Sing For Joy To The Living God

During my break from school, I was getting myself busy by updating the new songbook for my church, specifically for the Youth and Young Adult ministry. It's not normal for me to sit at home and do nothing. When I don't do anything, it's usually a break for me to relax and settle down from the business of school. Usually I take time and plan for the future by looking at jobs and praying about it.

The work (updating the songbook) that God gave me is almost complete. It took a very long process to collect 200 songs, adding and rewording tiny details of the lyrics, and discerning which key is best for every song and adding the chords.

This job was extremely tedious with lots of sweat and good eyes to spot errors. You need a lot of patience, especially when dealing with technological difficulties. Most of the time the lyrics or words of the song would shift to the next page, which would affect the rest of the songs as their lyrics would also go to the next page, so you need to go through the pages and fix that.

Choosing songs can be a tough job. I attend a small church, and my youth group has around 15-20 kids show up for every Sunday school. And our youth is room is just a simple room with couches and instruments. We do not need any hip and cool, rock and roll, and concert like worship. God does not need our worship, but our worship is about responding to God.

This afternoon, I was listening to Passion 2013 live broadcast, and +John Piper was preaching. I don't know what the main topic was, but he was talking about the joy of suffering for Christ. And Piper, again, gives a very deep statement that made me ponder for a while.

Our worship is the subjective echo of God's objective worth.

God is already infinitely worthy. He has this inherent worth. He doesn't need our worship to make Himself even more worthy or add to His worth. His glory is immense and far surpasses everything else in this universe and galaxy. Our act of worship is a subjective, inner, and personal response of God's already infinite worth, whether if you're singing, praying, studying, living...your life is worship (Romans 12:1-2).

I love how the Psalmist puts it, and I think it resonates with what John Piper stated.

How lovely is your dwelling place,

O LORD of hosts!

My soul longs, yes, faints

for the courts of the LORD;

my heart and flesh sing for joy

to the living God.

(Psalm 84:1-2)

Going back to choosing songs, I want to find songs that may be helpful for everyone in my church to sing. I'm also thankful for others who have suggested songs that we could sing together in such a way that the songs could teach us something, edify us, admonish us, and help us to respond to God's glory (Colossians 3:16-17).

To help my brothers and sisters out there that are having hard time finding songs, below are some links that you may find helpful and hopefully would increase your ministry by the grace of God.

http://www.worshiparchive.com/
http://www.ccli.com/
http://www.ultimate-guitar.com/
http://higherpraise.com/