When Worship Lyrics Miss the Mark
00:00:00.000 | [Music]
00:00:15.000 | Well, it's Sunday night after a day of worship with the people of God, and musical worship
00:00:21.400 | is such an important part of our embodied life together.
00:00:25.040 | But I don't think we've ever looked at lyrics of a contemporary worship song in a question
00:00:29.760 | in this podcast, but we do today.
00:00:32.800 | Hello Pastor John, my name is Samuel, a young minister through music.
00:00:36.760 | My church's worship team struggles with a new worship song, "What a Beautiful Name,"
00:00:41.200 | a widely acclaimed song because of its musical orchestration and because of its reflection
00:00:46.360 | on God's glory in the kingship of Christ.
00:00:49.280 | However, my worship team finds the lyrics of the second verse questionable.
00:00:53.400 | You didn't want heaven without us, so Jesus, you brought heaven down.
00:00:59.040 | Our question is, does saying, "You didn't want heaven without us," imply a man-centered
00:01:04.720 | gospel?
00:01:06.000 | The statement isn't necessarily false, but the implications could be skewed.
00:01:10.240 | That's our fear.
00:01:11.520 | Additionally, the word "so" is used afterwards, implying that the following statement of bringing
00:01:16.800 | heaven down was founded upon the first statement of not wanting heaven without us.
00:01:22.800 | Much like the word "therefore," "so" implies heaven was brought down in response to God
00:01:28.840 | not wanting heaven without us.
00:01:31.840 | So Pastor John, do you believe these lyrics are biblically valid?
00:01:36.960 | So let me start broad and then get specific because I love the issue.
00:01:42.120 | I love the concern.
00:01:44.440 | The first thing I want to do is praise God for a worship team that is struggling with
00:01:51.120 | issues of truth in song lyrics.
00:01:52.840 | This is really good news.
00:01:57.800 | It's a good sign, and I hope all worship leaders who hear this will be encouraged to do the
00:02:02.560 | same.
00:02:03.560 | One of the reasons this is really good news and that it really matters is that a congregation
00:02:11.200 | learns its theology and takes it down into the crevices of their soul by songs that they
00:02:20.720 | sing, not just by the preaching they hear.
00:02:23.520 | I think historically it's the hymnody of the church that has, alongside preaching, been
00:02:32.000 | one of the most powerful means by which a church is taught.
00:02:38.080 | I would guess that in some churches the songs may be even more decisive in the way truth
00:02:44.640 | is embraced because the preaching may be so thin when it comes to doctrinal teaching.
00:02:52.280 | Of course, the songs may be very thin as well.
00:02:55.440 | You can sing very thin songs that just repeat even great sentences like "His name is great."
00:03:01.560 | That's true, but you don't ever say why it's great or how the cross grounds its greatness.
00:03:08.160 | So I say amen to the struggle and commend every worship team to be vigilant over the
00:03:15.280 | lyrics of what their people are singing.
00:03:17.600 | That's the first thing.
00:03:19.600 | Second thing I would say is that the last 30 years, maybe 40 now, have been an incredibly
00:03:29.640 | fruitful time for writing of new lyrics and new music for the church.
00:03:37.560 | This is a great thing.
00:03:39.440 | This is a great sign, I think, of life.
00:03:43.480 | The psalmist says five times, "Sing to the Lord a new song."
00:03:49.240 | 33-3, 96-1, 98-1, 144-9, 149-1, "Sing to the Lord a new song."
00:03:59.280 | And Jesus said, to balance things, "Every scribe," you could say every worship leader,
00:04:05.800 | "who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like a master of a house who brings
00:04:10.560 | out of his treasure what is new and what is old."
00:04:15.920 | Matthew 13, 52.
00:04:18.840 | What this means is that given the hundreds and hundreds of worthy, substantial, rich,
00:04:26.720 | deep old hymns that speak nourishing doctrinal truth, and given the many, many, many new
00:04:35.320 | songs of the last 30 years that are solid and Christ-exalting and gospel-rich and God-centered,
00:04:45.720 | there is no reason for any church to sing songs that are misleading or even questionable.
00:04:55.000 | That's the second thing I need to say.
00:04:58.280 | It's not as though any worship team who has access to the internet is backed into a corner
00:05:06.080 | not knowing what to sing and having to sing something questionable, because there's hundreds
00:05:11.520 | of glorious, rich, beautiful, contemporary and old songs.
00:05:18.120 | So my main response to Samuel is, find the old and the new that are rock-solid, beautiful,
00:05:26.320 | and use them.
00:05:28.040 | You are teachers in the church.
00:05:30.640 | Let this sink in.
00:05:31.640 | James says, "Let not many of you become worship leaders," because you're teachers.
00:05:37.120 | Let not many of you become worship leaders because you are teachers, and teachers will
00:05:41.240 | be judged more strictly.
00:05:42.640 | I mean, right after the pastor come the worship leaders who are choosing what teaching is
00:05:47.960 | going to happen while people are singing their hearts out and absorbing all this truth or
00:05:52.480 | non-truth that these people have put in front of them.
00:05:56.400 | Now to the specific lyrics Samuel is concerned about.
00:06:00.680 | There's a thread of teaching in some songs today that seems to me to lack the gravity
00:06:09.680 | of God's passion for the glory of God above all things.
00:06:14.160 | Say that again.
00:06:15.960 | There's a thread of teaching in some songs today that seems to me to lack the gravity
00:06:23.840 | of God's passion for his glory above all else.
