When Worship is Fake

It is a sad thing to see when our worship seems fake, or at the very least forced. This can happen in many ways. It happens when you aren't not giving it the preparation time it needs, if your heart is in a selfish place, or it can happen when you are rushed and have a very limited time. For me personally, I struggle with all of those things. I find stressful and I become overcome with anxiety when I am being rushed to bring worship to a close. I feel we must give it the time needed to truly come into the presence of God. But I feel that our hearts can become hardened towards other speakers who may be eating into the music time. The only thing that will do is lead our hearts into a selfish place where the worship becomes about us and the speakers are taking away fro OUR time. 

In that sense, we can be lead into a self-serving downward spiral into sin. As Worship leaders, God has given us many responsibilities. We have the responsibility to sheperd people into the presence of the Lord. And when we give a false impression or a bad example of how to do that, we are doing more damage than we know. As we lead, we need to give the worship everything we have and everything God deserves. When we become selfish, we steal attention from the Lord and hoard it all to ourselves. Fake worship can come from us being fake, us just going through the motions. That is when we have really blown it.

There are many other things that can cause our worship to become less of what it should be, but in order to avoid them we must know what real worship looks like. The best example of what a true worshiper looks like is Jesus Christ. Maybe He didn't lead worship in the way our modern minds want to label it, but He was the greatest at worshipping the Father. His entire life and ministry was completely devoted to worship, worship that brought honor to God. It would have been easy for Jesus to become prideful and take all of the credit for everything miracle He did, but He didn't. This is the example we must follow in order for our worship to be genuine.