The Shepherd's Church

View Original

Joyful Singing Is Required

THE ANECDOTE SET FORWARD

October 2021 was both a unique and special month for me as a pastor. I was blessed to travel out of town (which in and of itself is a rare blessing) to three very unique events that are aimed at encouraging pastors and elders. In my travels, I was blessed to attend a ministers conference with pastor Derrick and a couple of dear brothers from the church. After that, I was off to an Orthodox Presbyterian annual meeting (called a Presbytery), and then onto the national Council meeting for the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches. As you can guess, my heart is so full!

But, beyond how refreshing these trips were for me personally, I also got a chance to see and experience the best congregational singing I have ever been a part of. In each of these events, the rooms were filled to the brim with joyful exuberent men, who were jovially singing out to their God, filling the room with boisterous praise. It was awe inspiring. It looked like a picture of heaven and it truly touched me and enraptured my soul.

Once I returned, I set my mind to reflecting upon this experience of such ardent guttural bellowing. Specifically, I wanted to understand why I was having this experience. First, it is right to note, that I was not impressed merely by how loud these men were crooning, although that was impressive enough. I was not caught up by the fact that everyone was singing in perfect tune, because surely, we were not. My sensibilities were not galvanized by an excellent production. There were no lights, fog machines, or big screens with floating head worship leaders… My reaction seemed to be more primal than that, going deeper down into the recesses of my humanity, sliding past the dermal layers to penetrate the soul. What I think happened to me was much more natural and central to my person than breathing. Let me explain.

God designed our bodies to need oxygen, so that when we breath we are gratifying the desires of our lungs, cells, and our entire physiology. He also created us to be fed by food, so that eating tasty meals brings a sort of pleasure down into the sinews. The same feelings exist when drinking ice cold water after a good sweat or piping hot peppermint tea by a fireplace in the winter. We were made with sensations that can and must be filled as a design feature of being human. The same is true of worship.

It is not an exaggeration at all to claim that God designed us with an inherent longing to worship Him. But, even more than that, He created us to sing unto Him joyfully! It is not enough to fain praise with half-hearted, joyless, singing. It is not enough to show up to church and lip sync the lyrics to the hymns because you are worried about offending your neighbor. God made us to sing! He made us to sing happily with great passion, conviction, energy, joy, and gumption as a central feature of our being human. When we neglect this, we are doing the spiritual equivalent of holding our own breath or refusing to eat a meal. Simply put, when we worship God as He intends it brings us abundant Christian life, but when we fail to have exuberant joy in our singing it relocates us to the melancholy doldrums of status quo Christianity.

At this point, I haven’t proved anything. I have simply extended an opinion that I have, which was confirmed by a few experiences I had in the month of October. You would be right to pipe up at this point and say: “All of that is well and good, sir, but what does the Bible say?” And it is to that aim we shall now turn.

THE BIBLICAL COMMAND FOR JOYFUL SINGING

Joyful singing is not a recommendation in the Bible; it is required. God mandates Joyful worship for His glory and for our good! It is a litmus test for how we view our God. Jesus tells us in Matthew 15:18: “the things that proceed out of the mouth come from the heart”. This means that sickly singing proceeds from a poisoned heart. It means that half hearted praise escapes the lips of men and women whose hearts are not fully satisfied with God. It means that joyful singing only erupts out of a heart that knows and loves its maker.

And while a full exposition of this could (and likely should) be taken up in a book that would bless the entire church, here are a few examples from our greatest hymnary, the Psalms.

David says in Psalm 5:

But let all who take refuge in You be glad, Let them ever sing for joy; And may You shelter them, That those who love Your name may exult in You.

David is not mixing words here. Under the inspiration of God’s divine Holy Spirit, he expects that everyone who claims to believe in God will be glad about it. He expects their will be joyful heart-thrilling singing. That is the norm for Christianity! What he cannot envision, even in his wildest nightmares, is a class of perpetually depressed believers who are barely awake in the presence of this great God.

Psalm 5, however, is not unique in the canon or Holy Writ. Other Psalms fill out this theology of jubilant merry-singing as well. For instance, we are commanded to offer Him ongoing and never ending praise (Ps. 30:12) in a way that both glorifies Him (Ps. 47:6) and also lifts up our heads (Ps. 27:6).

Why is this commanded? Or to say it more strongly, why is this kind of sining demanded?

Because God’s radiant character deserves it (Ps. 7:17; 18:49; 30:4). Because His royal power is owed it (Ps. 21:13). Because He offers sinful wretches like us to be in a relationship with Him (Ps. 9:2). Because He graciously dwells in our midst (Ps. 9:11). Because God did not abandon us to the nations but will lead us to have victory as citizens of His Kingdom (Ps. 20:5). We praise Him with all our soul because He has done things good for us (Ps. 13:6) and also because praising Him is altogether good for us (Ps. 33:1). It is what we were designed by Him to do!

And this is just a quick look at a few examples from the first book of Psalms (Ps. 1-41). There is a mountain of additional data that could be gleaned from the rest of the psalms, not to mention the rest of the Bible.

A BIBLICAL CHARGE SET FORWARD

Based on what we have seen from Scripture, God’s expectation for singing is so unavoidably clear it actually stings. Like a well target air strike from a bee protecting his queen, the Word from time to time ought to sting us. These times are important so that we will fear our God and submit ourselves to His joyful vision instead of the dank vomit piles we are prone to return to.

As C.S. Lewis once said:

“It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.” - C.S. Lewis

So what does all of this mean for us as a congregation? What are we supposed to do with what God has said in His Word? These are the kinds of questions I am asking.

For starters, we cannot be fake. We cannot simply shake our hips like peacocks in mating season, increase our volume to a mild roar, and all appear like we are trying out for the new church edition of Glee. God looks at the heart in worship, not the aesthetics.

Therefore, knowing this, I believe it is our responsibility to truly know our God. We cannot improve our worship by trying to improve our worship. That is where you get carnal humanistic spectacles like Bethel that offend our God more than it pleases Him. To grow in our worship, which should be our hearty aim, we must improve our devotion to our all-satisfying God.

We must learn how to love Him with deeper affections. We must learn to appreciate Him for what He has done for us, both on the cross and every moment of our lives holding us tight within His grace! We must be ever mindful of how beautiful He is instead of fixing our eyes on an ugly world. We must seek to have our hearts filled with tender, loving, gratitude for what He has done. We must repent of carrying distractions, frustrations, angsts, and bitternesses into the Lord’s Day Worship, which stifle our praise. We must not fear the missing notes and instead must fear how damaging it is to miss out in worship!

As the Scripture teaches, worship glorifies God, it lifts up our heads in joy, and it binds us together on mission to the nation. My heart for The Shepherd’s Church is that we would not miss this tangible and wonderful grace as we gather and that we would be a joyful singing people. Remember,

We exist to glorify God together through the preaching, SINGING, hearing, and doing of His Word.

God mandates Joyful worship for His glory and for our good!