, God. You are worthy. You are worthy, God.

All right, the half of the room that is closer to the door. I want you to sing with me. The half of the room that is to my left, further from the door. I want you to echo.

Follow Marissa. She's doing it.

All right, first half sing with me, the other half echo it.

You are worthy. You are worthy, God. You are worthy. You are worthy, God.

Sing it to each other. You are worthy. Declare it to each other that God is worthy. You are worthy, God. You are worthy. You are worthy.

Now pick your part.

You are worthy. You are worthy, God. Sing it to the Lord. You are worthy. You are worthy, God.

Amen.