Grace and work. Grace or work. It can’t be grace or work, grace without work is like to experience grace by avoiding work. Work without grace is solely self-belief which sounds like self-destructing.
In All, All of it, it is the fullness in size, volume, determination, everything that is mental, physical and spiritual, in body and mind – the totality of sincerity of commiting ourselves to God. This is important as we consider music discipleship as there are many layers of “doing” in music worship, and we need to be mindful of the extent we are putting time to the “doing”.
The essence of loving God is because he first loves us. On our own, we cannot will ourselves to love God, nor the capacity to do it, except with the Holy Spirit in us renewing us as new creation. It sets in context when we “do a lot” for our community, worship, caring, support etc., that it is a journey of increasingly closer walk with God. The by-product of this is we want to do the best, and this can be confused as “perfect practice”. We probably can be perfect in something, or aim to be so. It’s good to remind ourselves that God may desire us to be better and something and then move on to something else as this fits his plan for us.
But it could that he wants us to be the person, hold a certain responsibility, or do a certain task for the foreseeable future. While I have been a musician for years for a church, I have also been without a “base” in several other churches, to the extent that for several years I did not take part in any music worship team. God took me away from music worship to develop other gifts, and that was exciting. When God took me (back) to music worship, I grabbed the opportunity with fervour, as if it is my first one.
There is a curious balance between the restfulness of grace and the energetic engagement of work. To represent it in speech or maths can be misleading, but without saying it in speech or maths, it’s difficult to find other means to explain it. That is, we should allow God for us to have and experience grace in 100%, and allow God to enable us to “work”, to 100%, in various manners of doing, organising etc. for him. That will be a great source of peace.
Reflect and pray what is occupying you more in your worship participation – is that more “doing” when there should be more grace? Consider too a caring conversation might be necessary for others in the congregation or worship team to be reminded of the 100% grace 100% work balance in our love response of service and worship to God.
