Do We Need to Evaluate Our Worship?

I very enthusiastically agree with the below article that the preaching of God's Word has been sidelined in our modern worship. While singing and praising the Lord is important, the true experience of experiencing God comes from the Word that He has given us. God's Word will never be irrelevant for our day and age or in any other for that matter. I think you will enjoy the below article that I will quote here on my blog written by Todd Pruitt. Here is the link to the full article.

There is a great misunderstanding in churches of the purpose of music in Christian worship. Churches routinely advertise their “life-changing” or “dynamic” worship that will “bring you closer to God” or “change your life.” Certain worship CD’s promise that the music will “enable you to enter the presence of God.” Even a flyer for a recent conference for worship leaders boasted:

"Join us for dynamic teaching to set you on the right path, and inspiring worship where you can meet God and receive the energy and love you need to be a mover and shaker in today’s world…Alongside our teaching program are worship events which put you in touch with the power and love of God."

The problem with the flyer and with many church ads is that these kinds of promises reveal a significant theological error. Music is viewed as a means to facilitate an encounter with God; it will move us closer to God. In this schema, music becomes a means of mediation between God and man. But this idea is closer to ecstatic pagan practices than to Christian worship.

Jesus is the only mediator between God and man. He alone is the One who brings us to God. The popular but mistaken notions regarding worship music undermine this foundational truth of theChristian faith. It is also ironic that while many Christians deny the sacramental role of those ordinances which the Lord Himself has given to the church (baptism and the Lord’s Supper) they are eager to grant music sacramental powers. Music and “the worship experience” are viewed as means by which we enter the presence of God and receive his saving benefits. There is simply no evidence whatsoever in Scripture that music mediates direct encounters or experiences with God. This is a common pagan notion. It is far from Christian.

In his helpful book True Worship Vaughan Roberts offers four consequences of viewing music as an encounter with God. I will summarize them.

1. God’s Word is marginalized.
In many Churches and Christian gatherings it is not unusual for God’s Word to be shortchanged. Music gives people the elusive “liver quiver” while the Bible is more mundane. Pulpits have shrunk and even disappeared while bands and lighting have grown. But faith does not come from music, dynamic experiences, or supposed encounters with God. Faith is birthed through the proclamation of God’s Word (Rom 10:17).

2. Our assurance is threatened.
If we associate God’s presence with a particular experience or emotion, what happens when we no longer feel it? We search for churches whose praise band, orchestra, or pipe organ produce in us the feelings we are chasing. But the reality of God in our lives depends on the mediation of Christ not on subjective experiences.

3. Musicians are given priestly status.
When music is seen as a means to encounter God, worship leaders and musicians are vested with a priestly role. They become the ones who bring us into the presence of God rather than Jesus Christ who alone has already fulfilled that role. Understandably, when a worship leader or band doesn’t help me experience God they have failed and must be replaced. On the other hand, when we believe that they have successfully moved us into God’s presence they will attain in our minds a status that is far too high for their own good.

4. Division is increased.
If we identify a feeling as an encounter with God, and only a particular kind of music produces that feeling, then we will insist that same music be played regularly in our church or gatherings. As long as everyone else shares our taste then there is no problem. But if others depend upon a different kind of music to produce the feeling that is important to them then division is cultivated. And because we routinely classify particular feelings as encounters with God our demands for what produce those feelings become very rigid. This is why so many churches succumb to offering multiple styles of worship services. By doing so, they unwittingly sanction division and self-centeredness among the people of God.

Scripture is full of exhortations to God’s people to sing and make music to the Lord. Our God has been gracious to give us this means to worship Him. But it is important to understand that music in our worship is for two specific purposes: to honor God and to edify our fellow believers. Unfortunately, many Christians tend to grant music a sacramental power which Scripture never bestows upon it.

Jessa Duggar Points Out the Truth of History and Gets Bashed For It

The backlash for Jessa's comment on her instagram literally proves her point. People get sensitive when you shed a little light on the dark. While others did not appreciate her comment I must heartily agree with it. I have been doing some research on this topic and the dots are not too hard to connect which you will see in Mr Bomberger article below. The article seems we researched and well founded. Here to Jessa and standing for the truth.

Below is a great article from Townhall.com. Written by Ryan Bomberger. I am going to quote the article below on my blog but feel free to go to the link to check out more by them.


"Cosmopolitan magazine, the monthly magazine for liberal women who don’t mind pages filled with superficial airbrushed sleaze, is out of its depth. Cosmo’s senior political writer, Jill Filipovic, reveals why the magazine needs to stick to raunchy sex advice and not attempt commentary on history.

