Paul Tripp, teaching at our church Sojourn
I ‘ve been convicted lately — ever since reading Paul Tripp’s recent Gospel Coalition blog post God’s Glory, Our Excellence. Although he was speaking specifically in reference to pastoral ministry, his encouraging exhortations also apply to our ministry as worship leaders.
Paul did such an excellent job relaying his challenging encouragement that, rather than paraphrasing it, I’d like to share some excerpts from the post here. As you read these notes, keep in mind how readily this applies to worship leadership and ministry. Ask the Holy Spirit to speak to you and convict and encourage your heart to hold in greatest awe the glory of God. Ask Him to grip you with a tenacious desire to lead and serve with excellence for the glory of His beautiful name. Specifically, consider if (and how well) you’re working out the three disciplines of excellence that Paul outlines below:
If your heart is in functional awe of the glory of God, then there will be no place in your heart for poorly prepared, badly delivered, pastoral mediocrity. We should all be shocked at the level of mediocrity we tolerate in the life and ministry of the local church . . . Mediocrity is a heart problem. We have lost our commitment to the highest levels of excellence because we have lost our awe.
Awe of God inspires, motivates, and convicts. . . Awe reminds you that God is so glorious that it is impossible for you, as his ambassador, to have ministry standards that are too high . . .I’m talking about a sturdy commitment to do everything you can to display the glory of his presence and grace as powerfully and clearly as you can each time his people gather.
You never are just doing your duty. You never are just cranking it out. You never are just going through the motions. You never are just putting on a front. You are worshiping your way through life as the ambassador of an expansively glorious King. And you are in reverential fear of doing anything that would dent, diminish, or desecrate that glory in any way.
Excellence in ministry flows from a heart that is in holy, reverential, life-rearranging, motivation-capturing awe of the Lord of Glory. Excellence is, in fact, a relationship . . . So the one who is Excellence, in his grace, came to you when you were in a state of anything but excellence, and by grace offered you the promise of actually becoming a partaker of his divine nature. . . He calls and empowers you to display his excellency and the excellency of his grace. Only this excellency has the power to free us from the false excellency of human pride and the mediocrity that results when we are okay with ourselves and our world just the way they are.
When I am in awe at the reality that I have, by grace alone, been attached to what is truly excellent in every way, I want to be an ambassador of that excellence. . . I will want all ministries of the church to faithfully display the excellence of the one who calls out of darkness into his marvelous light.
This means we will be committed to the disciplines that cause these ministries to be as free from chaos and mediocrity as is possible between the “already” and the “not yet.” First, we must be committed to preaching the gospel to ourselves, reminding ourselves of our ongoing need to be rescued from us and low standards. . . . This also means we will do everything to maintain relationships of unity, understanding, and love between us. . .So we determine to give ourselves the humility of approachability and the courage of loving honesty. We will commit ourselves to regular patterns of confession and forgiveness. And we will celebrate together the grace that enables sinners to live and minister alongside sinners in a community of unity and love. . . And we will be committed to the discipline of adequate preparation that enables us to do well what we have been called to do.
If you forget who you are, your ministry will be shaped by a smugness that is more about displaying how great you are, rather than how glorious is the Savior who still meets you in your weakness. If you are not committed to loving gospel community, you will minister out of frustration and discouragement, displaying God’s glory in an abstract form, but not in its living, life-changing vitality. And if you are not committed to the discipline of preparation, you will offer sloppy leadership to poorly sighted people that will become more of a distraction to, rather than an enhancement of, their ability to see God for who is he and place their hope in him.
Paul Tripp photo courtesy Sojourn deacon of photography Chuck Heeke