In the Jacobs’ household, ‘tis the season for lots of planning (confession: it’s always that season in the Jacob’s household). We are OCD planners. We have spreadsheets, Word documents, notes, to-do lists, calendars, reminders, etc. for just about everything in our life. Mark actually prayed for us to be spontaneous at times when he married us.

Okay, back to the reason I’m writing today: “Being Prepared.” Most of us have heard the saying, “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” But even if you plan, sometimes you can forget things, run out of time, or the unexpected happens. Today, I want to write about one aspect of being prepared for worship.

Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God. – Colossians 3:16 (ESV)

One of the many ways we worship at Journey is through song.

My goal as a worship pastor at Journey on Sunday morning is to first worship the God who saved me; but in doing so, I should lead others in worship along side me. One thing I have to remind myself of a lot, is that even though I’ve listened to a worship song or played it 100 times, some of you may have never heard it. It may be quite hard to sing with us with thankfulness in your heart when you’re trying to learn a song.

To help you be prepared in this sense, you may have noticed that in Journey’s weekly email we are now including the song list for the current week with links to the songs to listen and learn them. If you haven’t, you should check it out. The links are on the right column of the email.

My hope is to do what we can to help you focus on us less and more on Christ as much as possible.

Wendy and I will be out of town for the next couple of weeks for vacation, but we cannot wait to come back and to celebrate Christmas with our Journey family.

Richard Jacobs
Worship Pastor