How to Stay Fresh & Focused as a Worship Leader (Podcast) - a podcast by NLW International

The question we are discussing today is how can we stay fresh and focused as spiritual leaders. This is a subject I’ve been studying on a lot lately because I’ll be teaching on this very thing at a leadership workshop I’m leading in Fort Wayne, Indiana at Sweetwater Sound later this week. It’s an important topic for any leader in the church, including worship leaders.

 

Read & Rest

To stay fresh and focused, I think it’s important to read good books and to read broadly–not just books on worship, but other books as well. For instance, I just finished a book on Abraham Lincoln titled Lessons on Spiritual Leadership by Elton Trueblood. I try to read one or two books per month. I am not a voracious reader, and I don’t try to read everything that comes out. However, I think it’s important to stay fresh by keeping our minds in tune with what we can learn from books. Even if I don’t always agree with what I’m reading, it helps keep me fresh and sharp.

Something else that’s really important for spiritual leaders is rest–good old-fashioned sleep. Turn off your phone. Turn off your TV, and get to sleep earlier tonight. Be sure you allow your body the amount of rest it needs. For me, I need an average of seven and a half to eight hours of sleep each night. I don’t always get that, but I try to prioritize that much because it helps me be more focused and more effective throughout my day. Hebrews says God gives his children rest. I believe that could include physical rest in the form of sleep for our tired bodies.

The third way that I believe it’s important to maintain and refuel our freshness and our focus each day as leaders is to do what I call the “Leader’s Daily Takes.” There are three takes, to be exact, that I want to encourage you to build into your daily habit each morning.

 

Take a bath

The first daily take is to take a bath. Everybody will appreciate if you take a bath. We were visiting a church recently and the lady in front of us had apparently not had a bath in a few days. I don’t have to tell you how we knew that. The aroma around her was foul. I’m sure she is a sweet lady and maybe she couldn’t help it, but honestly she smelled bad. We honestly didn’t want to sit there anymore.

The reality is leaders need to take baths too. Spiritual leaders need to take a cleansing spiritual bath every day. Jesus said in John chapter 15:3, “You are already clean because of the word I have spoken to you” (NIV). David prayed in Psalm 51 that God would cleanse him with hyssop. 1 John 1:9 says, “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” The idea of being clean in our souls is throughout the Bible. In the first chapter of his book, Isaiah wrote, “Wash and make yourselves clean…Though your sins are like scarlet,

they shall be as white as snow” (Isaiah 1:16, 18a NIV).

The idea of being washed in the blood of Jesus is a powerful reality that we take for granted. On a daily basis, as we walk through this world, we get dirty. Not only on the outside, but we also allow sins sometimes to happen and we don’t confess them immediately. Every day, like Paul, we need to die to ourselves, to die daily.

If you go to our blog post for this podcast episode, you can download a process I put together for taking a cleansing bath of confession.

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