I Cannot Tell Anymore What Is Craft

He knows, twelve bars out, that he is going to drop the band before the bridge, and he knows what the room will do when he does.

That is not cynicism. It is fourteen years of learning a real skill. He knows how long a phrase can be held before it stops meaning anything, he knows which key opens the back of a room, he knows that if he lets a line sit for four beats longer than is comfortable, something in that hall softens.

He also loves God, has loved God since he was seventeen, and would tell you without hesitation that the reason he does any of this is the God he loves.

The problem is that he can no longer see the seam.

When his hand goes up, he cannot tell whether it went up because something moved in him or because he has done this a thousand times and that is where the hand goes. When his voice breaks slightly on the third chorus, he does not know whether that is grief or technique, and he has begun to suspect that the honest answer is that there is no longer a difference in him, and that this is the worst thing he could possibly say out loud.

So he audits himself from the first chord to the last, every single week, while leading other people into something he cannot verify in himself.

If you have lost the seam, put the case down and get a coffee. Nothing about that platform or one person on it is going to be run down here.

The audit is the problem, not the craft

Let us separate two things he has fused, because the fusion is what is exhausting him.

The craft is not the enemy. Skill is not insincerity. A joiner who can cut a joint without measuring has not become a fraud, and a man who knows how long to hold a phrase has learned something about people and about music, and learning it took him fourteen years of real work.

What is doing the damage is the audit. He has appointed himself inspector of his own interior, in real time, during the one activity that cannot survive being watched from the inside. Nobody can love and observe themselves loving at the same time. The observing crowds out the thing it is trying to verify.

You are not a fraud on that platform. Nothing you cannot verify about your own motives has ever been the measure of what God receives. I am not saying it to reassure a tired man. Scripture says the Son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father do (John 5:19), which puts the initiative outside the one doing the work, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it hold in a man twelve bars from a bridge.

The initiative was never inside the worker

Here is the part that turned this for me, and it takes nothing off anybody who leads.

Read where the Lord locates the source of what He does, because it is not where a person auditing themselves would look.

Then answered Jesus and said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, The Son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father do.John 5:19

Nothing of himself. That is not modesty, it is a description of how the work runs: He looks outward, sees what is being done, and joins it.

Which means the question is not whether the right feeling was generated inside the worker before the work began. It is whether the worker is looking in the right direction. And looking outward is the one posture an internal audit makes impossible, because an audit turns the eyes inward.

You may look outward instead of inward, and Scripture puts the initiative entirely outside the one doing the work. That is written into the verse itself, and it is the Holy Spirit who brings it to a man with his hand on a fader.

Nothing here is against the platform

Something must be said very plainly, or this becomes a page that quietly sneers at the thing he does.

Leading is a real ministry. The hand going up is not theater, the people in that hall are not being handled, and the moment before the bridge is not manipulation because a man knows how it works. A doctor who knows what a drug does has not thereby stopped caring about the patient.

And nothing here is against expressive worship, on the platform or off it. The demonstrative are not showing off. The reserved are not deeper. A man who weeps at the third chorus and a man who does not are not on a ladder.

What He gave you is not a demonstration. You have nothing to prove in that room. Scripture says the manifestation of the Spirit is given to every man to profit withal (1 Corinthians 12:7), where the aim is the good of the room rather than the verification of the leader, and it is the Holy Spirit, and not a man's ability to certify his own interior, who does the work in a meeting.

And if these fourteen years have cost more than the friends at that table know, if sleep has gone, if Sunday has started to frighten you, please talk to somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if there is danger to anybody tonight. That is not a detour around God. It is one of the ways He keeps people.