I am convinced that congregations learn more theology (good and bad) from the songs they sing than from the sermons they hear. Many sermons are doctrinally sound and contain a fair amount of biblical information, but they lack that necessary emotional content that...
Music and liturgy can assist or express a worshiping heart, but they cannot make a non-worshiping heart into a worshiping one. The danger is that they can give a non-worshiping heart the sense of having worshiped. So the crucial factor in worship in the church is not...
John Newton refused to have Handel’s Messiah performed in his church because he thought the music too worldly.
The role of worship is foundational to the work of the church… God must be first in our private and corporate lives. If we have not placed our private and corporate relationship with God in first place, we cannot expect God to be active in our lives and church. Music...
The anthropological point that is of significance for theology is that singing clearly demonstrates worship—and therefore the divine kingdom and human salvation—to be an affair of the whole person, mind, heart, voice, body.
Many American churchgoers seem to expect to use the MIND in worship, but only during the sermon. It’s at that point that typical pew-occupiers open their textbook (the Bible), get their pencils ready (to take notes), and put their brains in gear. You can almost sense...
It was like the effect of some great orchestra when all the separate notes have melted into one swelling harmony that leaves the listener conscious of nothing save that his soul is being wafted upwards, and almost bursting with its own emotion. The perfect stillness...
Music is a moral law. It gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, a charm to sadness and life to everything. Fine music is the essence of order and leads to all that is just and good, of which it is the invisible, but nevertheless...
When Paul tells his churches to “let the word of Christ dwell…richly” among them by means of “psalms, hymns and spiritual songs” (Col. 3:16 NIV), he’s inviting them to do more than use music as a “warm-up” to the sermon. The song is not ornamentation; it is...
The church’s song, like music itself, is a gift of God. Music is a joy and delight with which God graces creation. We do not bargain for it. We do not deserve it. It is simply freely given, there for the hearing, a joyous overflow of creation’s goodness. from The...