by Alden Powers, Director of Music @RCC
Ahh! It’s nice to play some electric guitar for the Lord again! With Karla our bass player out on maternity leave for the last two months, I’ve been picking up the bass duties with Joey supplying the guitar. I do enjoy grooving along on the bass, and Joey’s been a great addition to the worship team, but it is definitely A LOT easier to lead worship from the guitar. With the electric I am free to do more riffs and explore more sounds.
Praise God that Karla has a beautiful, healthy baby girl and now she is ready to serve again! Praise God that He has given us another guitar player in Joey and praise God that we can now be more flexible with our instrumentation!
“Father of Lights”
We began our worship by praising God for being such a great God. He loves us and delights in His children. He supplies us with every good and perfect gift. He is eternal and unchanging. For many of us, we tend to spend our week thinking that our problems and our sins are greater than God. Singing a song like this helps us to re-focus our attention on the awesome God we have.
“The Father’s Love”
Every good and perfect gift comes from the Father, and there is no greater gift than His Son Jesus Christ. We come together and sing praises to the Father because we are now called Children of God through faith in His Son. What great assurance we have of our salvation! This is a great song from Sovereign Grace’s CD Sons and Daughters.
“Praise God”
We continued to praise God with two well-known hymns done a different way. Our arrangement of “The Doxology” is taken from several sources. The original verse has been a mainstay in traditional Lutheran liturgies for generations. Bob Kauflin wrote the other verses we sang in 2000. Our bass player Karla Miller wrote the bridge of the song in 2008.
“What a Friend We Have in Jesus”
Christ is our creator and redeemer. He is also our closest friend. I definitely try to avoid songs that imply “Jesus is my homeboy” theology, but we do know from scripture that Jesus calls us friends (John 15:15) and that God knows us better than anyone else. We cannot be ashamed to bring EVERYTHING to the Lord in our prayers.
Just because we sing a song once doesn’t mean we can’t sing it again; I have not found any biblical commands to do this. So after we sang the verses to “What a Friend” we simply went back and sang the bridge to “Praise God”, as well as the original verse. Reprising songs gives us a chance to further reflect on the truths we are singing about. Sometimes after singing a different song, the words we sing on the reprise have a stronger meaning.
“Give Me Jesus”
After the sermon we responded to the preached word with a very pretty song by Fernando Ortega (aren’t all his songs pretty?). Jesus isn’t someone we connect with on Sunday. We need Him morning, noon, night, when we are alone and when we die.
“Blessed Are the Sons of God”
This is an original arrangement that the RCC worship team has worked up over time. John-Mark’s sermon was about the importance of Church community. I thought this might be a good song to respond to this with. In hindsight, it might have been better to sing this during the first singing set. It might have fit better. Thanks be to God that we have 52 Sundays a year to improve our worship experience!
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