As we continually strive to honor God with our gifts of worship, we need to set realistic expectations. Even though we may desire perfectionism, we have to acknowledge the fact that we will never be perfect and that God does not expect us to be perfect. He can take our imperfections and use them for His good. What we really need to do, then, is understand that there is a greater purpose at work than ours; a "big picture" per se.
For a small portion of us, this realization that we don't need to shoulder the burden of making sure that we worship perfectly in order to bring about God's will is a great relief. For a larger portion of us, we need to work on the extremely difficult task of stepping back, becoming vulnerable, and allowing God to use our imperfections for His good.
The first step in this is realizing that our expectations need to come from God; not from our own prognosis of what we think worship should look, sound, or feel like. Noland states, "We need to give our expectations over to Him and exchange them for what He expects, not what we expect. We might be expecting artistic perfection, that might be the furthest thing from God's mind. Try to keep the big picture in mind. God cares about all the details of our artistic endeavors, but He's also in the business of saving souls. What's more important? That our efforts come off perfectly or that God's name be praised and that lost people come to know Him through our ministry? Try to keep things in His perspective" (Noland, 135).
Yet, this doesn't mean that we now get to play Parcheesi during rehearsals instead of working diligently through our worship music. Conversely, this means that we need to ever work harder on opening our ears to hear what the Lord is wanting of us and our spiritual gifts. "He expects us to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with Him (Mic. 6:8). God expects us to grow spiritually. The end result is His responsibility. Our job is to cooperate with the process. We put so much pressure on ourselves to be perfect (the end product), when God is more concerned with the process (that we walk humbly with Him)" (Noland, 135).
There are countless examples of ways that we have become more concerned with the end result than with allowing God's process to work in our lives. Unfortunately, many of these examples come with some embarrassment of knowing that we caused the uncomfortable conundrum by not following God's direction. Sadly, many of these lessons were learned in hindsight. This prompts our reflection questions:
How do we know that we are following God's big picture of saving souls instead of our own unrealistic expectations?
What can we do on a daily/weekly/monthly basis to ensure that we are in a place to be able to hear what God is saying?
