Meat Church

When your words came, I ate them;
    they were my joy and my heart’s delight…

Jeremiah 15:16

How sweet are your words to my taste,
    sweeter than honey to my mouth!

Psalm 119:103

What does it mean to be “Spirit-led” in our Sunday morning worship services?

One way to answer this question is to compare it to the beautiful art of cooking red meat. Preparing steak and brisket can teach us a great deal about how the Spirit moves in a worship service.

There are certain traditions within the church that virtually equate being “Spirit-led” with being “spontaneous.” You often find this kind of thinking in charismatic and Pentecostal churches. If a worship song or sermon is planned, then it’s not very Spirit-led. To be Spirit-led in these churches means to follow the spontaneous promptings of the Spirit in the moment. So a Spirit-led song is one that doesn’t follow the words on the screen but instead spontaneously flows from the heart. A Spirit-led worship service isn’t scripted.

This view of what it means to be Spirit-led is often a reaction against the hyper-scripted liturgical traditions. Sometimes it’s a reaction against the new form of hyper-scripted worship service — the multi-site, hyper-produced, mega-church service that is timed down to the millisecond.

It’s probably important to mention that not all things that are “spontaneous” in a worship service are from the Holy Spirit. This is why it is often unhelpful to always equate “Spirit-led” with “spontaneous.” Sometimes spontaneous worship moments by musicians or off-the-cuff stories that are unplanned by the preacher are not coming from the Holy Spirit but simply from their human spirit. As a worse-case scenario, some spontaneous things in worship could be coming from an evil spirit. So “Spirit-led” can’t always be equated with “spontaneous.”

While I agree that the Spirit does move through spontaneous moments in the worship service, I also believe that the Spirit moves through plans that are made by the pastors as they listen to the Spirit all week long. These two ways of being Spirit-led (the Spirit-led spontaneous and the Spirt-led planning) go together really well and remind me of two beautiful ways to prepare red meat.

The Spirit-led spontaneous reminds me of throwing steaks on the grill. The Holy Spirit in scripture is often depicted as a fire. The fire heats up and the flame creates an awesome char on the meat. Steaks cook fast. These quick, spontaneous moments of being Spirit-led can and do happen in a worship service where people are willing to follow the Spirit’s lead.

But there’s another way to make meat taste amazing. Smoking meat produces an incredible result if done correctly, but the rule of smoking meat is “low and slow.” With smoking meat, it’s not the flame that imparts flavor to the meat (as is the case with grilling), it’s the smoke. This is how Spirit-led worship planning should happen throughout the week. As the worship leaders and pastors sit in God’s presence allowing the Spirit to speak to them all week long, the deep aroma of Christ is imparted to the service (2 Corinthians 2:14-15). It’s not spontaneous. It’s planned. It’s low and slow. It’s following the lead of the Spirit days in advance, but it’s still “Spirit-led.”

With grilling, the meat needs to already be tender for it to work. You don’t grill tough meats, you smoke them. This is often true of a worship service as well. When things are spontaneous, they work best with truths that are already obvious, already tender, already able to be readily consumed.

But if you are dealing with passages of scripture or truths that are hard to understand, that are tough, then you need more than a quick, spontaneous Spirit-led moment. You need a low and slow studying of scripture. You need a low and slow process of listening to the Spirit speak the deep truths of God’s word to your heart. You need time. You need patience. It’s a lot like smoking tough cuts of meat until they are fall-apart tender. It takes the “low and slow” of planning and studying to unpack the deeper truths of scripture.

My favorite kind of worship service, and favorite way to prepare steak, is to combine both of these methods. When it comes to meat, it’s called a reverse sear. My brother-in-law did this for me on my birthday. He took a ribeye steak and first smoked it for a few hours. Then right at the end, when the temperature was almost medium-rare, he threw it on the grill to get that sear and that char. This steak was amazing because it had the smoke favor imparted to it from the low and slow, and it had the charred sear on the outside imparted from the grill. This is also what we need in our worship services.

We need the Spirit-led spontaneous moments in our worship, in our sermons, and in our prayer times. And we also need the Spirit-led planning the week before the worship service, so that we can consume difficult truths that have been tenderized with forethought, study, and Spirit-inspired wisdom. Our worship services need both. One without the other can fall short of the fullness that is available to us.

Our goal for every Sunday service should be a Spirit-led reverse sear – spontaneous moments with the Lord combined with tenderized, deep truth of scripture. Amen.