Formation to Transformation | A Worship Devotional

I used to hear a verse like this and immediately translate it into a strategy. How do we get more people under the sound. How do we fill the room. How do we make sure the glory has a path. And look, rooms matter. Sound matters. Somebody has to show up and open the door. I'm not arguing against any of that.

But this verse will not let you make yourself the water. The earth gets filled, and you are not the filling. You may be a cup somebody drinks from on the way. You may be a ditch that carries runoff for a season. You are not the sea. Which is a relief if you'll take it that way, because if the earth being filled depends on your next thirty days of content, your body already knows that math doesn't close.

Anchored in Habakkuk 2:14. Part of The Waiting Season, a walk through the three chapters of Habakkuk.

You're up, and you don't feel much of anything about it yet. Not discouraged exactly. Just even.

Most people know Lamentations 3:23. Not many know what comes right before it. This I recall to my mind, therefore I have hope. He doesn't wake up with hope, he goes and gets it. Twenty verses earlier he says his strength has perished along with his expectation from the Lord, and nothing in the chapter takes that back. Then he deliberately calls something to mind, and hope follows the recalling, in that order. And what he reaches for isn't a promise about how it turns out. It's that the mercies are new this morning, before anything has gone right.

Anchored in Lamentations 3:21-23. Before the Doors Open is a short Sunday morning sending for the whole worship team.

I used to debate my old pastor about our biggest weekend of the year. He'd say let's do it bigger and better, and I'd say okay, but why? What's the purpose? I know a lot of churches where that's the whole motto, and what happens inevitably is you burn out your people. It's never let's hire more people. It's always how do we do bigger and better with the same budget and the same people.

The peoples labor for the fire, and the nations weary themselves for vanity. They didn't fail. They got tired building something that wasn't going to hold. And no black and white here: the woe isn't on building. Churches should do big things. It's on what got mixed into the foundation, because the material is people.

Anchored in Habakkuk 2:12-13. Part of The Waiting Season, a walk through the three chapters of Habakkuk.

There's a photo I use sometimes from a program I did years back, and there's a Guitar Hero screen on the back wall. We played Guitar Hero, the whole room. I picked the photo because I needed a photo and I put it up without thinking about it. Some of the comments are not happy about it at all, and I've started to enjoy watching people argue.

Habakkuk 2:11 is one verse and it does the whole job. The stone cries out of the wall and the beam answers it. The building testifies, not the people in it, and it's a conversation the structure has with itself about how it got built. The house is the witness and nobody called it to the stand. Whatever you're building will keep saying something after you stop explaining it.

Anchored in Habakkuk 2:11. Part of The Waiting Season, a walk through the three chapters of Habakkuk.

I got a sweet delay pedal about ten years ago and it was a big old deal for us. I downloaded every timeline preset off the church site and I was going to dial it all in. I was just excited to have the new toy. My nest was nine inches wide and it sat on a pedalboard.

There's a phrase at the end of Habakkuk 2:10 that almost nobody preaches. You have sinned against your soul. Not against the people, against your soul. The cost of building your own small kingdom is real for everybody underneath you, and the verse says so. But the first casualty in the sentence is you. He set his nest on high to be delivered from the hand of evil, and the building is what got him.

Anchored in Habakkuk 2:9-10. Part of The Waiting Season, a walk through the three chapters of Habakkuk.

Sunday mornings at 6:30 I used to text the worship leader, sorry man, I'm out. It didn't bother me even a little. I was one of three guitarists, nobody had cast any vision to me, and I knew I was just the guitar player. Then I became the guy who gets the text.

Habakkuk 2:8 sounds like karma and it isn't. Karma is a system. This is a sentence about what people do: the remnant of the peoples, the ones left over, the survivors of what you did. They don't get organized, they just eventually get their turn. And usually they don't even mean it as payback. They're doing what somebody taught them was normal.

Anchored in Habakkuk 2:8. Part of The Waiting Season, a walk through the three chapters of Habakkuk.

I served for free. A lot. Years of it, and I got a job out of it, so it worked. But now that I'm the leader it's really hard to recommend that's how you go about doing ministry.

Something in Habakkuk 2:6 changes who's talking, and most people read past it. God doesn't say the woes. The nations do. Verse six hands the microphone to everybody who got run over, and what they take up is a taunting proverb, a song about the man who plundered them. Look at how their song ends: How long? Those are Habakkuk's own words from chapter one. The complaint God never answered shows up in somebody else's mouth as the chorus.

Anchored in Habakkuk 2:6-7. Part of The Waiting Season, a walk through the three chapters of Habakkuk.

Somebody's going to sing over you this morning, and it won't be the congregation.

Don't let your hands be weak. Zephaniah 3:16-17 is said to people with something to hold, and then it says what God does: he rejoices over you with joy, he calms you in his love, he rejoices over you with singing. The room is already being sung over before your first note. You're joining something that started before you got there. Then a blessing spoken over the whole team before the doors open.

Anchored in Zephaniah 3:16-17. Before the Doors Open is a short Sunday morning sending for the whole worship team.

There are shirts in my closet from a version of church I don't do anymore.

Habakkuk 2:5 is the last thing God says about the Chaldean before the woes begin. Wine is treacherous. He doesn't stay home, he enlarges his desire like Sheol, he heaps up all peoples and none of it fills him. Proverbs says Sheol is never satisfied and neither are a person's eyes. Ryan confesses the big attractional years, the shirts he still owns, and how much easier it is to measure eighteen singers on a stage than anything that matters. Last week was the net, the method. This is the appetite underneath it. Before the weekend, name the number that would be enough, and look at whether you've been working for that one or the one after it.

Anchored in Habakkuk 2:5. Part of The Waiting Season, a walk through the three chapters of Habakkuk.

Hundreds of people in a room, all of them singing, and I walked out sure I'd seen God move.

Habakkuk 2:4 is quoted three times in the New Testament and it cracked Luther open, and the prophet wrote it while still waiting for God to answer his question. Don't skip the first half: a soul puffed up, full of air instead of weight. The word for faith is emunah, steadiness, the word used for Moses' hands staying steady in the battle. Ryan confesses walking out of worship conferences he ran sure he'd seen the Holy Spirit move, and realizing he'd put hundreds of trained singers in a room and they sang. The person living by faith was the one who dragged themselves to church, fighting with their spouse on the way in, standing in the back holding a coffee. You're in that verse this morning. Stand in it and hold.

Anchored in Habakkuk 2:4. Part of The Waiting Season, a walk through the three chapters of Habakkuk.