Do We Really Need Musical Worship?
00:00:00.000 | Jeremy writes in with today's question, "Dear Pastor John, I've served for the past seven
00:00:08.600 | years as a worship leader, but something I've had trouble reconciling is how worshiping
00:00:12.400 | God has been turned into singing trendy praise songs in a community setting.
00:00:18.200 | Does this derive from the Levites and appointed leaders in the Old Testament?
00:00:21.880 | I have a hard time finding something relatable in the New Testament.
00:00:25.740 | In fact, one of the scriptures I find most denotes what worship is comes from Romans
00:00:30.400 | 12, where Paul tells the church in Rome that worship is giving oneself completely to God.
00:00:36.680 | Long question short, what brings us corporate music worship that inhabits almost every church
00:00:41.760 | today?"
00:00:42.760 | Well, let's just overlook the use of the word trendy, because I doubt that's really what
00:00:49.240 | he's asking.
00:00:50.240 | I mean, I don't think he expects to find in the Bible a justification for trendy.
00:00:55.520 | I think his question really is, why do we sing for half an hour in worship services
00:01:01.280 | all over the world?
00:01:02.280 | Why do we do it that way?
00:01:03.440 | So let me try to go at that and see what I can do.
00:01:06.160 | I would define worship as anything we do which gives expression to the supreme, all satisfying
00:01:16.520 | worth of God.
00:01:18.640 | That's worship.
00:01:19.720 | Which would include both offering my body to be burned in martyrdom, because I'm showing
00:01:25.680 | how precious Christ is to me, that I'm willing to give up my life for him.
00:01:30.920 | And it would include my singing, my heartily offering up my voice and my heart in church
00:01:38.200 | as I sing, because I'm giving expression to his worth as I sing a God-exalting song.
00:01:46.180 | Now what makes them both worship is the experience of the heart, which treasures God above all
00:01:55.560 | things.
00:01:56.560 | That's the essence of worship, the experience of the heart.
00:01:59.120 | Jesus says, "Your heart is far from you.
00:02:02.960 | Worship me with your lips."
00:02:03.960 | This is a zero worship.
00:02:05.400 | So the essence of worship is heart, a heart that treasures God above all things.
00:02:11.960 | The universe was created so that human beings would do everything we do and use everything
00:02:19.080 | we have to display the supreme worth of God.
00:02:24.280 | And in an ideal world, all is thus worship.
00:02:28.840 | Now how does it come about that today most evangelical services around the world, at
00:02:35.920 | least the parts I've been to and that I look at online, have an extended time of singing
00:02:41.760 | at the front end and preaching at the back end?
00:02:46.360 | Here's my best effort to give an account for this.
00:02:49.280 | When you compare, this is the most important thing I'm going to say, this little observation
00:02:53.920 | here.
00:02:54.920 | When you compare the Old Testament and the New Testament, something startling emerges
00:03:00.280 | with regard to worship.
00:03:01.860 | In the Old Testament, there is an extremely detailed set of guidelines for how everything
00:03:07.880 | should be done in relationship to the tabernacle and the sacrifices and the way people come
00:03:13.280 | to God.
00:03:14.640 | In the New Testament, those details are almost completely lacking.
00:03:20.640 | I'm tempted to say completely lacking.
00:03:23.960 | There is no way anybody could construct a normative worship service from what we have
00:03:32.240 | in the New Testament.
00:03:33.680 | Lots of people think they can, but I don't think so.
00:03:36.960 | There's more tradition going on there than they realize.
00:03:40.360 | My opinion about why this is so is that the Old Testament was a "com-si" religion with
00:03:49.760 | all of redemptive history focused on a culturally unified ethnic people called Israel, and the
00:03:58.960 | New Testament is a "go-tel" religion with no ethnic center, no geographic center, no
00:04:06.360 | cultural center, and therefore the New Testament is written so as to be a manual of theology
00:04:15.600 | and life useful in all cultures and all the peoples of the world, which is why it should
00:04:21.600 | be translated into all the languages of the world.
00:04:25.200 | If the New Testament had given detailed guidelines for what a worship service should be, it would
00:04:32.800 | have enshrined one first-century culture to be imposed on all the cultures of the world.
00:04:40.140 | It would have been a colossal failure, given what God designs for His church to look like
00:04:46.560 | all over the world as it becomes embedded in and incarnate in all the cultures of the
00:04:52.840 | world.
00:04:53.840 | to explain why there's so much singing and why there is preaching.
00:05:00.140 | I don't think you look for prescribed patterns in the New Testament.
00:05:05.420 | You look for emphases, trajectories, implications, the nature of God,
00:05:13.120 | the nature of man, the nature of his mind, the nature of his emotions,
00:05:17.260 | the nature of salvation, the nature of gifts.
