For quite some time, my wife has been "encouraging" me (read: "pressuring") to do more teaching during our worship times at church.
I love the people at our church, but a majority of them don't really know much about what the Bible says about worship. In the past, when I've done these little teaching things, they've gone over well, but I've been looking for some sort of overarching theme to help me approach the issue.
I was familiar with Aaron Keyes "Postures of Praise" sermon, so downloaded the pdf from him and started looking through the material trying to formulate my approach. I knew this past Sunday was a great time to do it, since we were doing Michael Neale's "From the Rooftops," which has this line: I lift my hands in adoration.
Before we did the song, I talked about "what it looks like" - essentially, what does the Bible say about the physical aspects of worship: lifting hands, singing, clapping, kneeling, shouting, dancing. I used the phrase "what it looks like" 2 or 3 times because I thought it created a unique, non-threatening approach. I spoke real briefly about what most of us at my church think of with regard to the lifting of hands - that its something we do to acknowledge God's sovereignty or we're feeling particularly inspired. I think those can be great reasons to lift hands, but I wanted to come at if from a different angle, so here's what I read:
Hear the voice of my pleas for mercy, when I cry to you for help, when I lift up my hands toward your most holy sanctuary.
Psalm 28:2
Then I talked about how children do this - when they cry for help, they throw their hands up. I mentioned that there were probably were people in the room who needed help and I encouraged them to lift their hands during the song. I also mentioned that if they felt weird about that, then they might consider simply opening their hands up in front of them.
It came out nice. The song went over great and I even got a bit of postivite feedback immediately after the service, which is always a good sign.
For quite some time, I've wanted to do this sort of thing for my folks, and this time it worked. I think we'll hit on the hands for three or four weeks (not necessarily consecutively) and then move on. I'll let you know how it goes.
