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.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Pornography as Occultism

There is a kind of helplessness that a man engaged in pornography exhibits. He often speaks of it in terms of a “struggle” or an “addiction.” Now both of those terms are accurate, I believe, but they distance a person from his sin in a soul-decaying manner. Pornography is not just an addiction; it is occultism. The man who sits upstairs viewing pornography while his wife chauffeurs the kids to soccer practice is not some unusual “pervert”; he is (like his forefather Adam) seeking the mystery of the universe apart from Christ. That’s the reason the one picture, stored in his memory, of that naked woman will never be enough for him. He will never be able to be satisfied because he will never be able to get an image naked enough. I say pornography is occultism because I believe the draw toward it is more than biological (though that is strong). The satanic powers understand that “the sexually immoral person sins against his own body” (1 Cor. 6:18). They understand that the pornographic ...
Post a Comment
KEEP READING →

The Wound of Sin

Bless the Lord, O my soul, that when you were playing with the bait, unaware of the hook like so many others, He opened your eyes—allowing you to see your folly and danger so that you might flee from it. And now, be careful that you do not grasp at any of the devil's temptations, lest he ensnare you with his hook. For though you may be restored by grace, it will not be without a wound—just as a fish sometimes escapes the hook but swims away injured. That wound may bring sorrow and take long to heal. And you have already known this to be true. THOMAS BOSTON  ( Source : The Art of Man-Fishing) A sobering truth from Thomas Boston. Sin always damages. God always restores His children when we fall but it is never without the wounds. We often carry the scars of our sins. This is another m reason for us to avoid sin altogether. Sometimes in our presumption of His grace, we tend to be antinomian. Boston is warning that such an attitude is foolish since sin always damages. It always leaves ...
Post a Comment
KEEP READING →

Pussy Riot as the Messenger

I have always thought there was something uneasy, or something not quite right about Pussy Riot and the western media reaction to it. It was not just the desecration of the Orthodox Church Cathedral. I could not placed my finger on it until I read this assessment by Vadim Nikitin : How many fans of Pussy Riot’s zany “punk prayer” in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova’s erudite and moving closing statement were equally thrilled by her participation, naked and heavily pregnant, in a public orgy at a Moscow museum in 2008? That performance, by the radical art group Voina (Russian for “war”), was meant to illustrate how Russians were abused by their government. Voina had previously set fire to a police car and drew obscene images on a St. Petersburg drawbridge. Stunts like that would get you arrested just about anywhere, not just in authoritarian Russia. But Pussy Riot and its comrades at Voina come as a full package: You can’t have the fun, pro-democrac...
2 comments
KEEP READING →