Any love is ultimately love of God. No love can be in competition with love of God; it is merely a different expression of it . . . the deeper, the more passionate any love, the more truly it is the love of God.
God’s image shines through us most clearly in the act of creation — comprising the three stages of Idea, Expression and Recognition — and by reproducing this act we may begin to grasp, by analogy, the Trinity. from Reaching for the Invisible God
Confronting our feelings and giving them appropriate expression always takes strength, not weakness.
The miracle of Pentecost wasn't that everyone spoke the same, but that all were "understood" in their native tongue. The fulfillment of Gospel is not assimilation/uniformity to one culture, but rather togetherness and mutuality within diverse cultural expression....
I compose music because I must give expression to my feelings, just as I talk because I must give utterance to my thoughts.
If love is the soul of Christian existence, it must be at the heart of every other Christian virtue. Thus, for example, justice without love is legalism; faith without love is ideology; hope without love is self-centeredness; forgiveness without love is...
A hymn can be defined as a poetic statement of a personal religious encounter or insight, universal in its truth, and suitable for corporate expression when sung in stanzas to a hymn tune. Perhaps few forms of poetry are so widely known and used, and so generally...
A major part of life is spent looking for community. The fact that people can reach the extraordinary intellectual precocity of great music, and experience its beauty and ethical integrity by singing together with 50 or 100 other people, that's an extraordinary thing....
Our entire being is fashioned as an instrument of praise. Just as a master violin maker designs an instrument to produce maximum aesthetic results, so God tailor-made our bodies, souls and spirits to work together in consonance to produce pleasing expressions of...
I have no doubt that many of the people who press for particular styles of music in worship are motivated by a desire to help us be more culturally relevant in the liturgical life of the church. They believe our musical expressions in worship needs to sound more like...