Have You Not Read - S1:E20

Welcome to Have You Not Read, a podcast seeking to answer questions from the text of scripture for the honor of Christ and the edification of the saints.

Before we dig into our topic, we humbly ask you to rate, review, and share the podcast. Thank you.

I'm Dylan Hamilton, and with me are Michael Durham. Jonathan Durham. Today we are answering questions about music, specifically in the church body.

Our first question, or actually our first two questions, we're gonna try and answer in tandem because they're so close together.

What type of music should be played in a local church worship, and how should Christians rightly use music in corporate worship to the glory of God?

Michael, you wanna take a shot at it? Great questions. So obviously, the standard that we're going to answer this from is not our own personal experience and our preferences, you know, but we need to look at the word of God and say, what is prescriptive in the word of God for how he wants to be worshiped?

How has he declared in his word how his people are to worship him, why we are to worship, and even the manner in which we worship him should be attached to the aspects of his nature, his character, his glory.

It should be something that fits the glory and the honor of our creator as we worship

Christ. How we worship him should be done in agreement with his glory as our sovereign and as our savior.

So worship, according to the scriptures, the general sense of it is that the worship of God should be attuned to God.

It should be focused upon God, not upon the standards or the preferences of men.

Now, God has given us many instructions, and there is a great deal of freedom and diversity within the ways in which he has called us to worship, but there are some principles, some standards, and some focus that we need.

So my brother Jonathan, let him tell us who he is and what he does and kind of his background and why he's been thinking about this for quite a long time.

Yeah, well, I'm a worship and administrative pastor at my church and been doing full -time music ministry since 2008,

I think. I did part -time before then, but yes. So this question comes up quite a bit.

What type of music should be played in the local church worship? And usually when folks say that, they're talking about style, but if we go to scripture, you're gonna have a hard time finding style lined out in scripture.

So we have in the book of the Psalms, 65 references to singing.

There are over 135 references to praise, yet there are very few references to the style of music.

Psalm 92, one through three says, it is good to give thanks to the Lord, to sing praises to your name almost high, to declare your steadfast love in the morning and your faithfulness by night, to the music of the lute and the harp and to the melody of the lyre.

And that's talking about instrumentation, probably more than style. But in the titles of several

Psalms, we have some indications, some instructions. You're supposed to sing or play according to what appears to be a certain tune or perhaps a technique of singing or playing.

There's about 12 different things listed, Alamoth, the lilies, the doe of the dawn.

And the one that has four references, the most of anything else is do not destroy. And I wish

I had the music to that that was very popular, I guess. Do not destroy was used four times in the Psalms. Yeah, set to do not destroy,

I've seen that. Yeah, but we don't know any of those melodies. So how do we know what it's supposed to sound like?

We do have an Ezra, when they're laying the foundation of the temple, the priests come forward with trumpets, the

Levites, the sons of Asaph with their symbols to praise the Lord, according to the directions of David, King of Israel.

It sounds like David had some ideas about how it should sound. So he gave some instructions of some sort.

And it says they sang responsively, praising and giving thanks to the Lord. Well, it's probably some sort of antiphonal singing, call and response.

Someone would sing something, someone would respond to that. Well, that's some stuff from the Old Testament, but the New Testament, what do we have?

We have Jesus singing with his disciples on the Mount of Olives, singing a hymn after the Lord's Supper.

Of course, we have the two pretty famous portions of the New Testament, Ephesians 5, 18 through 21, which says, do not get drunk with wine for that's debauchery but be filled with the

Spirit, addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the

Lord with your heart, giving thanks always and for everything to God, the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ.

And those three indicators, okay, we have psalms, hymns, spiritual songs, which

Paul mentions again in Colossians 3, 16. Well, we can say that psalms are probably the psalms.

The book of the psalms are something very similar to that. That's what he's talking about. Then hymns and spiritual songs, you're kind of left scratching your head a little bit.

Are these compositions passed down through time, hymns that sing praise about God?

Are spiritual songs more personal? We don't really know, we're speculating at that point. But our question is probably, again, asking more about the style.

What's the style of a psalm? What's the style of hymns and spiritual songs? I was hearing you make a distinction between instrumentation and style.

Could you go into that a little bit more? So instrumentation, they give in scripture various instruments, the lute, the harp, the lyre, cymbals, loud clashing cymbals, timbrel.

So we have instrumentation. We don't know what style it was. It was the

Jews' style of their day, and they used their style to praise

God. Now, does that mean that we as believers have to do things in a Jewish style because that's what they did in biblical times?

I don't think so. The style was developed over time as a culture.