00:05:21.900 | What you find is that there is an extraordinary centrality and emphasis
00:05:27.840 | to the Word of God in the Christian life, and there is at least one example
00:05:33.480 | of preaching mandated in the context of worship, 1 Timothy—no, 2 Timothy 4, 1 and 2.
00:05:41.020 | And, as we would expect from the Old Testament legacy of singing,
00:05:46.420 | there is a good bit of singing in the New Testament and pictures of it in the age to come.
00:05:54.900 | And there are a couple of texts, at least, that say it should be done corporately.
00:05:59.740 | Let me just give you a flavor of singing in the New Testament.
00:06:04.580 | Heaven in Revelation is full of song, and they sing the song of Moses, the servant of God,
00:06:12.280 | and the song of the Lamb, saying, "Great and amazing are your deeds, O Lord, the Almighty."
00:06:19.820 | Revelation 15, 3. And James says, "Is anyone among you cheerful? Let him sing."
00:06:26.760 | And Paul says, "I will sing with my spirit, and I will sing with my mind."
00:06:32.440 | And again in Colossians, "Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly,
00:06:36.500 | teaching, admonishing one another, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs
00:06:41.840 | with thankfulness in your heart to God."
00:06:43.720 | And then he says the same thing, almost, in Ephesians 5,
00:06:46.920 | only here he makes it clear that it's corporate.
00:06:49.820 | He says, "Be filled with the Spirit, addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs,
00:06:56.860 | singing and making melody to the Lord in your heart."
00:07:02.100 | And you got this same Paul, "Bless his heart." I just love this guy.
00:07:07.840 | Midnight, feet in stalks, having been beaten with many blows,
00:07:13.740 | and he and Silas are singing. They're singing hymns to God,
00:07:19.620 | which means he knew some hymns by heart, and singing was so much a part of Paul's life.
00:07:25.320 | You don't usually think of Paul as a singer, but as a logician who pounds out Romans on an anvil of truth.
00:07:32.560 | But no, no, no, no, no. He sang in tongues, and he sang intelligible language, and he sang in prison.
00:07:39.500 | He probably sang on the road and sang in the boats and sang while he was clinging to the shards of wood in the sea.
00:07:46.440 | This man was a singer big time. And where did he get that?
00:07:52.480 | Jesus sang. He sang Mark 14, 26.
00:07:57.320 | "When they had sung a hymn, he and his apostles, they went out to the Mount of Olives."
00:08:01.760 | The last thing he does with his disciples almost is sing with them.
00:08:07.060 | And of course, the New Testament loved the Psalms, and the songs are full of commands to sing over and over.
00:08:12.940 | Five times, I think, it says, "Sing a new song."
00:08:16.240 | And Jesus says that his new covenant scribes, the writers, are going to be like a master of a house
00:08:25.680 | who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.
00:08:28.960 | So I expect we will always be singing new songs and old songs.
00:08:34.120 | I don't know if the word "trendy" is helpful. I think "new" is great. I hope we will anyway.
00:08:41.840 | So it doesn't seem at all surprising to me that over the centuries,
00:08:46.600 | Christians would come together to corporately express the infinite value of God
00:08:53.240 | by lifting their voices and lifting their hearts in song about his worth.
00:08:58.820 | And that they would crave to hear the voice of God heralded from his word.
00:09:05.120 | And of course, good night.
00:09:07.820 | Lots more could be said about why we do what we do in worship,
00:09:12.200 | but that's pretty much why I feel so at home today in worship services like this,
00:09:21.400 | provided—this is a huge provision—provided the preaching and the singing are radically God-centered,
00:09:31.640 | Christ-exalting, Gospel-rich, Bible-saturated, and singable and authentic through and through.
00:09:39.480 | Amen. May that ever be more true of our churches in more and more ways.
00:09:44.260 | Thank you, Pastor John, and thank you for the question, Jeremy.
00:09:46.060 | If you have a question that you just can't quite figure out, some issue that's confusing you,
00:09:50.320 | email us your questions at askpastorjohn@desiringgod.org.
00:09:54.360 | You can find our audio feeds, our episode archive, and all the good things you need to know about this podcast
00:09:58.740 | at desiringgod.org/askpastorjohn.
00:10:03.940 | Well, can a difficult marriage with lots of tension bring glory to Christ?
00:10:09.840 | Or is it only happy marriages that can do this?
00:10:12.180 | It's a great question, and it's next on the docket for Monday.
00:10:16.360 | I'm your host, Tony Reinke.
00:10:17.260 | Thanks for listening to the Ask Pastor John podcast, and have a wonderful weekend.
00:10:20.900 | [BLANK_AUDIO]