Today is the day Rend Collective’s new album ‘Choose To Worship’ is released. I think their post today (see below) is very apt for us all. Worship is always a choice. Let’s choose to worship (and you can sing along on Facebook Live with them at 7 p.m. tonight – free concerts are brill!)
Til the darkness
turns to dawn
I lift my praises
There are mountaintop moments in all our lives – where we breathe in the goodness of God and breathe out His praises just as naturally and reflexively as our physical breath. Unfortunately the amount of time we spend on this “worship sweet spot” probably totals up to be about 0.1 percent of our lives. So what do we do with the other 99.9 percent? We choose to worship.
Life is hard. Worship will not always or even usually be our default setting. It’s not initially natural to respond to a cancer diagnosis, or the death of a loved one or a major career setback with a song of praise and trust. But like a pilot encountering dangerous landing conditions, when these storms gather over us we have to switch off autopilot, wrestle back the controls and manually, intentionally choose worship. Because God is still worthy in the valley. He is good when life is not. And that’s the anchor of our souls.
We used a labyrinth as our album art concept to reflect the confusing. messiness of life. So many twists and turns, so many little micro decisions, so much uncertainty and doubt, so much fear. In the middle of all this it can be so easy to forgot to make the one choice that ultimately makes all the others insignificant : to love God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength.
This album is an invitation into the spiritual discipline that we have been living as a community of building altars of praise in the darkness, trusting that whether or not the dawn comes, worship is still our sacred duty – and privilege.
We hope this album gives you a vocabulary so that you can sing from the shackles, lift an anthem of defiance against your circumstances and raise a shout of joy that demoralises the enemy in his attempts to silence you. We hope that that nothing will ever steal your song. We hope that you will join us in choosing worship.
