Your preparation is needed.
Before you lead praise and worship you need to prepare in prayer, in waiting upon the Lord and rehearse with your worship team, your preparation is needed for Sunday service, concert, revival and vigil or any Church service. You must be prayerfully prepare the heart of God’s people to connect the throne of grace, water the ground with your prayer unto God because your sweet voice cannot connect the heart of people to God in worship and praise except the spirit of God, commit the atmospheres into God’s hands in prayer and come against the spirit of heaviness, weariness, sadness and command the spirit of Joy into the service.
One of the things that I have found to be very important is to seek the Lord beforehand and to prepare yourself by making a song list, I see leading worship very much like preparing a sermon, a good pastor prepares carefully ahead of time, putting much time and prayer into a sermon, Jesus said that He only did what He saw the father doing. Moses followed the pillar of cloud and the pillar of fire and only moved when they moved. In the same way we as worship leaders need to be followers of the Holy Spirit, He is really the worship leader, we are simply following what He wants to emphasize when we lead, when making a song list make it according to what you believe the Holy Spirit is telling you for that particular service, we need to prepare and plan, yet be flexible and leave room for the nudging of the Holy Spirit during the service to lead us in another direction, pray during the week and ask the Lord to bring songs to your mind and then write them down, I believe we need to be flexible and plan according to what the Lord is saying.
What praise and worship is not.
In our attempt to carry out praise and worship in the Church, the biblical standard of acceptable praise and worship has been neglected and jeopardized; we now have sinners as praise leaders and instrumentalists. Our attempts to modernize the Church through praise and worship have made us murderers, something must be done to correct these evils before they escalate to return the whole system of the body of Christ, and we have to revisit this issue prayerfully.
Many of the song we sing in our Churches are neither for praise nor for worship and we are using it to celebrate Christ. Based on all these definitions of worship and praise which makes the power of God not to be made manifest in our services, many of the things we think we experience is just a mare feeling. The song of worship and praise we sing must reflect biblical meaning of praise and worship, the king of kings and the Lord of lords said that “this people that I formed for myself; they shall show forth my praise Isa 43:21, And when I am lifted up on the earth I will draw everyone to myself Jn 12:32, From the lips of children and infants you have ordained praise Ps 8:2”, you are to give God undiluted worship and praise from your heart, what comes from your heart must be a genuine one and have you ever check the lyrics of the songs of praise you offer unto God?, there is a need for me to let you know what praise and worship is not.
Walex Gospel Music blog247 