We don't have any specifics in the New Testament for the instrumentation for their singing either. In fact, some traditions don't even think we should have instrumentation because you don't see it mentioned so much in the

New Testament. Well, I guess that's part of the question, isn't it, about what kind of instrumentation. As you pointed out,

Paul says, sing the Psalms. He's writing that to Christians, sing the Psalms, and the Psalms, such as you've already pointed out, and another good example is

Psalm 150, says to use instruments, whatever you have lying around. I mean, if all you have is a couple of taut strings on a tortoise shell, use that.

Whatever you've got, let's use it to praise the Lord. So it doesn't seem like instrumentation is the focus of the instructions other than use it for God's glory.

So maybe when we think of style, what we're talking about is aesthetic. The aesthetic is more in view in this question, and do we know anything about the kind of aesthetic that God prefers given the instructions throughout the

Bible about his worship? I think we have to look at both the occasion and the content of singing.

When did God's people sing? Why did they sing? It was because, first of all, because God is, and you can fill in the blank, glorious, good, gracious, righteous, just, unchanging, and the totality of his attributes, which are all praiseworthy, that's the reason why we sing.

And we see the deliverance of God's people as an occasion for singing. We see

Paul and Silas suffering in prison, persecution, imprisonment, and at midnight, they're found singing hymns to their

Savior. So there's all these occasions for singing, and of course, in the book of the

Psalms, we have so many commands to sing, but there's also reasons given.

Praise him, for he is good. There's the occasion for it, but then the content.

You don't just say whatever you wanna say to praise God. You need to use biblical truth. They gotta be biblically faithful lyrics, theologically sound, and then skillfully written.

So don't use a song that's void of biblical truth. That should be a given. But sometimes songs are written, and you can look at it plainly and say, well, that wasn't a biblical phrase they just used there.

That's against scripture, if they really think about it. So we shouldn't be using the Babylon Bee worship song generator?

No, that's not the best source for your liturgy. So I like how you're pointing out the patterns in scripture about the occasion, that it's not only about the occasion of praising the

Lord, but it's also the content, so that both of these together makes me think of what the occasion and the content of our worship is on Sunday mornings.

For example, I mean, obviously, we should be singing praise to God individually, as families, as the week goes on, we should be lifting our voices in praise to God.

But considering the occasion of a Sunday morning, because we gather on the day that Jesus rose from the dead, and not only is this the occasion that we're rejoicing in the revelation of who

God is in Christ, the risen, but also we're rejoicing in our deliverance from sin and death because of Christ's resurrection.

Not only do we have the occasion there, but also we have the content. So that makes a lot of sense when we think about occasion and content.

As a guiding principle, would we use truth, goodness, and beauty for those being wrapped up as God's attributes?

Would we use those as principles to go by when we're thinking about what type of music we're going to be playing on any given

Sunday? Right, so we've already talked about doctrinal content, it has to be truth, certainly skillfully done, and we have the beauty, all right?

And then the goodness, I think, would have to be that which comports with the character of God, that's what agrees with everything about who

God is, who is good. So there shouldn't be something that is obviously contrary to the character of God being used in worship.

Right, so the cacophonous banging and repeating of lyrics and cacophonous banging of drums that we see across in pagan culture that shouldn't be brought in to our worship and music, right, because that's where we start seeing the line blurred for style, is all of a sudden we have this wildness, this formless, if you will, type of noise and being told it's music for worship, and that's where we kind of start to blur the lines.

Yeah, I want to ask Jonathan this question because I think that when many of our hymns are, you know, we have the praise about who

God is declarative to one another, we are teaching and admonishing one another in these hymns, and then some of the things that we sing are directly addressed to God as a corporate prayer.

You know, we and us and our are the pronouns and we declare to God, praises to him and ask things of him.

So this is a structured corporate type of prayer and Jesus tells us when we're to pray, we're not supposed to use vain repetitions.

I mean, does that help us there a little bit about the types of songs that we sing? Sure, those are all great principles with, you know, the caveat that sometimes you do repeat for his mercy endures forever.

Yes, exactly. That's not vain repetition. Right, right, right. It's solid repetition. Right, right.

So I think there's room for repetition when it's called for, but definitely the corporate side of worship is often missed.

Sometimes it's more about what I feel, just God and me, and so oftentimes you'll see a lot of folks will close their eyes in worship.

They're getting rid of all distractions and you wanna be focused on the Lord, but corporate worship is by its essence corporate.

God is the singular one. We are the plural and, you know, we're worshiping our triune

God in spirit and in truth with one another. We've all been redeemed and so we're saying things like, to one another, all hail the power of Jesus' name.

