Worship Guitar Class Blog

Christian Guitar Lessons Blog

Worship Songs for the Contest are Posted

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Over 100 songs were submitted for the Worship Contest… Songs for an Awesome God.  Every song written is precious in God’s eyes. It’s been a joy for me to hear all the submissions. It made me cry thinking that these are just the songs in English. How pleased God must be to hear new worship songs sung in so many different languages!

Several beautiful worship songs are now posted at the site for you to hear for both age categories. Here’s a comment from one of the adult songwriters.

Went to the site… Good job! I listened… I am humbled. I’m thinking about voting for someone else. Wow… what a wonderful collection of worship and worshippers!"

Both categories are accessible from – www.worshipguitarclass.com/contest.html

I was particularly impressed with all the Kids that wrote songs. There were 21 submissions in this category. Nine are on the site. I know you’ll be blessed too, just hearing worship from the heart of a child or teenager!

The specific URL’s are:

Age 17 and younger –  http://worshipguitarclass.com/sep-2006kids.html
Age 18 and older – http://worshipguitarclass.com/sep-2006.html

How to Write a Worship Song

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This is the first article since announcing the Worship Contest that deals with writing worship songs. Before you start to write your song, you need to know what you want to say. For the contest, one of the requirements is that you must back up some of your words with a least one Scripture verse.

You may take a verse and sing it. That works. I did that for Psalm 67 in my Friends of the Heart CD. It’s literally Scripture. God’s Word is Active and Alive. It’s good to meditate on it. In a Bible Class I took years ago, they told us to pick a verse and find 30 truths or applications. My verse was Jeremiah 9:23-24

Thus says the LORD, “Let not a wise man boast of his wisdom, and let not the mighty man boast of his might, let not a rich man boast of his riches; but let him who boasts boast of this, that he understands and knows Me, that I am the LORD who exercises lovingkindness, justice and righteousness on earth; for I delight in these things,” declares the LORD.

The first ones were easy to see. We are not supposed to boast. It got harder finding the numbers 25 – 30, but it hit me what God didn’t say. He didn’t say we should boast about His wisdom, His power and His riches which He possesses to the ultimate. No, instead He says to boast about His Lovingkindness, his righteous attributes and to boast that we know Him.

How do we know Him? Take a real good look at Jesus in the New Testament. You now know God. Jesus said if we have seen Him, then we have seen the Father. He said as we abide in Him and His Word abides in us then we can ask whatever we wish and it will be done. (We will desire for God’s will to be done!)

Last week, I sat down and wrote this song based on that passage in Jeremiah and on the observations I saw. I wanted to make the song easy, so it starts in the key of D with the I, IV & V (D, G & A7). This is covered in my Worship Guitar Class DVD volume 2. When you sign up for the Newsletter, you receive an e-book of common chords and the I, IV and V are there too.

Songs often have a chorus which repeats after verses. An easy format could be Chorus, verse 1, Chorus, verse 1 ,etc. For the verses I added a few other chords in the Key of D, this is from that free e-book.

To get on the Newsletter list, visit WorshipGuitarClass.com.  Maybe later I can get a signup box in this blog too.

About Us

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Doctrine

I believe the Bible is the inspired word of God.
I believe in the trinity, the Father, Son & Holy Spirit. One God in three persons.
I believe Jesus, God incarnate, died on the cross to pay the penalty for our sins.
I believe He died & rose again, and now sits at the Father’s right side, interceding for us.

Personal Testimony

I gave my life to Christ at age 17. Within a month my guitar teacher went to Europe and gave me all her students, 30 students. I’ve always viewed teaching as a gift, and love it, especially teaching Worship guitar lessons.

Personal Thoughts about God

I think God has an amazing sense of humor! Just look at a squirrel. What mind would create an animal like that? They run DOWN trees? How about a puppy chasing it’s tail. Isn’t that funny?

I wonder if we’ll laugh so hard it’ll hurt in our new bodies. Have you ever laughed so hard it hurt? I have.

I honestly believe, even in our bodies of clay, we can actually make God smile. I think it gives Him pleasure when we carve out time to be with Him alone. I think it brings Him pleasure when we carve out time to come to Him in groups.

All of us have sin natures. It’s no surprise to Him. I believe He loves it when we are absolutely transparent in our communications to Him. Just read the Psalms.

(I also believe sin always has consequences, even as Christians. Look at King David and Bathseba. Best to live holy lives and keep a clean slate.)

I believe we are exceedingly blessed when we spend honest time with Him.

Worship Him will all your heart, because He loves you with all of His!

God Bless,

Jean Welles

Good Music is Good For You!

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I just listened to an interesting CD set called ‘The Profound Effects of Music on Life’ by Andrew Pudewa. I bought it from Sarah Cooper at SingNLearn.

Andrew quotes a number of scientific studies involving young children, college students, mice and plants.

One of the studies was by David Merrell, he won the Virginia State Science Fair in the late 1990’s. He used 72 mice split into 3 groups. He used a standard maze and tested each group before introducing them to music. They all took around 10 minutes to get through the maze.

One group heard Mozart for 12 hours a day, another silence and the third heard a Heavy Metal group for 12 hours a day. After a few weeks the Classical group got through the maze in 1 1/2 minutes, the no music group took around 5 minutes and the Heavy Metal group took half an hour. They, the heavy metal group, also became very aggressive and started killing each other.

Other studies show how music actually effects the way brain cells grow. Conclusion…. good music is good for you!

After listening to these CD’s it makes me wonder if Christian Heavy Metal music is such a good idea. Plants and mice cannot understand words, but the ‘sound’ of this type of music is detrimental to their health. What does it do to us?

In college, I remember learning in a music history classes that even in the time of the Greeks, philosophers said that a whole group of people can be dramatically influenced by the type of music they listened to. Apparently one of the music modes in that time made people ‘lazy.’

Sarah Cooper send an interesting article to me today about how music is healing. You can read it here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/5194884.stm

It does make a difference what we listen to, and yes it makes a huge difference in our lives when we actively produce music, like using our guitars to play worship songs!