Archives For Worship

These articles are written to encourage and equip you and your people to honor and depend on God.

Topics include: a leader’s heart, Faith, surrender, tithing, singing, corporate worship services, etc.

Rick Warren BaptizingNearly 3,000 people gave their lives to Christ over Easter weekend at Saddleback Church! The stories of salvations and baptisms have been so deeply moving.

All eight of our Saddleback campuses had record attendance:  Corona, Anaheim, Irvine, Huntington Beach, Laguna Woods, San Clemente, Rancho Capistrano, and Lake Forest. Last weekend, three of our campuses had over 3,000 attenders, one had close to 2,000 attenders, and four of campuses had nearly 1,000 attenders!

In addition, about twenty folks around the world rented theaters to show our Saddleback Easter service for their friends. Many were saved in a prison in the Philippines where the service was shown!

On Monday after Easter, I sent a tweet asking for people to email me with the highlights of their Easter weekend. Here are some of the responses I’ve received…

I attend a Korean church in Walnut Creek, CA, but am a member of our English ministry for young adults. Because our church has two different congregations and a youth group, Sundays like Easter Sunday and Christmas Sunday are treats for us. All three groups (who worship separately for language and age group reasons) join together for a joint service.

This…

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Channel“May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.” (2 Corinthians 13:14 NIV)

In faith, I know these things to be true:

  • God is full of love and grace, and he fills me with his love and grace.
  • God’s work within me is to clear a channel for his love and grace to flow through me into the lives of anyone and everyone I meet.
  • I may not be there yet, but I am “confident of this, that he who began a good work in will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus” (Philippians 1:6 NIV).
  • And I know “God is able to make all grace abound will abound in every good work” (2 Corinthians 9:8 NIV).
  • He will make my joy complete because I no longer live in darkness, but I now live in the truth and have fellowship with God (1 John 1:4; 1 John 1:6).
  • Through the “Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship…

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Four Ways a Pastor Can Show Love

Pastor, you set the tone and atmosphere in your congregation. If you want to know the warmth of your church, put the thermometer in your own mouth.

I’ve visited some churches where the pastor’s lack of love is the main reason the church isn’t growing. Some pastors, by their cold demeanor and lack of personal warmth, virtually guarantee that visitors won’t come back. And in some larger churches, I’ve gotten the impression that the pastor loves an audience but doesn’t like people.

Great preaching without love is just noise in God’s view.

Every time I speak to at Saddleback, I repeat a simple reminder to myself. I never preach or teach without thinking this:

“Father, I love you and you love me. I love these people and you love these people. Love these people through me. This is not an audience to be feared but a family to be loved. There is no fear in love; perfect love casts out all fear.”

Let me suggest some practical ways that you can demonstrate your love:

Memorize names.

Remembering names shows that you’re interested in people. Nothing sounds sweeter to a…

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Praise Holy HandsAnswer me when I call, O God of my righteousness! You have relieved me in my distress; Be gracious to me and hear my prayer. Psalms 4:1 (NASB)

Lord, we’re desperate for you.  We’re bunched up in confusion, moving by impulse and fear, flitting here and there like a frenzied flock caught in the wilderness of the far country.

We are here! We are here!

We know you hear; you’ve heard us before; you’ve swept in like shock and awe and saved us from our hopeless paralysis.

Do it again, O, Holy One; we are desperate for you. How long will you make us wait?

And you speak to us God, saying, “Yes, how long? How long must I wait while you wear my grace and peace like some cheap cloak bought at the secondhand store? How long must I wait while you chase after worthless things, like birds pushed by a winter’s wind?  How long must I wait while you live out a lie because you think you’ve found the truth in something – or someone – other than me?”

Oh God, I hear your heart. You set me apart; yet,…

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Get a Life!

By Jon Walker

“’And do you seek great things for yourself? Do not seek them; for behold, I will bring adversity on all flesh,’ says the Lord. ‘But I will give your life to you as a prize in all places, wherever you go.’” (Jeremiah 45:5 NKJV)

“Once you get into the real world, you’ll find it’s not as easy as that.”

“You’re in for a rude awakening when you get out of here and into real life.”

These are things we might say to students who’ve never experienced life outside of school. But the truth is, even after we graduate, we still haven’t reached our real life in Christ.

We become real, healed, full human beings when we connect with Jesus through the Holy Spirit. Until then, we’re still sending postcards from a fantasy life.

Our maturity in Jesus brings us closer and closer to real life, as established by God before he set the foundations of the world.

Thomas Merton, the prayer-centered monk, spoke in terms of life in the nasty-now-and-now being like an onion. God keeps peeling away the layers until the real you is revealed.

In a sense, God is explaining that when he says, “I will bring adversity on all flesh” (Jeremiah 45:5 NKJV)….

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Whether you turn to the right or to the left, your ears will hear a voice behind you, saying, “This is the way; walk in it.” Isaiah 30:21 (NIV)

In faith, we know this to be true:

God manages circumstances.

Whether I turn to the right or to the left, my ears will hear a voice behind me, saying, “This is the way; walk in it” (Isaiah 30:21 NIV).

He makes my paths straight as I lean on him and acknowledge him (Proverbs 3:5–6). He’s placed a hedge around me and he blesses the work of my hands (Job 1:10).

God says he is the only one capable of interpreting circumstances: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways . . . . As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:8–9 NIV).

