Music Video for There Is No Sin that I Have Done

October 22, 2011
7:00 pm	to	8:00 pm

We've got some exciting news to share about one of our songs. One of the popular tracks on our recent album, Merciful to Me, is the song There Is No Sin that I Have Done. We have been working with a local audio and video studio to create a music video for this song in an attempt to communicate its gospel-saturated lyrics in the powerful medium of video. All of the filming has already been finished and the video is in the editing stage. We plan to make it publicly available on Saturday, October 22nd.

At 7pm on October 22nd, we are going to have a viewing party to celebrate the song and the music video project. Anyone who is interested will gather either at my home in Minnetonka, MN or at my church in Minnetonka (which is three blocks from my home). Our time together will include a song story and short teaching moment, a live performance of the song, a presentation about the filming of the video, and, of course, the premiere of the video itself. We'll also have some light refreshments to help us relax and enjoy...

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He Alone Is God

The Hebrew word hallelujah (or alleluia) which means literally "praise the Lord," has been used as an exclamation of praise not only by the ancient Hebrews, but in the early Church, throughout the history of the Church, and even today. Following the pattern of the Psalms, it has become integrally wed to music throughout all the cultures of the world. This song uses the word "alleluia" as a triumphant exclamation of praise for who God is and what He has done. The verses direct us to God's eternal character - dwelling in holy splendor as a spirit ("beyond our gaze"), the God of love, and reigning over all creation. We are reminded of the Son's worthiness to receive our "alleluias" as well - we will forever marvel at the grace He showed in giving Himself up to death to save undeserving sinners. In this song we also look forward to the day when our feeble alleluias will join with a vast number of believers and angelic creatures in the new world, praising God with what are sure to be earth-shattering roars.

This song is loosely based on the hymn "The God of Abraham Praise" by Thomas Olivers (1725-1799)

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The Love of Calvary

One of the most difficult attributes about God to understand and accept is His amazing love towards humanity. In a Christian culture that has been saturated with verses like John 3:16 ("for God so loved the world...") this may seem ridiculous; you may ask something like "what's so hard about believing God loves me - after all, I've heard it all my life!" When we consider the holy and righteous character of God juxtaposed against our unclean and rebellious character, His love shouldn't make sense. There's no reason why our heavenly Father should love creatures who He made to know and worship Him, yet worship anything but Him in their pride and rebellion. Yet He has proved the depths of this perplexing love in sending His beloved Son, Jesus Christ, to rescue us from our sins. In love, God sent Jesus to cleanse sinful people from their sins by His atoning blood, and progressively transform them to be like him in holiness and righteousness. Based upon the prayer "Love Lustres at Calvary," from The Valley of Vision, this song continues the apostolic tradition of expressing endless wonder in the boundless and perplexing love revealed in the Cross of Christ (Gal. 6:14). The cry of every true believer's heart is to not only apprehend the love of God more clearly, but to rest in it and be conformed to it in his or her personal character and daily life more fully.

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2011 National Worship Leader Conference

July 18, 2011 7:00 pm

to

July 21, 2011 9:30 pm

Pardon us for the silence here over the past couple of months. An unusual season of busyness immediately after Easter, a few big projects related to Reformed Praise, and a long personal vacation have distracted us.

I have the privilege of attending the 2011 National Worship Leader Conference in the Kansas City area next week. The conference is being run by the folks at Worship Leader Magazine, to which I subscribe. At this conference I'll get to learn from a wide variety of performers and worship leaders, professors, pastors, and other experts, and look forward to the diversity of approaches and opinions. I'm eager to have my "box" (the limits of my philosophical and practical approaches to music ministry) expanded and ready to be challenged and encouraged.

If you or someone you know is going and knows me or anything about Reformed Praise, please contact me; I'd love to meet anyone who's interested.

Responding to Judgment Day Predictions

In the mid 1990s I used to periodically listen to a radio station in New Jersey founded by Harold Camping called Family Radio. Once I started hearing Camping teach about the Bible and learned of his failed predication that Jesus would return in 1994, I lost interest in listening. This same group has garnered a huge amount of publicity in the past few weeks, making the national media spotlight with Camping's prediction that the new day of judgment was today, May 21st, 2011.

