Friday • 6/30/2023

Welcome to Daily Office Devotions. I’m Reggie Kidd. Thanks for joining me.

We’re taking a detour from the Daily Office readings this week and next. Instead, we’re thinking through various facets of worship and how our Lord provides meaningful communion with him through our formal corporate worship as well as in individual worship in our daily devotions. The thoughts offered here are excerpts (sometimes lightly edited) from articles I wrote for Worship Leader Magazine a few years ago. 

They come from a season in my life when I was on a journey from more generic free-form worship to worship shaped by the classic liturgy. I hope these observations help you in your own quest to love God and your neighbor.

“A Campaign Only Love Can Win”

“Music is a universal phenomenon but not a universal language,” maintains ethnomusicologist Robin Harris. So true. Jake and Elwood Blues (The Blues Brothers, 1980) might not have made it out of Bob’s Country Bunker alive if they had not figured out the local language was “Theme from Rawhide,” not “Gimme Some Lovin’.” 

Sometimes it’s not that easy. Once, some friends and I never got past a group’s stony silence with our songs. Another friend had asked us to come and lead worship. He thought our stuff was cool and he thought his group would think so too. Wrong! Unfortunately, unlike the Blues Brothers, we didn’t have a wide enough repertoire to adjust to the situation. It was a night to remember.  

What does it take to learn somebody’s “heart language” of music? It takes learning their heart. It takes the singular language of love that Christ’s followers learn from the one they follow.   

Singing Is Not the Only Worship

The Christian faith was born in the Middle East — born unwelcomed, born in controversy. It established itself largely through its irrepressible love. “Look … how they love one another!” complained unbelievers about Christ’s followers, according to the North African theologian Tertullian around A.D. 197/198. That love, observed modern historian E. R. Dodds, was “a major cause, perhaps the strongest single cause, of the spread of Christianity.” 

Nearly 2,000 years later, nothing’s changed. 

A friend of mine — call her Margie — ministers frequently in Tertullian’s part of the world. Hers is not a ministry of music, but she has a lot to teach those of us who think worship is just about the music. On a recent trip she had been asked to bring a teaching for women in ministry:

I really struggled with what I should share with the women.  I had prepared two messages, but neither seemed appropriate.  During my restless night before my scheduled time to speak it seemed that Jesus clearly spoke to me saying, ”Wash their feet.” But where would I find the basins and towels?  I shared my desire with a servant leader and within a few hours everything appeared in our “upper room.”

I modeled the process with a dear sister who serves in a highly restrictive country. In humbleness I knelt before her and while washing her feet I quoted verses of encouragement and prayed for her as I finished. We traded places. The Spirit’s presence was very evident as we clung to one another in love and tears. Other ladies came and filled the chairs and washed each other’s feet. There were many tears, but much joy.  

One missionary wanted to wash others’ feet but did not allow someone to wash hers. That night when she shared with her husband, he knelt down and washed her feet. Another wanted to have her feet washed for her team member who was not at the conference. When she returned to her country of service, she washed her feet. One of the gifts we had taken for the ladies were bedroom slippers — not knowing that we would be washing their feet. 

When the ladies shared their experience with their husbands the vision caught and spread. In fact, when the elders from that country visited the church leaders in yet another restrictive country — one where there is military conflict and where the gospel is just struggling to regain a foothold — they knelt and washed their brothers’ feet. Once again, the humbling, healing service was blessed. 

It was as though the Lord were anointing an army of footwashers, to wage a campaign only love can win. 

The way of love is the way of immersion. It’s the way of observation. It’s the way of listening. It’s a way that Margie had learned over time. If she had been a musician, she wouldn’t have needed beer bottles flying through chicken wire à la The Blues Brothers to get her attention. Nor would she have encountered stony silence from people who found her music alien. 

She loved — she simply loved. Then when she finally made her offering, its recipients made it their own and found a way to multiply it. 

Be blessed this day, 

Reggie Kidd+