When I see the circumstances the way God does, he says, “You will go out in joy and be led forth in peace; the mountains and hills will burst into song before you, and all the trees of…

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When he had received the drink, Jesus said, “It is finished.” With that, he bowed his head and gave up his spirit. John 19:30 (NIV)

TimeTiming was important to Jesus; everything in its time at just the right time. On his mission to bring you and me from death to life (Romans 6:13), he never rushed or struggled to play catch up.

He clearly worked from a different clock than everyone else. Instead of Eastern Standard Time, Jesus seemed to be on Eternal Standard Time. He never arrived late and he never arrived early, he simply arrived according to his purpose.

Jesus was born at exactly the right time to be in Bethlehem with his parents, right as the stars aligned to announce the birth of Israel’s long-awaited king. When he was older, he stayed to study Scripture in the temple, even though his parents left for home.

When others thought he was late, Jesus arrived just in time to raise Lazarus from the dead. When his brothers wanted him to go with them to the Festival of Shelters, Jesus told them, “Go on to the festival. My time…

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John replied in the words of Isaiah the prophet, “I am the voice of one calling in the desert, ‘Make straight the way for the Lord.’” John 1:23 (NIV)

Pastor, you are a voice. You are not the message; you are simply the messenger.

Like Isaiah and John the Baptist, you are the “voice of one calling in the desert, ‘Make straight the way for the Lord’” (John 1:23 NIV).

Your objective is to reach the place where you are honest when you say:

The message I bring is from God; it’s not anything I thought up on my own. God filled me with his Holy Spirit so that I could understand his message and know without a doubt that his message is true and freely given.

The words I speak are not the result of human wisdom or human imagination or my own opinion; they were formed in me by the Holy Spirit so that I could express “spiritual truths in spiritual words” (1 Corinthians 2:12–13 NIV, with author paraphrase).

I am simply a channel for God’s message. In order for his message to grow in me and to grow in you,…

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New Years ResolutionsFor I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. 1 Corinthians 2:2 (NIV)

How are you doing with your New Year’s resolutions? You remember that list you made with two scoops of optimistic enthusiasm, sprinkled with unrealistic expectations, and topped with the cherry of knowing the list isn’t serious anyway.

One of my friends started making New Year’s resolutions like:

  • I won’t lose ten pounds this year.
  • I commit to watching the Super Bowl this year.
  • I will listen to my iPod at least four days a week.

But there is one guy who I suspect played for keeps when he made New Year’s resolutions. You know, the zealot who could never do anything halfway, the let’s-get-real-about-our-faith apostle, Saul-Paul.

My thought is Paul only had one resolution on his New Year’s list: “This year I resolve to know nothing but Christ and him crucified” (1 Corinthians 2:2).

Paul’s message is radically simple: Salvation is in Christ alone. What does this mean?

  • It’s not Christ plus your good behavior.
  • It’s not Christ plus the years you taught a Bible study.
  • It’s not Christ plus your tithe.
  • It’s not Christ plus the…

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graceandjusticeHi, Pastor! I got your note saying you don’t think you can do what God is telling you to do in your ministry.

You may be surprised to hear me say this, but I agree! If God called you to do it, then you shouldn’t be able to do it without him. In fact, if you could do it without him, then it’s really not a God-thing.

I know you feel that God is asking you to do something that you think is impossible. But God did call you to do it and that means his strength is working through you and that will make you sufficient for the task.

In fact, the Bible says your weaknesses, doubts, and insecurities are no surprise to God. You may try to hide them from others, but you can’t hide them from the one who created you.

The truth is, God created you with weaknesses. And, since he’s God, he didn’t make a mistake. Is it possible he created you with weaknesses in order to keep you on your knees before him? And with you dependent upon him, you’re able to do all things through him who…

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leafThen a man suffering from a dreaded skin disease came to him, knelt down before him, and said, “Sir, if you want to, you can make me clean.” Jesus reached out and touched him. “I do want to,” he answered. “Be clean!” At once the man was healed of his disease. (Matthew 8:2-3 TEV)

When we hide the truth, it is a faith issue, not a circumstance issue.

It requires faith to be truthful. It requires faith to come clean. It requires faith to be authentic and transparent in our relationships. It requires faith to stop pretending and to let others see who we really are and what we’re really about.

Praise God, we have Jesus!

Even if we sin, we need not live in fear, because he sits at the right hand of the Father as our Advocate. He understands our weaknesses; he was tempted in “every way that we are, but did not sin. Let us have confidence, then, and approach God’s throne, where there is grace. There we will receive mercy and find grace to help us just when we need it” (Hebrews 4:14-16 TEV).

The point is: Jesus wants to cleanse…

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Jesus Defines Love in Uncompromising Terms

“But now I tell you: love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5:44 GNT)

“Had Jesus only told us to love our brethren, we might have misunderstood what he meant by love, but now he leaves us in no doubt whatever as to his meaning.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Jesus is absolutely relentless in pushing the standards of the law to a higher level—in truth, the level at which they’ve always been in the kingdom of heaven. In this case, he speaks about the law of love, insisting it must be a love that is extraordinary and remarkable.

He calls us, Bonhoeffer notes, to a sacrificial love where we love our enemies in exactly the same way we love our friends. Yet Bonhoeffer adds, “By our enemies Jesus means those who are quite intractable and utterly unresponsive to our love, who forgive us nothing when we forgive them all, who requite our love with hatred and our service with derision.”

Our enemies may reject our love; they may waste our love, discount our love, and react angrily to our love. They may…

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