Devotional from Pastor Dave July 26, 2023

This past Saturday, the four of us piled into our car and drove over to Nashville to see Ed Sheeran in concert at the Titans stadium. And what a concert it was! It was Wesley’s first big concert like that, and I told him not to expect them all to be like that. There were fireworks, a rotating stage, and fancy videography to match the music. There were 73,000 people in the stadium that night. It set a record for attendance at a music concert in Tennessee, surpassing even Taylor Swift’s recent concert there.

Ed Sheeran is the moppy red-haired English singer-songwriter who has piled up a bunch of hits over the past several years, like “The A Team,” “Thinking Out Loud,” and “Perfect.” He performed for over two hours straight, most of it as the lone musician on the stage.

I couldn’t help but think that a lot of the concert reminded me of worship. It was exhilarating to join our voices with 73,000 other people in singing some of these songs that we know by heart, just like it’s such a joy to belt out beloved hymns and songs with a gathered congregation in worship. He also led us all in a call-and-response participation that reminded me of times when we’ve asked one side of the sanctuary to read the bold print of a responsive reading and the other side to read the light print. He engaged us and made us feel a part of the concert.

The concert did what I believe good worship does. It made me feel something; it made me think something; and it made me do something.

For example, I had already known that his song “Eyes Closed” was about his grief over the loss of a dear friend last year, and he mentioned that when he introduced the song. And I had listened to that song dozens of times. But there was something about the way he performed it live that night that reached into my heart and touched my own grief at the loss of my mom this spring. I actually got a little choked up during it. It made me feel something.

Later, when he performed “Photograph,” which is really a love song, I heard its lyrics in a new way, inviting us not to romantic love but to a more Christlike love. It was as if Jesus were speaking through the words of this song:

Loving can hurt, loving can hurt sometimes

But it’s the only thing that I know

When it gets hard, you know it can get hard sometimes

But it’s the only thing that makes us feel alive

It made me think of those words in a whole new way.

And the concert also inspired me do something, which is to tell you about it here!

That’s also what good worship does. It makes us feel something. It makes us think something. And ultimately it invites us to do something, something new or different, and which may be nothing more complicated than to simply tell someone else about it.