00:06:29.080 | My sense is that until a congregation is devastated by the outrage and the horror of our sin as
00:06:37.620 | demeaning and belittling to the glory of God, accompanied by a majestic vision of God's
00:06:46.620 | glory and justice and holiness and wrath, until those two realities are taught and felt
00:06:54.820 | deep down, the reality of grace and mercy will not be rightly known and cherished by
00:07:05.560 | a congregation, which really matters to me then how we sing about grace.
00:07:11.740 | Seems to me that we tend to assume that at least there's a strain or a thread of songs
00:07:19.980 | that tend to assume that people's sorrows and shame and difficulties in life is enough
00:07:29.940 | of a backdrop, a bad backdrop, to make the mysteries of the glory of the gospel known
00:07:36.020 | over against them.
00:07:37.020 | I don't think so.
00:07:38.700 | I don't think the sorrows and the shame that people bring without being taught what their
00:07:44.260 | real condition is, is enough to help them understand grace.
00:07:49.180 | In fact, I think people are going to distort grace if it's not taught against the backdrop
00:07:56.740 | of the biblical bad news rather than the bad news that people bring, which they think they
00:08:02.100 | understand to be the bad news when it's not the bad news.
00:08:06.060 | The New Testament assumes that people need to be taught what their real terrible condition
00:08:12.400 | is under the power of sin before grace can really be the God-exalting reality that it
00:08:18.380 | is.
00:08:19.380 | And I see that in Ephesians 2, 1 to 10, and Ephesians 1, 4 to 6, for example.
00:08:25.820 | So I think Samuel is right that the question is not whether a statement in a song is literally
00:08:34.100 | true by itself, but what effect, what effect it has on the people.
00:08:40.900 | That is, how does it fit into their view of God?
00:08:44.820 | So it may be that the same truth will be sung one time in one context, but it will not be
00:08:52.020 | sung another time in another context because the whole tendency and tone of the context
00:08:58.220 | is going to be misleading.
00:09:00.420 | It's going to confirm error in the hearts of the people.
00:09:04.300 | I don't favor the lyric he quotes.
00:09:09.380 | It fits too easily into a theology of a God who created because he was lonely and then
00:09:18.540 | saved people for the same reason.
00:09:22.300 | He just can't be happy without us.
00:09:25.940 | To be sure, we should sing about God's amazing delight in us as his children.
00:09:35.460 | Witness the father in the parable of the prodigal son throwing a party when his son comes home.
00:09:40.860 | And witness Zephaniah 3.17 where God sings over his people.
00:09:47.280 | But what is so amazing about that is that God is not miserable and lonely without us.
00:09:56.220 | He's not motivated to sing over us because we have just made up for some poor deficiencies
00:10:03.860 | that God has.
00:10:05.020 | And now at last his weakening deity is strengthened by our presence and he can be happy finally.
00:10:12.580 | That's not the picture of the Bible.
00:10:15.900 | His delight in us is the overflow of his fullness, not the compensation of his emptiness.
00:10:24.840 | So does the song help the people feel that wonder?
00:10:30.940 | That's the question.
00:10:32.540 | Here's another popular lyric that we just, I just got back from Asia and we sang this
00:10:38.220 | in Asian.
00:10:39.220 | I kind of wish they weren't singing this.
00:10:42.620 | And it's very popular, "Like a rose trampled on the ground, you took the fall and thought
00:10:47.700 | of me above all."
00:10:49.740 | That's not true.
00:10:51.820 | That's not true.
00:10:52.820 | It's not helpful.
00:10:53.820 | I'm not frankly even sure what it means.
00:10:57.140 | Above all what?
00:10:58.340 | Above all other people who he saved?
00:11:00.460 | No, can't be that.
00:11:02.740 | Above all his own glory?
00:11:03.820 | No, not his own glory.
00:11:05.700 | Above all what?
00:11:09.820 | That was a beautiful song before it got to that line.
00:11:13.900 | He saved us precisely so that we could see and savor his glory as the supreme treasure
00:11:23.460 | of the universe above all.
00:11:26.660 | And I'm not sure what the lyrics mean, but it doesn't communicate to most people that.
00:11:32.380 | So my conclusion is God has been at work in history and he's been at work wonderfully
00:11:39.860 | in the last 30 years to produce hundreds and hundreds of solid, gospel-rich, doctrinally
00:11:47.220 | faithful Christ-exalting, big God songs, so many that we don't have to use the ones that
00:11:54.860 | seem theologically skewed and that may mislead our people.
00:12:01.740 | This is a first for APJ in talking about popular lyrics of a popular worship song.
00:12:08.180 | And I found it fruitful.
00:12:09.180 | I found it helpful.
00:12:10.180 | This is really valuable content, I think, in thinking carefully about what we sing on
00:12:14.140 | Sundays.
00:12:15.140 | So thank you, Pastor John, for investing your time and thought into this response.
00:12:18.380 | And thank you for listening to this podcast.
00:12:20.580 | We publish three times a week and you can subscribe to our audio feeds and search our
00:12:24.180 | episode archive.
00:12:25.180 | You can reach us by email with a contemporary lyric that may raise some red flags for you.
00:12:30.100 | You can do all that through our online home at DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn.
00:12:36.340 | I'm your host, Tony Ranke.
00:12:37.340 | Thanks for listening to the Ask Pastor John podcast with author and longtime pastor, John
00:12:41.820 | Piper.
00:12:42.820 | We're going to be back on Wednesday looking at the topic of retirement homes and caring
00:12:47.100 | for aging parents.
00:12:48.460 | How do we glorify God in serving our aging parents?
00:12:52.220 | We'll see you then.
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