Let angels prostrate fall. Bring forth the royal diadem and crown him Lord of all.

And another verse, ye chosen seed of Israel's race, ye ransomed from the fall, hail him who saves you by his grace and crown him

Lord of all. So we're worshiping Christ, but we're also telling one another, hey, you worship

Christ too. That's good. I like how you put it that the focus is singular because our triune

God, he's the standard and we all drove in different cars to this one location.

We've all lived a different week. We've all done different things, been focusing, but when we come together as the church to worship, we are all being conformed to, focused upon, oriented upon one who is

God, his glory, his worthiness, his truth. And we're unified there.

No matter how different our lives have been the previous week, here we come together and we're all unified upon him.

And we're saying you are the most important. So it seems to me just kind of talking it out that with hopefully not denigrating what

I'm about to say by using the word style, but if we're gonna talk about a proper approach, let's say, let's use the word approach as a more fuller synonym for style, an approach to worship.

It seems to me that it should be the fear of the Lord. Reverence. Yes, reverence ought to guide everything.

We're too casual when we come into even just prayer time. Yes, God is eminently with us, but he's still the transcendent

God. He's God, we are not. And the same thing when we're singing. So much of our songs really can be voiced prayers.

We're kind of praying twice when we sing. And so in that vein, how would you present a prayer to God?

Is it more reverent, is it not? Now there's time for celebration, there's time for joy. And you see that throughout the

Old and New Testament. There is active joy and celebration. I'm sure that was a louder song than others were.

But it definitely needs to start with reverence. That's where a good call to worship to get your mind on track and get your focus right is so necessary when you're coming together to worship

God. That's very helpful. Well, Dylan, do you think we've answered the question or do we have some loose threads here?

Well, I sort of have some of my own adjacent questions that might kick up some more conversation.

But my thinking is we're talking about reverence. And we're talking about reverence in the sense of both the truth and the goodness mostly.

I'm a little more focused on beauty. That's the way God made me. But I'm thinking reverence toward how

God has created men and women, how he's created different voices, all different instruments in the congregation.

And would you say that modern music has taken into account those different instruments in the corporate body where they're written for all of these voices to be harmonious?

Or do they seem set aside for sometimes a performance of a specific type of voice?

Because sometimes when I'm listening to certain music, I'm not hearing all the various diverse voices being harmonized.

I'm hearing one voice. There are written for one voice to harmonize to. I'm just wanting to kind of get your thoughts on that because when

I hear beautiful music, when I listen to Handel, when I listen to Bach, when I listen to Mozart, they're taking in all the threads.

It's like watching a writer make a beautiful creation, a novel with 50 different players.

But I'm not getting that from modern music. Yeah, I'd say largely it's more soloistic in its approach.

I mean, not everyone, but the main things that seem to sell are the more individualistic music.

Usually it's a high tenor voice, which actually fits the ladies' voices perfect so they can sing the same pitch and all the guys gotta sing down the basement.

But yeah, it's not as conducive for more choral sound and where it would involve more congregational singing, which is what we're after with the music we use on Sundays.

And I think some have seen that and have done a good job in trying to swing the pendulum back a little bit where they're writing more music that can be called strophic or similar lines sung the same way each time with different lyrics, more hymn -like.

It may sound more modern in some instrumentation, but if you peel it away, it could almost sound like a hymn out of your hymnal.

And they're pairing it with very, very good, solid, rich doctrinal truth, just a line from one that fits this bill for me is, how rich a treasure we possess in Jesus Christ, our

Lord, his blood, our ransom, and defense, his glory, our reward. You can hear the poetic meter following and coming in, but it has some great opportunity for some harmonies in there too.

It's not too high, not too low. It's not too crazy of a rhythm. So some guys are coming back to that. But yeah, it's a lost,

I don't wanna say generation, but there's some ages of people who just didn't get that in their contemporary style music.

Who are the ones that you would suggest that are swinging the pendulum back that way? Probably the best at that are probably the

Gettys. They write a lot of things that are easy to sing congregationally, and they're interesting, and they're beautiful sounding.

I do like the stuff of Matt Boswell as well. He's done a good job with writing new hymn tunes and new hymn lyrics.

And then not all of Sovereign Grace things are so good for that, but I do think some of theirs are very helpful as well.

Okay, that's good. One of the other questions I had was, I think in order to sound good corporately, shouldn't we be practicing on the side?

You know what, so I've seen it done both ways. I've seen it done on the fly, or we actually meet one to two nights a week.

