Let the message of Christ dwell among you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom through psalms, hymns, and songs from the Spirit, singing to God with gratitude in your hearts. —Colossians 3:16
Like it or not, we are consumers. We eat great food. We watch great shows. We attend amazing concerts or sports events. We read and review megabytes of media. Much of our consumption includes much waste. We throw food away. We leave events when we are tired. We often have “one and done” experiences with the things we consume. We may often lose the significance of our experiences because of the volume of things we consume. So many options can reduce the value or significance of what we experience.
The casual way we treat our consumption of media can also leak into our spiritual life. We may listen to Christian music in our car or on our smartphones. We may listen to various sermons or podcasts online or in person. We read Bibles and do Bible studies multiple times a week. In all of our spiritual consumption we often do not appreciate what God is doing to reach our hearts. Perhaps a bit more intention in our consumption of Christian media could help us connect more closely to God.
A lot of prayer, creativity and passion goes into the development and leading of a church worship service. The service you attend this week will most likely involve many gifted people who plan and practice for hours. Volunteers lend support with additional musicianship, technical and production skills. Church worship services usually require much more than someone just strumming a guitar or playing a piano. Music sets are frequently coordinated with sermon themes to set just the right tone. What many of us experience in weekend worship rivals what people pay good money for in concerts, movies or TED Talks. Yet, many churchgoers enter and exit a worship service never to think again about what they just experienced. All that good work of worship goes in one ear and out the other.
The Apostle Paul reminds us that “the word of Christ” or “the message of Christ” can come to us through teaching, admonishment, psalms, hymns and songs of the Spirit (Colossians 3:16). We need to find ways to let this “word of Christ dwell in” us. Just as we can improve our spiritual life through reading and meditation, we can also improve our spiritual state through song. Consider improving your spiritual devotional experience by rehearsing or “replaying” what you sang from the last worship service you attended. I will assume that most of you reading this will attend church on a Sunday. Some of you may attend on different days. I will refer to worship as a “Sunday experience” for the purposes of our discussion. You may substitute another day if you worship then.
Think about it this way. You attended a worship service last week. You got out of bed, prepared yourself and made your way to a place of worship. On that given day, a number of songs were chosen, a passage of Scripture was read and expounded and you left with a challenge to be transformed in some way. Why would you let what God was trying to speak to you through song and Scripture that day reside in your heart for only a few minutes on a Sunday?
What would happen to your heart if you took time in the following week to replay or revisit the songs and the sermon that God prepared for you just a few days before? Seeing Sunday worship as a gift from God, tailored just for you, to be enjoyed and savored throughout the week, can revolutionize the way that Sunday worship impacts you. “What is God speaking to me this Sunday for my week?” can be the anticipatory question that motivates your expectations for worship attendance.
While attending your next weekend worship service, note what songs are chosen and sung. You might do this by writing down the song names or significant verses from the songs. You could write the song titles down on a notepad or journal or even on your smartphone. Later in the day or early in the week, search your favorite music website for these songs. Perhaps you could create your own playlist of these songs. If you are not able to jot down song titles, you can often go to your church's website and replay a recording of your church’s last worship service.* You can replay the worship sets and even the sermon for review.
In your devotional time, consider replaying one of the worship songs from your last worship service. Recall what you were thinking and feeling while you were singing that song on Sunday. Listen for words or phrases that touched your heart. Hum or sing along with the replay of this song. The rehearsal of this song and the reflection on it can ingrain the “teaching and admonishment” of the song in a deep and impactful way. Often when doing this, that repeated song will become the song that my mind replays throughout the day. Instead of humming some annoying jingle heard in popular media, your mind can be rehearsing what you sang on Sunday, connecting you back to the shared worship experience that contained so much of God’s Word and Spirit.
