Would You Like to Know a Songwriter Secret?

Several months after I wrote the song, we started planning the first of two recordings I would produce while living in England in the late 1990s. The first one became known as Winds of Worship Live from London with an alternate title of Come, Now Is the Time, and the second one was Hungry, which went on to sell over 400,000 copies. The first recording took place on February 22, 1998. It was a Sunday evening, and we were in the Elliot High School auditorium, which was jam-packed with people. It was as if people sensed something special was about to happen. Eleanor Mumford spoke about the treasure of worship before we started the first song, and she encouraged us to worship by singing to the Lord a new song with our whole heart!

As we started the song, I sensed God whispering to me, This is one of the main reasons I brought you across the Atlantic to encourage and awaken the call to worship in England and Europe in this season. And the entire evening was bathed in the presence of God and charged with an energy and urgency that came from God stirring our hearts. I continued to sense that energy and urgency through the long days of postproductionand we needed plenty of energy as we only had one week to mix the project, with some days at the studio starting at 9:00 a.m. and not finishing until
4:00 a.m.

That sense of urgency was there because of the urgency to worship. Now is the time means just that. Now is the time to choose God, to choose to love and follow Him. We don't know how much time we have left, but we do have today. We have this moment to respond to God's invitation.

This urgency speaks of reordering our priorities. It's time to return to this truth:

Worship is first 
always has been
always will be.

It's the way we were made; it's what we were created for!
Worship is the highest privilege and pleasure in the kingdom of God. It is the response of our lives to the greatest commandment in Scripture: Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength (Mark 12:30).

I wrote this song in London, one of the great cities on earth. But it's filled with people who are passionately serving other gods. These days the most common god is the narcissistic trinity of me, myself, and I. It's a world of people faithful only to themselves, yet made in the image of God, created to worship YHWH. Some activists have declared that this generation can end extreme poverty with our technology and wealth. What a fantastic goal! There is only one challenge: When you have a world of people who are self-absorbed, serving and worshipping themselves and protecting their own rights at any costs, how can we see poverty ended? The only way to see poverty destroyed is to destroy the idolatry that is its root cause.

That's one of the main reasons why there is such urgency to the call to worship that God is sounding. So much hangs in the balance. Those of us who have been called by God to sound this call often come under intense attack. That's one of the reasons why having a prayer shield is so vital. Pam Dyck, who leads my team of intercessors, shared this with me recently: Satan hates what we do when we worship God, for when we embrace the calling to be lead worshippers, we are doing what Satan abandoned. Many theologians believe that there is evidence in Scripture that Satan was a beautiful angel specifically created to direct the worship around the throne to God, until he desired the worship for himself. Of course, we won't know in this life exactly what happened eons ago when Lucifer fell, but we do know that Satan longs to be worshipped behind all bondage and every false religion is the father of lies craving what belongs to God alone.

And so our calling is to clearly and urgently sound the call to worship God. And what is the core of that calling? Nothing less than our hearts loving God with all of who we are!

And if worship is first and foremost a matter of the heart, it's not about where we worship or what we look like when we worship. It's not a performance for God. It's a surrender of love to God, just the way we are.