While much biblical prophecy about the end of the world is clouded by culturally removed symbolism, all evangelical, "Bible-believing" Christians agree that Judgment Day is real. As Jesus said in Mark 13:32, "concerning that day or that hour, no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father." The world will be destroyed and re-made, but not even Jesus knows the specific time of His return. Amazingly, Harold Camping thinks that he has come to understand the living Word of God better than the Word Himself (Jesus is called the "Word" in John chapter 1).

Predictions of a judgment day have been taking place for all of...

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Worship Values: Worship Must Be Congregationally Oriented

[ We've been working on rewriting our mission and also creating a series of "values" about worship that will communicate our vision for what worship should be all about. While those aren't completely finalized, I think it will be helpful to share some thoughts about each value in a series of short posts. ]

What kind of worship do we want to cultivate? Sixth: Congregationally Oriented

Gathered Worship
I like to call public worship "gathered worship" to emphasize several things including this very value. God commands that we worship Him in several spheres of our lives - in private, in our families, and with our local churches. I'll write more on these spheres next time in our seventh and last worship value. It is certainly true that worship is for God, and in an overarching sense, directed to God; after all, we are to worship God, not anything or anyone else. But at the same time, God wants our gathered worship to be edifying to the church. He has designed the church's public gatherings as a time when the entire church can participate, utilize their spiritual gifts, and be edified. Look at how Paul instructs the Corinthian...

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Praise the Lord Who Reigns Above

This hymn exhorts us to obey the countless commands in Scripture, especially in the Psalms, to praise the Lord. After reminding us of the reasons we have to praise Him - His holiness, love, greatness, noble deeds, and matchless power, it joins with Psalm 150 in calling for praise from instruments and all the creatures of the world. May God's praise continue to rise from His people as they join the witness of all creation in proclaiming God's honor and worth.

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I Know

Jessie Pounds wrote this hymn for Easter following the pattern of Job 19:25 where Job asserts the promise that though he will die, he knows that he will see his Redeemer with his own eyes. "I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the last he will stand upon the earth. And after my skin has been thus destroyed, yet in my flesh I shall see God, whom I shall see for myself, and my eyes shall behold, and not another." (Job 19:25-27). What a wonderful promise! The Lord will resurrect our bodies, reconstitute and repair them, and we will live for all eternity seeing our Redeemer with our own eyes. May the Lord give us faith to know that Jesus lives and will stand on the earth once again.

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A Personal Tribute to Chip Stam

While there have been several fitting tributes to Chip Stam shared in the past week (Ware and Schreiner, Pierre, SBTS), I would like to share a more personal tribute and explain how Chip and I got to know each other and what he meant to me.

My first memories of "Chip" (Carl) Stam date back to the early 1990s when I was a high school student in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. I became a Christian at the age of twelve and within a few years joined a church on my own called the Chapel Hill Bible Church. I was very involved in the youth group and worshiped there just about every Sunday. I remember pastor Jim Abrahamson preaching verse by verse through the book of Romans and Chip's ever-smiling face as he strummed his guitar and led the music on Sundays.

Chip had a flourishing music program which included both a choir and small ensemble with woodwind instruments and a rhythm section. The church used a variety of songs, the majority being the so-called "praise choruses" from that period including many songs by Graham Kendrick. This was the musical language of my...

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I Have a Dad

In his classic book Knowing God, theologian J.I. Packer makes the following assertion about the fatherhood of God.

If you want to judge how well a person understands Christianity, find out how much he makes of the thought of being God’s child, and having God as his Father. If this is not the thought that prompts and controls his worship and prayers and his whole outlook on life, it means that he does not understand Christianity very well at all. For everything that Christ taught, everything that makes the New Testament new, and better than the Old, everything that is distinctively Christian as opposed to merely Jewish, is summed up in the knowledge of the Fatherhood of God. “Father” is the Christian name for God… Our understanding of Christianity cannot be better than our grasp of adoption.

In one of the Jesus' most moving parables, the Parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32; this could also be called the Parable of the Lost Sons), we see salvation portrayed as the restoration of a family, the reuniting of a wayward son with his loving Father. This song draws its inspiration from this parable and attempts to help us remember what kind of father we have in the Lord - a Father who patiently endured our waywardness, even though it cost Him the life of His own precious Son. The word "Dad" is used instead of Father intentionally. When Jesus prayed, He used the Aramaic word "Abba" which translated literally would mean either Papa or Daddy, and His use of this term to address God would have been controversial at the time. The word is meant to show us the intimacy that we can have with our creator - He need no longer be simply the God of the universe, He can become our Daddy through the redeeming work of His Son.

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