Student Ministry That Matters by Trueblood Ben;

Author:Trueblood, Ben;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Religion/Christian Ministry/Pastoral Resources
Publisher: B&H Publishing Group
Published: 2016-04-02T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9

Character Transformation and Grace

I led worship one time as a student pastor. It was at my first church in Huntsville, Alabama, and our normal worship leader wasn’t able to make it to the service. Four months prior to this night, I started learning to play the guitar. Knowing I was going to serve as a student pastor, hopefully soon, I thought knowing how to play the guitar would be a great skill and one that would come in handy at some point. This “some point” became that night for a room full of students. It was the first time I’d ever played in front of anyone, and I picked the three easiest songs I had been practicing that I thought I could nail.

Practice and sound check went better than I thought they would, and I was ready to go. Then the students came in. Everything fell apart for me as nervousness took over. My confident sound check turned into a train wreck from the beginning as I forgot to make sure my guitar was in tune before I began. Through the three-song set I battled through nervousness, extreme sweat, wrong words, and an out-of-tune guitar to deliver the worst worship leading experience of all time. The only comment made to my face about that night was the ever-encouraging, “That really took a lot of courage, doing what you did tonight,” from an adult volunteer. I never led worship again.

At this point in my life I can look back at that moment and laugh, but what I didn’t realize then is that I never had a chance because my guitar was out of tune. When a musical instrument is out of tune, you can try your hardest to make it sound good, but it won’t work. The only thing you can do to make it sound good once again is to stop what you’re doing and tune it. As bad as an instrument can sound when it is out of tune, when in tune a musical instrument or group of instruments can make some of the most beautiful sounds we could ever hear, and in that moment the instrument is fulfilling its purpose.

Grace works the same way as a musical instrument. It’s something we have to be tuned for in order to understand it and live by it. There’s a line in the hymn “Come Thy Fount of Every Blessing,” that says, “Tune my heart to sing Thy grace.” The reason this plea is included in the hymn is because people aren’t naturally tuned to grace. The hymn also says, “We are prone to wander.” Most often when we think of this “wandering” we think in terms of sinfulness. However, we are also prone to wander into rule following, self-righteousness, laziness, and an identity defined by our own ability. Those all happen to be areas of sinfulness as well; we just tend to ignore them more often than other sins because they are well camouflaged in spiritual language or intentions.

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