I don’t know if it’s just me, but I wonder if some of the worship songs we sing are more about us than they are about God. So many of the songs I find myself singing in church end up saying more about what I am, what I am doing, or intend to do than about what God is, what he is doing etc. Most of them have lines like ‘I will worship with all of my heart…” “I will give you all my worship….” “I surrender all….” and so on. Now there’s nothing wrong with this – the Psalms do it quite a bit, but if that is all we sing, and if the subject of most sentences is ‘I’, then it ends up pointing more to me than to God. The song subtly becomes more about me than it does about God. Worshipping God is not a celebration of our intentions or desires, but is being enabled to gaze upon him and lose ourselves in that, or allowing him to gaze on us and sensing his searching eyes on us.

I’ve been listening out for worship songs that don’t have the words ‘I’, ‘me’ or ‘us’ in them. And I haven’t found many. Of course we want songs that include us. But maybe we don’t quite have the balance right here. When I end up singing about my desire to worship, there’s always a little voice in my head that asks ‘do you really want to worship with all of your heart, all of the time?’ Do you really surrender all? Not only in the moment of worship in church but in the rest of my life? To be honest I think I’d prefer to sing a bit more often about God & his love, grace, Son, Spirit, creation, and a little less about myself. I'd like to be able to forget about myself and whether or not I feel like worshipping, or whether 'my eyes have seen the King', adn just let the light fall on God so I can contemplate him rather than my own frail and faltering faith and desire.

I also think the focus on the self makes it harder for those who are a) new to Christian faith and are wondering whether they can really sing ‘I will offer up my life in spirit and truth’, and so on, or b) struggling with the faith, but hanging in there – people who can’t honestly sing how they are ‘desperate’ for God, but just want to be reminded of how much he still cares, creates and remains faithful.

So here’s a challenge for you worship song-writers – try to write a song without the words ‘I’, ‘me’, ‘we’ or ‘us’. The prize is an indulgence – the permission to eat a Mars Bar during Lent…..