Skip to main content

God Centred Singing

Each generation must sing to God with the best music of its generation. For David, it was the tambourine. For us today, it is the carefully crafted sounds of hiphop drumbeats, the sound of the Kalindula drums, and many other such instruments. Here is what Asaph says :
Sing aloud to God our strength; shout for joy to the God of Jacob! Raise a song; sound the tambourine, the sweet lyre with the harp. (Psalms 81:1, 2 ESV)
I posit that there are five features that must accompany God centred singing:

1. It must be aloud (1) – he says it twice “aloud” and “shout”. That is both declaratory and resounding! No timidness in singing! Its pathetic singing the word of God with your hands in your pocket when people shout at football games!

2. It must be joyful  (1) – it says shout for joy. Not the glumness that we see in churches. It flows from a deeper joy in Christ that is fully expressed in worship. It is not dullness we see! It is overflowing!

3. It is a song (2) – that means it is a crafted song, dare I say, with some intelligence to it – not just words bumbled together. But being a song also means that it is meaningful to those listening. A song captures your attention and draws you to the mind of the author.

4. It is accompanied by instruments  – the tambourine, the lyre and the harp, and the trumpet. These add colour and flavour to the singing. The diversity of instruments is vital here, not just one instrument.

5. It is sweet  – the key here is on the “sweet lyre”. Asaph is captured by the sound of the lyre and its melody. What Asaph is getting at is that it s the best! The Psalmist calls us to bring the best of our culture before God. For Asaph it was the lyre, for us it means the best of hiphop drum beats, the best of reggae beats, the best of neo-gospel melodies , the best of Kalindula beats and other styles of our culture. They must be brought and expressed in a way that glorifies God in singing.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Shame of Worldly Joy

Only a Christian can be joyful and wise at the same time, because all other people either rejoice about things that they should be ashamed of (Philippians 3:19) or things that will disappear. A Christian is not ashamed of his joy, because he is not joyful about something shameful. That is why the Apostle Paul in [2 Corinthians 1:12] defends his joy. He says, I don’t care if everyone knows what makes me happy, because it is the ‘testimony of my conscience.’ He means, let other people can be happy about base pleasures that they are afraid to admit; let other people rejoice in riches, fame, or popularity; they can be happy about whatever they want, but my joy is different. ‘I rejoice because of my conscience.’ A Christian has a happiness that he can stand by and prove. No one else can do that. They will feel embarrassed and guilty if their happiness is found in something that is outside of themselves. They cannot say, ‘this is what makes me happy’. But a Christian has the approval of his ...

Incarnation and Modernity

[The Bible] resituate modernity's prejudices within a wider context from which they were originally wrenched, showing them to be reductive heresies of a more complex biblical reality. So whereas modernity privileges an unchanging a-historicity, in the incarnation God enters history at a particular moment to gather a people to be with him not in a Greck eternity of unchanging timelessness, but in a biblical eternity of never-ending and ever-renewed intimacy and relational richness. Whereas modernity subordinates the particular to the universal, the Bible perfectly marries the universal "image of the invisible God" together with a particular first-century Palestinian Jewish man. Whereas modernity seeks the abstract over the material and finds itself painfully akimbo between the twin idols of materialism and immaterialism, in the same gesture the incarnate Christ validates material reality and prevents his followers from ever worshipping it. Finally, whereas modernity secks ...

Pride vs Humility

Spiritual pride tends to speak of other persons’ sins with bitterness or with laughter and an air of contempt. But pure Christian humility rather tends either to be silent about these problems or to speak of them with grief and pity. Spiritual pride is very apt to suspect others, but a humble Christian is most guarded about himself. He is as suspicious of nothing in the world as he is of his own heart. The proud person is apt to find fault with other believers, that they are low in grace, and to be quick to note their deficiencies. But the humble Christian has so much to do at home and sees so much evil in his own heart and is so concerned about it that he is not apt to be very busy with other hearts. He is apt to esteem others better than himself. JONATHAN EDWARDS  (Source: The Works of Jonathan Edward’s, Volume 1)