Moments are fleeting.
They come quickly, and they go just as fast. One week they’re there, the next week they’re not. And yet, if we’re not careful, they can quietly become the thing we look for most when we gather to worship.
Because moments feel powerful.
But here’s what has been pressing on me lately—most of the time, the moments we talk about are centered more on us than they are on God.
They’re about our feelings.
Our emotions.
Our experience.
Our worship.
And less about Him.
That realization has been sitting heavy with me.
Because when we describe a “powerful” time of worship, what do we usually mean? We mean we felt something. We felt close to God. We felt moved. We felt lifted. There was a sense of elation, of joy, of energy in the room.
And again, those things aren’t bad.
But it’s telling that we almost never talk about the other kind of moments.
We don’t rave about the times we felt crushed under the weight of conviction.
We don’t often celebrate the moments where the Word exposed something in us that needed to change.
We don’t walk away saying, “That was incredible,” when worship leads us into repentance or brokenness.
And yet, those moments may actually be just as—if not more—evidence of God at work.
So why don’t we talk about them the same way?
Because they don’t feel as good.
And that’s where the danger begins.
When we start chasing moments, what we’re often chasing is a specific kind of moment—the kind that makes us feel lifted, not the kind that humbles us. The kind that feels like closeness, not the kind that exposes distance. The kind that stirs joy, not the kind that calls for surrender.
But God works in all of those spaces.
If we only recognize His presence in the moments of elation, we will miss Him in the moments of conviction. If we only value what feels good, we will begin to avoid what forms us deeply.
And slowly, without meaning to, we begin to shape worship around our preferences instead of His worth.
That’s where it gets dangerous.
Because when we chase moments, we cheapen our worship.
We reduce something that is meant to be anchored in truth, rooted in who God is, and shaped by His Word… into something that is measured by how it made us feel in a given moment.
Worship becomes less about responding to God, and more about experiencing something for ourselves.
And once that shift happens, it doesn’t take long before we begin to evaluate services based on whether or not they “had a moment.” As leaders, we feel it. As congregants, we feel it. There’s a subtle disappointment when things felt more ordinary, more steady, less emotionally charged.
But God is not more present in a heightened moment than He is in a quiet one.
He is not more worthy when we feel it than when we don’t.
And worship is not more effective just because it was more emotional.
Some of the most important work God does in us doesn’t happen in the high moments. It happens in the steady ones. The ordinary ones. The ones where we show up, sing truth, sit under the Word, and respond in obedience—even when our emotions aren’t leading the way.
That kind of worship may not feel as memorable.
But it is deeply forming.
So yes, we can be grateful for the moments when they come. They can be sweet gifts—reminders of joy, glimpses of nearness, expressions of unity.
But we don’t build our worship on them.
We don’t chase them.
Because the goal was never to create a moment.
The goal has always been to put Christ on display.
And He is just as worthy…
in the quiet,
in the conviction,
and in the ordinary
as He is in the moments we tend to remember most.
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