Christian Pettyness

In the past couple days I found a couple blog posts by Christians complaining about worship songs. The posts were not very clear to me, but as far as I could tell, the bloggers didn't like how so many worship songs use the pronouns 'I' and 'me', instead of 'we' and 'us' and 'you'. They also were saying that the songs were not appropriate for corporate worship. This bugged me a lot. Who cares what pronouns are used?! What matters is that the songs enable you to focus on worshiping God. And if you are in a group of people, all worshiping God, then you are obviously worshiping corporately. As long as the songs lyrics glorify God, pronouns don't matter. We aren't Bugs Bunny and Daffy arguing about what hunting season it is.

Now, after spending 45 minutes to an hour reading through comments and complaining to myself, I realized something. I was just totally wasting my time. And the bloggers and commentators were as well. I also figured out that the main reason I was so frustrated with the posts wasn't their subject. It was the fact that spending that much time on a subject that has no bearing on someones salvation was just pathetic.

To be blunt, that is exactly the kind of thing that Satan wants us to focus on. The more time we spend bickering about minor issues like what version of the Bible is best, or what style of worship to use, or if we should use hymnals instead of projectors, the less we have to pay attention to the people around us who need salvation. It also makes us look like fools. If I had been a non-Christian reading those blog posts, I would have been laughing my read end off at how stupid those idiot Christians are.

Now, I am not saying that you should only be concerned with things that affect salvation. Christians definitely should figure out what the believe about many doctrinal differences. What I am saying is that you should not let those differences create rifts between you and your fellow believers. You also should not let them stop you from worshiping and serving God. The bloggers in the posts I read <em>seemed</em> to be so focused on how horrible it was that the songs didn't fit their desires, they were not able to worship.

So, next time something in church gets you agitated, take a step back and check to see that it really matters. Make sure you don't waste time on the small things when you could be working on the big things.

Submitted by david.reagan on