Should churches consider coming and learning to use that instrument that God has given them?

That was something that was taught way back when I was in seminary. They were suggesting that, like you should get your congregation together and practice before the service, which as a choir director,

I'm all for that. I want that sound to be the best. I want the congregation sound to be the best.

But sometimes it's not as economic for everyone to be there on another night. What we've tried to do is

I give out a list of the songs before, a few days before, and with links where people can sing along at home so they maybe learn the song a little better, they can practice at home.

I've had some moms ask this so that their kids will know the songs better when they come to church.

And so there is a spirit that wants to do better, and we found that very helpful for us.

Yeah, to the economic answer most of the time, I view that a little differently because I think there's an intrinsic value of practicing beautiful things and practicing them together.

I think to a certain degree, yeah, you can practice individually. It's kind of like baseball. You can practice individually and you can get really good, but if you're practicing as a team, if you're taking in and out as a team every single day, it's gonna look a lot more beautiful.

It's gonna seem on a higher plane. And it may exclude those coming in who are outside of the church, but that's what the church's war songs usually do is they exclude those who are outside.

But when they come in, they ought to be able to hear what we're singing and say, that's a powerful

God they're singing to. We should be lifting their eyes up. And I think music and preaching, we've talked about that, should be the same way.

We shouldn't be milking down. We should be enriching. There should be fat there and they should be, they should have never tasted that before in their life and want more.

I guess last loose thread for me is going back to this instrumentation.

People wanna know what instruments are okay to use and which ones are not. And so someone's gonna be like, they haven't answered that question.

So for you, are there instruments that should not be used or is it more of an issue of instruments should not be used in certain ways?

Or to state the thing positively, when it comes to using instruments, you should use those that fit what and then you should use them in a way that they cohere together,

I guess. Is that where we're coming from on our answer? Yes, and you want everything that you do to be done for the glory of God at the best of your ability and not half -baked.

You want it to be right and be done well. But the number one instrument of any church service is the congregational voice.

So whatever you play or use, it should not overpower the congregation's voice.

You wanna amplify it, you wanna help them. And sometimes you'll play a little louder and then maybe you'll cut out because you've been helping the congregation to be encouraged to sing louder.

So I wouldn't necessarily, there's probably an instrument too, I would say, well, what are you using the kazoo for?

I'm not sure why that's in the worship service. But we can go across the ocean and find all sorts of things they're using over there that we wouldn't use over here.

On that issue of beauty, sometimes that's subjective. That can be beautiful to one, not to the other.

I think there's some things that are across the board. Most people could agree that's beautiful. But one such story out of a book

I read is very helpful in this regard. This lady says, I once heard of a

Christian woman who spent time serving God in South Africa. While visiting a health clinic, she was deeply moved by the sound of the local

Zulu women singing. Their harmonies were hauntingly beautiful. With tears in her eyes, she asked her friend if she knew the translation of the words.

"'Sure,' her friend replied. "'If you boil the water, you won't get dysentery.'"

Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. So just because we think it should sound a certain way doesn't mean that we're necessarily right about that.

For them, it was a beautiful song about health. But for us, in our context,

I think we know what's gonna distract our people. I think we know what's gonna help serve them and encourage them.

And if the content is what's driving it, the music should serve the lyrics. The music should serve the content in such a way that those truths are bolstered and God's people are instructed, encouraged, and moved to obey.

All right. Amen for that. Well done. We'll move right along to, what are we thankful for? We'll start with you,

Michael. I'm thankful for my brother. Ha, ha, ha. We're only a year apart in age and been very thankful for him.

Not always been able to live in the same state, not alone to live in the same city, but very grateful that we can do that and partner and see each other often and rejoice together in what the

Lord is doing. So he's irreplaceable in my life. Very grateful for him. Thank the

Lord for him. Amen. What about you, Jonathan? Well, it'll sound bad if I don't say my brother. Ha, ha, ha.

But I'll save that for another time. I'm thankful for my church family. We've been at this church for about two and a half years now and it's just been a real blessing in my life, just what

I'm able to do, how I'm able to serve, and the godly brothers and sisters

I get to do it with. There's an amazing group of people over at my church and I'm daily thankful for the

Lord bringing us there. Amen. Well, I'm very thankful for there being loads more for me to learn in music and I really have needlessly strong opinions about it.

I love to sing. I love certain songs in worship, but I do have loads more to learn in that area and I'm thankful that I get to stretch my legs and have that be another rabbit hole to go down.

And that wraps it up for today. We are very thankful for our listeners and hope you will join us again as we meet to answer common questions and objections with Have You Not Read?