How Great Is Our God: 5 Days Toward a Worship-Led Life by Chris TomlinExemplo

Day 1: Introduction: A Worship-Led Life

One afternoon I was sitting in my apartment in Austin, Texas, with my Bible open, reading Psalm 104. It’s a beautiful song of praise that begins with this:

Lord my God, you are very great; you are clothed with splendor and majesty. The Lord wraps himself in light as with a garment; he stretches out the heavens like a tent. (vv. 1–2)

The Psalm continues with several verses layering high praises that celebrate the greatness of God.

Songs are mysteries, and I still don’t understand where they come from, but I remember grabbing my guitar one day when I read that psalm. And I began to sing out a simple chorus:

“How great is our God. Sing with me, how great is our God, and all will see how great is our God.”

I remember thinking to myself, This chorus is way too simple. It will never work. Weeks later I began to frame the verses around that chorus as I went back to Psalm 104 for inspiration. I worked hard to keep every lyric pointed to the greatness of God, with nothing about me or you in there.

Songs about our human need for help and deliverance are good, and certainly the Bible is filled with them. The Bible is also filled with Scriptures and songs devoted exclusively to the glory of God. I call the former songs of deliverance and the latter songs of transcendence.

I have noticed over the years that the church tends to sing more songs of deliverance than songs of transcendence. It’s understandable, because we have such desperate need for God’s help. Yet I have noticed something else over the years: every time, without fail, those songs of transcendence completely change the room. They take our eyes off of ourselves and our needy situations and put them on God alone.

The more conscious we become of the greatness of God, the more we lose sight of ourselves and all the complex challenges of our lives. When we enter into new depths of relationship with God, our perspective and posture toward our problems also change.

This is one of the biggest keys to the worship-led life: if we want to break free of me-driven living, we must begin with God, not ourselves. Even in our songs, we tend to start where we are—at our point of desperation and need. But when we begin with ourselves, we never quite get our focus on God. If we instead begin with God and bring our exclusive focus to His greatness and glory, we mysteriously find our challenging situations lightening up and even lifting off of us. When we seek Him first, He takes care of the rest. Songs of deliverance tend to naturally find their place and rise up in the wake of songs of transcendence.

This is the point of a worship-led life. We all come to the table broken and needy. That fact is inescapable. We are all sinners, which is to say we have a self-centered gravity.

A self-centered gravity leads to a me-driven world. In a me-driven world, everyone is desperately trying to orchestrate everything to solve their own problems and serve their own needs, interests, ambitions, agendas, projects, and so forth. The unintended result is that we try, with our worship, to bring God into our orbit—to enlist His movement to revolve around our activity (ironically, in His own name).

A worship-led life means living with a God-centered gravity—where we are the ones revolving our lives and everything in them around His reality. And isn’t that the ultimate reality? All of reality centers on God, whether we know it or not, whether we realize it or not, and whether we want it to or not.

A worship-led life is an ever-growing awakening to this truth. It is the massive movement from “I need you to help me, God,” to “I want you to have me, God.” We are so prone to seeking God’s hand of help, and God is ever ready to help. What delights Him most, though, is when we start by seeking His face. After all, didn’t Jesus say something like, “Your Father knows what you need before you ask Him”? I think you are getting the point.

The worship-led life unfolds a “movemental” life—a movement from upward to inward and then outward. To be sure, as we lift our lives to God, our good, good Father, He comes powerfully into the deepest recesses of our innermost selves, where He transforms us into His likeness. That is the secret of the worship-led life: Jesus Christ, the worship leader, within us. From here our lives move outward and into the lives of others by the person and power of the Holy Spirit.

SING WITH ME:

We will close each day’s reading with an element called Sing With Me. I’ll suggest a song or two we can sing together to lead us out into the day. You can find the songs on our playlist at www.christomlin.com/singwithme, or cobble together a playlist on whatever platform you prefer.