If you serve a church, particularly in a visible capacity like preaching or leading worship, people often wonder if the ‘end result’ they witness is the entire effort. They do not realize that the most visible aspect of our job is - or should be - the smallest portion of our job. Certainly there are innumerable practical, musical, and pastoral details we navigate each week in preparation for a Sunday service, but that is not what I hope to address today.
What I want to encourage you - what I want to preach to myself - is that our private devotion should outpace, outstretch, and outlast our public worship on the platform. We can be so easily tempted to believe that what is visible is what truly matters. Leading corporate worship is not unimportant! It is precisely because it is so important that is must be fueled by private devotion.
If all of my time, energy, effort, and presence with the Lord is ultimately being spent for the purpose of executing a Sunday gathering, then my worship quickly becomes thin, brittle, and performative. If I have not been present with and to the Lord from the secret place, then I can become tempted to selfishly hoard my worship, rather than seek to serve when I am on the platform.
This does not mean that I need to light a candle, and block out two hours every day to sing to the Lord. Although, if you have the space and capacity to do that, why not?! But because every moment is poised with an invitation to once again turn my attention and affection to Christ, I can be privately devoted to the Lord in every area of my life.
“One thing have I asked of the Lord,
that will I seek after:
that I may dwell in the house of the Lord
all the days of my life,
to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord
and to inquire in his temple.” - Psalm 27:4