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You’re the first to admit a night with Casting Crowns encompasses an
evening of worship.
Right, because you can do a lot of things at a concert, but for us,
pointing at people or elevating talent or anything like that might make
for a great evening, but it’s not going to do anything eternal.
From the start, we’re trying to tear down all the pictures you might
have in your head and let you know we’re just less than ordinary people
up there on the stage that God loves and is doing things through. That
to me is a little easier taking home with you, knowing that God can do
something in my life too so there’s a lot of motivations behind that.
Worship is what we’re created to do. We want to sings songs that are
worship but we also want to sing sings that encourage you toward a life
of worship. We’re created to worship.
You’re so right, we’re created to worship, but it still amazing me,
Mark, when I’m in church and they begin with 3 or 4 worship songs to
start off Sunday morning and if I look around I see so many people who
are just not getting into it.
You’re right.
Why do you think that is and what are they missing?
Well I think if it’s not in you it’s not going to come out of you, so
it’s not something you can generate. Music can generate a lot, but down
deep worship happens when it’s more of a response and not something
you’re trying to conjure up as if as though I’ve been walking with Jesus
this week and when I come together with my friends, my brothers and
sisters here, now I get to celebrate the week that we just spent at
home, you know, when a lot of times, even for me, worship can sometimes
become, ‘Okay, I have to flush my head of everything that happened this
week so I can listen to the sermon.’
If you’re walking with Jesus all week, when you show up at church,
you’re ready to celebrate what happened and worship happens naturally.
I
also think worship is a word we believe should be celebrated in song on
Sunday morning but like you said and like the Bible clearly states on so
many occasions, we were made and created to worship, and worship as an
element is something we can partake in all the time.
Yeah, that’s where the song Lifesong came from, teaching my
children and the teenagers and the families here at Eagle’s Landing
Church what Colossians says:
All of it is supposed to make Him smile, that’s what worship is, making
God smile with your life or for what your motivation is behind life even
more so.
I talk to my teenagers a lot, I’m like, ‘Hey, I know you like this song
but you didn’t write this song, this is somebody else’s song to Jesus so
reading it off a screen doesn’t make it worship, this is somebody else’s
moment with their Father - what makes it worship is the heart behind it
and the life behind it.’ |
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You wrote the phrase
The Alter
and the Door in a line of Somewhere in the Middle, which is on
the record, but then you had this little 4 hour journey to Nashville and
the song was born.
Yeah it
was, it came out of nowhere. To me, it sort of encompasses the whole record and
where it’s all headed. There’s a difference between me at the alter and me when
I’m out the door. It’s so easy to live for Jesus in church, everybody’s on the
same page and everybody agrees, life is beautiful, but when you get out in the
world, it’s like something kind of goes loopy, and I think a lot of what that
is, is because we as believers are leaning on other people’s walk with Jesus -
I’m soaking up my pastor’s walk with Jesus, I’m enjoying my worship team’s
intimacy with God and all of that is great as long as I’m with them, it’s good,
but when I go home, they don’t go home with me, they don’t go to work with me,
they don’t go to school with me.
What
God’s been showing me is I have to have my own walk, my own every day walking
around friendship with God if this is going to work, and a lot of time we don’t
have that, we’ve got other people’s Jesus, you know, we have the youth camp
Jesus and the revival service Jesus and all that other kind of stuff, so to me,
when we come to town, that entire experience is about having your own walk with
God. What does that look like? Why is it that we are so up and down and not so
steady and focused on Him and pouring our on others? There’s a reason for that,
and we’ve been diving into that on this current tour. It’s been amazing.
Why do
you think it is? Are there just too many distractions? Sometimes the biggest
enemy of Christians seems to be Christians themselves. What is it that gets in
the way of having this incredible relationship with Christ? Is it pride?
I think
that’s exactly what it is, but when it really boils down, the first thing that
Satan comes after in a believer’s life in my opinion, is his time with God. He
wants to separate me and let me lean on what you believe, and what my pastor
says and what this song says and just what everyone else says.
Mostly,
a lot of what our theology is built around is just logic, what makes sense to
us, like surely God would do this or there’s no way He would do that, we start
to say stuff like that and it’s a sign that you’re kind of wondering off.
When
we’re not spending time with God every day, that voice gets a little greyer and
it’s hard to know, was that from God or from me? How do I know when it’s God?
Then we start to look for special books, ‘well I need a special book on this,
and I need a new song about this,’ instead of having every day a quiet time and
time with Him every day.
There
needs to be you and Jesus time, instead of you and what someone else said about
Jesus, just you and Jesus. Devotion books and all that stuff is great but man,
I’ve gotta have some me and Jesus time.
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