Jayson was part of the CityView launch team, and has lead worship and served as Creative Arts Director at CityView Pearland in the years since. Jayson is endlessly enamored with the connection to God’s heart that He offers to us through the act of worshiping Him, and he loves to talk and teach about that. He blogs with CityView about worship and music.
I’ll turn 32 in 2024, and when I do, I will have been serving as a worship leader for the mathematical majority of my life. In that time I’ve led worship in a lot of different capacities, from leading youth as a teenager, to traveling in a full time worship band during my college years, to my past 6 years leading at CityView Church in Pearland.
One thing these years have not done is make me an expert worshiper. I love talking to senior church musicians, and the one thing they all have in common is that they still learn new things about praising God all the time. The summit of “worship mountain” isn’t attainable by us mortals.
So I definitely wouldn’t consider myself a “worship authority”, but if there is a bit of extra knowledge I’ve gained in all these years, I’d say it’s related to the following- because worship has been my actual job for so long, I’ve been expected to do it consistently regardless of whether I felt up to worshiping that day.
Most of us don’t get to stop working just because we’re not enthused about our responsibilities on a crappy Monday, and my job is no different. I’ve had a lot of crappy Mondays in these years as a worship leader.
I’ve been thinking about that a lot in the midst of COVID-19. The way we’ve responded to all of this is astounding to me- Facebook in particular has given me a front row seat to people’s anxieties, their humor, their compassion, and their ability to contextualize things according to their own experiences. It’s good to think about how our worship of God changes in the middle of a pandemic, and I think that will present different challenges for different people.
In my experience, there are two very broad categories of worshipers. Whether you fall into one category, neither, or both, considering how people struggle differently is important for all of us. Here are the two types, which are sort of inversions of each other:
1. People who struggle to praise God when things go badly.
1. People who struggle to praise God when things go well.
Today, I’d like to talk about the first struggle.
Praising God When Things Go Badly
I think it’s safe to say we’re all in the middle of a crash course on praising God in crisis.
At the time of this writing, the world is dealing with the outbreak of COVID-19, a novel virus that has undone a lot of the normalcies that we take for granted. The United States has made major adjustments in the past week, cancelling large public gatherings, encouraging social distancing, and getting the ball rolling on economic aid to combat what is surely going to be the most intense financial crisis of my lifetime. As we slow down labor to halt the spread of the virus, billions of dollars have already vanished from the economy.
For those of us who struggle with trusting God in the middle of hardship, a worldwide health emergency, especially one where it feels like things change every few hours, is a unique brand of exhausting and unsettling.
I totally empathize with you. This is the category of worshiper that I find myself in most often- I struggle to look to God when things do not go my way, and right now most of us wouldn’t consider things to be going “our way”.
There are two times in my life where worshiping God has been the most challenging for me. The first was when I was a member of a traveling worship band. A fellow band member turned on us, deciding for reasons nobody really understood that he no longer supported myself and my best friend as members of the band. He didn’t speak to us for three months, despite living in the same van together and singing worship songs together on stage. After many failed attempts at reconciliation, he left, and on the way out called around to cancel most of our booked gigs, leaving myself and the rest of the band scrambling to uphold our reputation and secure our income for the rest of year. We felt betrayed and lost.
The second time was when my wife and I first found out that getting pregnant naturally would not be easy for us. We had to wait together as our knowledge progressed- first to the understanding that “not easy” actually meant “impossible”, and then the understanding that the alternative to “impossible” was “expensive”, and then that “expensive” didn’t mean “guaranteed”, and so on and so forth. Our journey through In-Vitro Fertilization was a two year waiting game centered around the ministry that meant the most to us- parenthood.
These are the two times in my life where I was at my lowest, where things were most definitively NOT going how I wanted them to. The struggles were very different. but they did have one important thing in common- in the middle of both of them, I was still expected to get on stage and sing praise to God on a regular, near-daily basis.
This expectation was the catalyst for the greatest leaps in my faith that I’ve gotten to take in my life. Having to reconcile my internal turmoil with the spiritual responsibility to lead people authentically in worship was a challenge that brought me nearer to God. It made me a better worshiper.
God is encouraging you to deepen your faith as you navigate the unknown, and moreover, He is not at all interested in you doing it by yourself. He loves you. He created you. He understands when and why you doubt Him, and He wants to walk you through it. Here are two truths that I lean on when I struggle to praise God in crisis.
Truth: God is in control, and He is logical.
“Great is our Lord and abundant in strength; His understanding is infinite.” -Psalm 147:5
It turns out that a phrase we hear a lot, that God “works in mysterious ways”, is nowhere to be found in scripture. This is because God’s methodology is only mysterious to us. To God, author of the Bible, it makes perfect sense.
Believer, release yourself of the need to understand why God does things the way that He does them. We do not have God’s capacity for logic. We cannot see things from His perspective. Trying to reckon the world with our own power is a recipe for despair.
As you work through how to worship Him in crisis, start your praise by surrendering control to Him and asking God to give you peace about that surrender. Living in faith is an incredible challenge for all of us. It is only doable when we believe deeply that the God we surrender to is more capable and more understanding than we are.
Truth: God knows your feelings, and He cares about them.
“The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit. Many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the Lord delivers him out of them all.” -Psalm 34:18-19
Believer, do not be ashamed of your anxiety. God created the heart that is feeling it, and God does not make mistakes. Your anxiety has purpose.
You will see a lot of scripture shared in the coming days that encourages you not to fear. I am happy to admit that those scriptures sometimes don’t comfort me like I feel they should. As someone who lives with anxiety, who’s spouse and dearest friends live with anxiety, I am intimately aware that “not worrying” is a lot easier said than done.
What helps me most is this; when God tells me in scripture to cast aside my worry and my fear, He totally gets that it isn’t easy. He is proud of us when we obey His command to struggle against anxiety. He allows us to struggle with it to help us become better worshipers and better servants.
It is okay to feel. God has a plan for your feelings, and wants to work through them with you.