"This past weekend, TLC’s Duggar family visited the Holocaust Memorial Museumin DC. Anyone who has ever been there knows how the experience pierces the soul. Jessa Duggar expressed some powerful sentiments on Instagram:

“I walked through the Holocaust Museum again today... very sobering. Millions of innocents denied the most basic and fundamental of all rights--their right to life. One human destroying the life of another deemed "less than human." Racism, stemming from the evolutionary idea that man came from something less than human; that some people groups are "more evolved" and others "less evolved." A denying that our Creator--GOD--made us human from the beginning, all of ONE BLOOD and ONE RACE, descendants of Adam. The belief that some human beings are "not fit to live." So they're murdered. Slaughtered. Kids with Down syndrome or other disabilities. The sickly. The elderly. The sanctity of human life varies not in sickness or health, poverty or wealth, elderly or pre-born, little or lots of melanin [making you darker or lighter skinned], or any other factor… May we never sit idly by and allow such an atrocity to happen again. Not this generation. We must be a voice for those who cannot speak up for themselves. Because EVERY LIFE IS PRECIOUS. #ProLife”

"Cosmo went into full anti-woman mode. Filipovic attacked Jessa Duggar for daring to put history into perspective: “Jessa had just walked out of the Holocaust museum, and instead of absorbing the scale of that atrocity, decided to make a point about abortion rights. That's not just tone-deaf; it's deranged.”

"Cosmo’s political writer apparently has no appreciation for the role of a museum of that nature. The point of learning of human failings of the past is so we don’t repeat them. Jessa’s remarks on Instagram conveyed a profound understanding of the past and applied it to the present. Over 56 million human lives have been butchered by an abortion industry birthed in the same racist and elitist pseudoscience ofeugenics that created the racial hygiene theory that led to the slaughter of millions in the Holocaust.

"I know eugenics is big vocabulary for a wannabe porn magazine that masquerades as the voice of American women. Cosmo clearly doesn’t speak for most women. Filipovic laments further about Jessa’s keen revelation: “Regardless of how one feels about the morality of abortion though, comparing it to one of the greatest horrors in modern history is insensitive and clueless, to say the least.”

"No, Cosmo. It is you that is clueless. Abortion and the Holocaust are so inextricably tied together, no amount of airbrushing could paint a different picture. The American Eugenics movement was the single-most potent influencer of Hitler’s ethnic and racial cleansing “solutions”. Planned Parenthood’s founder, Margaret Sanger, was a member of the American Eugenics Society (AES).Guttmacher Institute’s founder, Alan F. Guttmacher (also President of Planned Parenthood) was the Vice President of AES. Most leadership involved in Planned Parenthood throughout the early to late 20th century, were involved in the American Eugenics Movement.

"Prior to the holocaust, Sanger, like her fellow eugenicists, was a staunch proponent of forced sterilizations (only changing her tune to “voluntary” sterilization after the Holocaust revealed what happens when her rhetoric becomes reality). According to her 1932 article, “Plan For Peace”, she demanded that America “…apply a stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is already tainted...”

"This led to our country’s forcible sterilization of over 60,000 people. Nazi Germany modeled its actions after what was already happening here in the United States.

"Sanger helped to create the World Population Conferences, a global gathering of leading eugenicists, to promote birth control and other forms of population control. One of the leading eugenicists, funded by the same Rockefeller Foundation that funded Sanger’s work, was Eugen Fischer. He was the Director of the Keiser Wilhem Institute for Anthropology, Medical Genetics, and Eugenics in Berlin, Germany. Sanger included Eugen Fischer as a contributing leader in her World Population Conference as evidenced here in the program for the event (h/tMaafa21.com). It was Fischer’s “racial hygiene theory” that Hitler adopted leading to the mass extermination of over 11 million precious lives.

"Frederick Osborn (1889-1981), President of The American Eugenics Society,infamously declared in response to Roe v. Wade: “Birth Control and abortion are turning out to be the great eugenic advances of our time.”

"Cosmo would like to think the present just magically appears, like flawless skin on their photoshopped models. But it takes real journalists to explore beyond superficial euphemisms and uninformed advocacy.

"Edwin Black, a New York Times bestselling investigative author and human rights journalist (who can certainly never be accused of being rightwing or conservative) wrote the authoritative book on how American Eugenics inspired Nazi Germany—War On The Weak. The late Jack Fischel, the first Jewish professor hired at Millersville University, specialized in Holocaust studies and gave a definitiveendorsement of Black’s book: 

“It is apparent from Black’s research that American eugenicists contributed to Nazi racial hygiene policy. The Nazi experiments with X-rays to sterilize their victims, euthanasia and even the gas chamber were all at one time or another proposed by American eugenicists as a means of eliminating the unfit from American life. To the extent that Black’s research documents this connection between early 20th-century eugenics policy and its extreme escalation by the Nazis in the death camps, the book is a valuable contribution to our understanding of the evolution of the Holocaust.”

"Jessa Duggar isn’t blinded to history by the broken lens of liberal feminism. The only thing deranged about tying abortion to the holocaust is deniers like Cosmo and its writers who think abortion is simply a fashionable choice."