Worship Matters by Ted Slater on 09/12/2006 at 9:16 AM

As I considered again this morning my motivations for blogging, I found myself prompted to re-read Bob Kauflin's recent article on Boundless, "Blogging to Worship God." If you have time, let me encourage you to take a few moments to read Bob's very helpful article.

But that's not what I'm posting about today.

After reading Bob's article on Boundless, I clicked over to his blog, Worship Matters. For years I've benefitted from Bob's thoughtful perspectives on worship. A recent blog entry, as I've come to expect, brings a helpful correction to my thoughts about music and worship. Consider this sentence that Bob excerpts from a book he's reading by Harold Best:

"Music and the arts have a kind of power in themselves that can be falsely related to or equated with Spirit power, so much so that the presence of God seems all the more guaranteed and the worshiper sees this union of artistic power and Spirit power as normal, even anticipated."

I love and am moved by music, especially "worship" music. But may I better grasp, as Bob put it, that "music is never to be the ultimate means by which we worship God. Only Jesus, working through the Holy Spirit, can fulfill that role."