The Biblical Purpose of Songs in the Church

FROM THE STUDY

Dear friends,

Many times we cannot remember the text a pastor preached three Sundays ago. Be honest. But you can sing every word of a song you have not heard since you were nine years old, a jingle off the radio, a tune your mother hummed at the sink. An Eddie Arnold classic? So can I. The melody stayed when almost everything else washed out. It’s interesting, isn’t it? God knew this about us long before the advertisers did, and He built His church on it.

Look at the last thing He gave Moses to do. The Jordan is in sight, Moses’ own death has been declared imminent to him, and the assignment is not a final sermon. It is a song. Now therefore write this song and teach it to the people of Israel. Put it in their mouths, that this song may be a witness for me against the people of Israel (Deuteronomy 31:19). Think about the reason He gives. God has just told Moses that these people will forget. They will break the covenant and chase other gods almost before the sun goes down tomorrow. So He does not leave them only a law to be read. He leaves them a song to be sung.

And what a song! The next chapter is all of it, eighty-six lines that rehearse God’s faithfulness and Israel’s coming treachery, set to be carried in the mouth. Give ear, O heavens, and I will speak (Deuteronomy 32:1). The Lord did not hand them a memo to be filed. He handed them a melody, because the melody will ride home and come back at three in the morning when nothing else will. A people forgets its sermons. It does not so easily forget its songs. It’s almost as though God chose the vessel that leaks the least.

That is the same logic Paul hands the church: “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs” (Colossians 3:16). Read the verse slowly and watch what he does. The word of Christ is to dwell in us, to take up residence, to settle in and stay. And the singing is named in the same breath, because the song is the room the word lives in. Notice, too, what Paul calls our singing. Teaching. Admonishing. When we sing together, we are not supposed to be an audience watching a performance. No! We are a body preaching the word of Christ to one another, in meter.

Asaph said it before Paul ever wrote it, that one generation might sing the works of God to the next, that they should set their hope in God and not forget the works of God (Psalm 78:7). There it is again. The song stands guard against forgetting. It is how a people hands God to its children.

Which means the words of songs we sing in church are never a small thing. Whatever a congregation sings, it is being taught. The only question is what. A song that focuses on me and you is not worth singing at all. If it’s man-centered at the core, it’s not worship of God but of man.

A VOICE FROM THE PAST

John Calvin, who set the Psalms to music for the people of Geneva, knew exactly how much was at stake in a tune. In his 1543 preface to that psalter he wrote of music:

“We find by experience that it has a secret and almost incredible power to move hearts in one way or another.”

Read that last phrase again, in one way or another. He did not mean it as praise. He meant it as a warning. Music does not only move hearts toward God; it moves them, full stop, and it will move them away from God as readily as toward Him. A thing with that much power over the affections must be tied tightly to the truth, or it will carry people somewhere the truth never sent them. That is why Calvin would not let Geneva sing just anything. He gave them the Psalms, the words God Himself had already approved, so that the power in the tune and the truth in the text were pulling in the same direction.

A WORD FROM JOEL

So here is the whole of it, small enough to carry into next Sunday. When the music stops and only the words are left standing on the page, is there something true about God still there? Not a mood about Him, but a truth about Him. About His character or attributes. Something you could be taught by, even corrected by, the way Paul said our songs are meant to teach and admonish. Something a dying believer could rest his whole weight on. A song can stir every feeling in you and give the truth nothing to grab, nothing to dwell in. When that happens we have not worshiped. We have produced a feeling and called the feeling worship. And a man who feels he has worshiped will not go looking for the worship he missed.

I am not asking you to throw out the new and keep only the old. Some old hymns are sentiment with a tune attached, and some of the truest songs of Christ were written in our own lifetime. Sing the new one, if it is true. Sing the old one, if it is true. But sing the word of Christ, the way God taught Moses to, so that it dwells in you richly and is still there in the dark when you need it.

Moses was given a song to confront a forgetful people and call them home. May the ones we sing do the same.

Yours in Christ Jesus,

Joel Taylor
Abingdon, Virginia