In 2 Chronicles 21, we find a story of David\u2019s disobedience and his appeal to the Lord. In summary, David was persuaded to take a census of Israel and Judah against God\u2019s direction. As punishment, a plague killed 70,000 Israelites. To stop the plague, David repents and builds an altar on the threshing floor belonging to a man named Ornan. When King David approached Ornan, Ornan offered to give David everything he needed for the sacrifice, but David responded with this:<\/p>\n
But King David said to Ornan, \u201cNo, but I will buy them for the full price. I will not take for the Lord what is yours, nor offer burnt offerings that cost me nothing.\u201d So David paid Ornan 600 shekels of gold by weight for the site. And David built there an altar to the Lord and presented burnt offerings and peace offerings and called on the Lord, and the Lord answered him with fire from heaven upon the altar of burnt offering.<\/em> David refused to give God what he didn\u2019t own, that which cost him nothing. Rather, he ensured that the sacrifice involved something from himself.<\/p>\n As worship leaders and worship team members, how often do we want a room to be fully in worship but we let ourselves live off of another\u2019s sacrifice \u2014 living off of the lead pastor\u2019s vision for the service, the worship pastor\u2019s word from God, the music director\u2019s practice time and familiarity with the songs, the congregation\u2019s hunger, or the songwriter\u2019s personal experience that went into writing the song, instead of our own. When we don\u2019t invest in the preparation of the sacrifice, we make the choice to live off of another\u2019s sacrifice.<\/p>\n In the story of David, it\u2019s easy to say that the sacrifice itself was the main event \u2014 the place you expect to find the sacrifice. But David\u2019s faithfulness, values, conviction and sacrifice were actually found in the preparation for the main event, reserving the main event for God\u2019s response. In the same way, it\u2019s easy to see the worship set as the main event and miss that the sacrifice comes in the preparation: in the laying down of time, pride, ego, agendas and unreadiness. When we make those sacrifices before the worship set, the main event can then be about the response of Heaven.<\/strong><\/p>\n Many things go into a worship set: prayer, set planning, song arrangements, team rosters, practice, rehearsals, transitions, etc. It can be easy to fall into a habit of less-prep and lean more into \u201cgoing through the motions\u201d, especially when we\u2019re serving every single week. But remember that the sacrifice happens before the main event – the encounter. It happens as we pray, plan, build Ableton sets, prepare ProPresenter slides, and organize stage cables.<\/p>\n This week, let\u2019s reset our mindset and put in the appropriate spiritual, mental and physical work so that the worship set can be about the encounter.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Many things go into a worship set: prayer, set planning, song arrangements, team rosters, practice, rehearsals, transitions, etc. It can be easy to fall into a habit of less-prep and lean more into \u201cgoing through the motions\u201d. But the real sacrifice happens as we prepare for the encounter with God.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":34,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"","neve_meta_content_width":0,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"","neve_meta_disable_title":"","_themeisle_gutenberg_block_has_review":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[28,17,29,15],"class_list":["post-33","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-methodology","tag-david","tag-planning","tag-sacrifice","tag-worship"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/josiahpalmer.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/unsplash-image-_12PwFpWZZ0.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/josiahpalmer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/josiahpalmer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/josiahpalmer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/josiahpalmer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/josiahpalmer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=33"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/josiahpalmer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/josiahpalmer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/34"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/josiahpalmer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=33"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/josiahpalmer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=33"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/josiahpalmer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=33"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n(1 Chronicles 21:24-26 ESV)<\/strong><\/p>\n