As many of you may know I lead worship at my local church and to keep the worship vibrant and fresh I try and add new songs to our repotoire as often as I can. Consequently I find myself singing a lot of different songs. It was last Sunday morning when I was rehearsing before the service when someone pointed something out to me…

It was a genuine mistake - a typo on my words. We were singing that great hymn, ‘In Christ Alone’ and in the last verse my copy of the words said ‘From life’s first cry, to final death‘. If you have ever sung this song before you will know that it should read ‘final breath‘. Oops. I have probably sung that song a good ten times previous and never noticed that I had been insinuating that we as Christians have more than one death…

“Thats no big deal” I hear you cry - and you are probably right. But it did cause me to think a little further about what I sing. It took someone to point out to me that what I was singing was completely incorrect and if they had not I’d probably still be singing the wrong words. My mind was just on auto-pilot and it says to me that I probably wasn’t giving my full attention to what I was singing and what the words actually meant.

I think there is a danger for all of us who engage in corporate sung worship to fall into this trap. In the age of good quality modern worship bands it is easy to switch off and enjoy the songs - when, just as we should weigh any prophecies spoke over our lives, we should also be weighing, and meaning every word we say in sung worship to God. It doesn’t matter how catchy the tune is, if it is incorrect or dodgy in any way, we should not be singing it.

I heard a great talk by Louis Giglio who said that we “should stop singing the songs [in our corporate meetings] until we start living the life”. Sung worship has power, it blesses God and draws us close to Him. Lets be vigilent about what we sing and more importantly, mean everything we sing too.

As an aside - this is not the worst typo I have ever seen… My favourite was at an event where they had printed song sheets and the chorus to ‘Your love is amazing’ by Brenton Brown went ‘Hallelujah, Your love makes me sin…’ Whoops… :)