Often I will sing the first song selection of last week’s worship service on Monday, the second selection on Tuesday and the third selection on Wednesday. By Thursday and Friday these songs are rolling around in my head and heart. I find my heart replaying these songs throughout the week. I do have to take the time and effort to replay these songs for them to come up automatically later in the week. I feel like I am planting a seed of a song in my heart during devotions that will spring and grow in the course of my week. Many events in a given week may be enlightened by these songs. Many times the phrase of a worship song on Sunday will address a mood or feeling I am having on a Thursday. Replaying Sunday worship songs in my heart is a way of speaking to yourselves with psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord (Ephesians 5:19).
If you are unfamiliar with a song used in worship, you can look up the lyrics of the song. When you do a web search of the title of a song, include the word “lyrics” with the title or a phrase from the song. You will quickly see the complete lyrics of the song. If you search video feeds like You Tube or Vimeo you can also include the word “lyrics” in your song search and you will most likely find versions of videos which include words of songs that you can follow as you attempt to “re-sing” songs that may not be easily remembered.
Another fruitful devotional practice is to find Bible passages that connect to the songs that you are rehearsing. See if you can discover a passage that is being referred to by the song and include this in your replay of the song. Maybe there is a direct quote from a Bible passage in the song or maybe there is a biblical story or character that reflects the sentiment of the song. Perhaps you can memorize a verse that a song references. Connecting scriptures to songs can be a life-changing exercise. As you replay a worship song in your devotional time, you can sing the words while reviewing the Scriptures they support.
Also consider connecting a phrase from a Sunday worship song to a situation that is going on in your life. If a Sunday song was about surrender, ask yourself what you need to surrender to God this week. If a song was about overcoming fear, what is filling you with dread or fear this week? Sing a song of hope on a Monday or Tuesday to encourage you about what you must face on a Wednesday. Often as a worship song phrase is rolling around in my head, a situation will pop up that is directly in line with words from that song.
When I attend a Sunday worship service, I am asking God to speak to me. I am asking God to change my heart. When I rehearse or replay songs I sang on Sunday, I am reminding myself of what God is trying to say to me.
Worship songs on Sunday are no longer random musical selections for me. Replaying Sunday songs becomes a way for God to speak to my heart throughout the week. Rehearsing Sunday songs on Monday and beyond has helped my spiritual life in a powerful way.
Beyond music, God is using the preached words of your pastor to speak to you on Sundays. Consider replaying the some or all of the sermon you heard last week sometime in your devotional time. Maybe you could replay a point made by the pastor that you did not quite understand. Maybe there was a sermon section that significantly impacted you. Replay that. Sermons are the blood, sweat and tears of your pastor. Why should we hear them once and never benefit from them again? Review the sermon you experienced last Sunday. Make notes of what you felt and discovered during the sermon. Take note of what God was saying to your heart and consider how you might on Monday or Tuesday apply what was preached to you. Reviewing, rehearsing and applying what you experienced on Sunday should be a regular activity. With the blessings of modern media, we can replay and review what we may have missed on a given Sunday.
Finally consider taking new gems from last Sunday and using them to replace old dusty thoughts that haunt you. Often we can feel sad, depressed or defeated by thoughts that weigh us down. We can feel like nothing ever changes or bad things always happen to us, or we can never get a break. Thoughts like these can influence our approach to life and can sour our mood or perspective. Consider taking a refrain from a Sunday song or a line from a Sunday sermon that you will use as your “new word” to replace an old mantra. Saying, “Your way is better” and “This is my surrender” repeatedly throughout your day is so much better than repeating “I’ll never make it” or “I did it my way.”
Replaying past worship songs and sermons from the previous week’s services as part of your daily devotions can make you anticipate more from your Sunday attendance. Repurposing nuggets of truth from Sunday songs and sermons can open up channels of influence of the Spirit in your life. Don’t waste the treasures of your Sunday worship experience. Review them and replay them throughout the following week as though God has packaged them specifically for you in the week to come. Replay that “Sunday stuff” for joy and encouragement in your upcoming week.
* You can watch Sunday services from Central Bible Church, which provides this Next Step Disciple website, on our YouTube channel.