Corby Stephens

The worship leader for our church, Jordan Weston, and I, have started a new podcast project called Notes from the Road. It is proving, at least for us, to be a fascinating experiment/project. It’s goal, as simply as we can put it, is to get people thinking and talking.

Thinking and talking about what? The role of worship in the life of the church and the believer. We say right up front that we don’t offer any answers, we don’t offer any “how to’s”, at least not beyond “this is what we do and why we do it this way”, but we don’t say that any of it is the way you are supposed to do it too. What we want is for worship leaders, pastors of churches, musicians on worship teams, sound people, anyone involved in worship ministry, to rethink why it is that they do things the way they do them.

Worship conferences are loaded with all kinds of practical stuff, and praise God for that. What is often missing is they “why” behind things, the heart behind things. Worship has become a programmed element that is part of the service to the point of it being programmed down to the minute. No room for flexibility, no room for the Holy Spirit to be spontaneous. While discussing these things one day, Jordan and I thought of trying to put together a new kind of conference. After quickly realizing that would be a tremendous undertaking, we thought that a podcast, a series of conversations with people who have been (or are) through the process of being built up, then broken down, to learn what the essentials are, would be a more efficient way to get this “out there”. This is what we are after.

Please do visit the website linked above to browse the podcast episodes on the web. You can also go to our listing in the iTunes podcast directory and subscribe there. If you do so, please visit it again and submit a review. Feed back is welcomed!

So far we have had the chance to interview Ron Stephens (my dad, musician, worship leader, music producer) and Dominic Balli (worship pastor at Reality Carpenteria). This weekend we will be interviewing Terry Clark. I’m so stoked. Be sure to check back Monday for that one!

Yeah, I’ve been absent for a while. I’ve got a couple in the cue. Stay tuned.

So far as I can tell, in many places on the planet, when two people get married, the assets of both people no longer belong to them individually, they are one. They each are now beneficiaries of the other’s stuff. What’s more, they also acquire the debt of the other person. After all, “the two shall become one.”

In America, when a couple get’s divorced, what typically happens is that the assets (and presumably the debt) the couple had gets split 50/50. If one person entered the marriage rich and the other poor, the poor person doesn’t walk away poor, they walk away with half. However, and I don’t know how new of an invention this is, there is something that a couple can enter into before getting married to prevent this from happening. It’s called a prenuptial agreement. It spells out who has the rights to what if the marriage ends in divorce.

As I think through my own walk with the Lord, and as I survey the body of Christ at large, it seems to me that we enter into a relationship with Jesus Christ with a prenuptial agreement.

Jesus in Our Lives
We don’t understand the debt that Jesus absorbed. We don’t understand that Jesus has taken upon Himself all of our debt and paid it in full on the cross. He became sin so that we could be righteous. We limit the access God has in our lives. We don’t let Him have access to all of our assets. We don’t give all of ourselves to Him. We limit how much control He has over us. Those who try Jesus and bail on Him entered into the thing with a prenup.

Us in Jesus’ Life
We don’t understand or realize what we have access to in Jesus. We don’t get who and what we are in Him. We don’t take advantage of the exceedingly, abundantly above all we could ever ask or think. We have not because we ask not. We don’t leave the world and cleve unto Jesus.

What conditions have you put on Jesus? What conditions do you think Jesus has put on you that may not even be reality? What are you missing out on in His life? What are you keeping Him from in yours?

Tear up that prenup. Give yourself over to Him completely. After all, He gave Himself over completely to you and for you.

Over the past, I don’t know, “season” (how’s that for a word that describes an ambiguous amount of time?), a common theme has popped up, both in people I have directly interacted with and observed from afar. It typically centers around conflict between people who say they are Christians. From problems in marriages to the division over the Emergent Church, a theme has surfaced. It has to do with the lordship of Jesus. Who is on the throne of your life, and what impact is that having?

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I’ve just finished reading and re-skimming the book The Diving Mentor by Wayne Cordiero, a pastor on Oahu. It is perhaps the best and simplest book on the why’s and the how’s of personal devotional time. If I can be honest, it is in this area that I have had one of my biggest struggles. Being a pastor I already spend so much time in the word. It does speak to me, it does change me, but most of the time I’m thinking, “How can I communicate this to others?” It needs to speak to me, it needs to teach me before I can teach it to others. It is this cool opportunity I have to spend so much time in the word that actually makes personal devotions one of the most challenging things for me.

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