Which Songs for Worship? (Pt1)

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00:03
Hello, welcome back to Coffee with a Calvinist.
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This is a daily conversation about scripture, culture and media from a Reformed perspective.
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Get your Bible and coffee ready and prepare to engage today's topic.
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Here's your host, Pastor Keith Foskey.
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Thank you for tuning in to Coffee with a Calvinist.
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Recently, I had the opportunity to sit down and have a discussion about worship and worship music with my friend and the former worship leader of Sovereign Grace Family Church, John Mercer.
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This conversation actually went long, so I have decided to break it into two episodes.
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I hope you enjoy today's portion and that you will tune in tomorrow for the second half.
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Welcome back to Coffee with a Calvinist.
00:52
My name is Keith Foskey and I am a Calvinist.
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Today, we're going to be talking about the subject of worship and worship music, and I am joined by a very dear friend of mine.
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His name is John Mercer.
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John, say hello.
01:06
Hello.
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It's good to have you and I'm so glad that you're here.
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Now, I want to introduce everyone to you because so many people in our church already know you, but we have listeners that are not a part of our church and certainly I want to let everyone know who it is that is speaking.
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This is John.
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He is a worship leader and he's actually the former worship minister at our church.
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He was an elder here before we were Sovereign Grace.
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You were an elder.
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We were Forrest, right? Correct.
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Okay.
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Just before the name change.
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That's right.
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And you were here in what years? Do you remember? I think it was 08 to 10 or was it? Man, I just turned 49 and you're asking me to remember things.
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It would have been around 11 years ago because Jonathan just turned 11 and he was born when I remember when you told me that Annie was pregnant.
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Yeah, and I remember when my son was born and went to the ICU and you were the first one at the hospital.
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Yes, sir.
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So we have a good history and of course, I love you and I love your wife and your boys and your sons both did karate with me and now one's taller than me and he started when he was a little boy and so we have a wonderful history and I wanted to just mention how I met you.
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You had come from another church along with some other folks that came from that same church and I was introduced to you through some of the church members that you were the worship leader at the previous church and we met at Wing It, which used to be a little sort of, it's a restaurant here and it's sort of like my office.
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I tell people if you really want to have a serious conversation with me, take me for wings and we can really, we can chew it up.
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I can attest to that, yes.
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And you sat across from me and you were very serious and in a good way and my wife and I were there and you told me about yourself and your background and your history and I had already heard a little bit about you and I remember going out into the car and I told my wife, boy, how great would it be to get that guy, but I don't think we're going to be able to get him.
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He's too good for our little church.
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No, no, not at all.
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No, that was honestly, that was what I said, but then by God's grace, you did come here and you helped us in a very, I would say a very critical time regarding worship because at that time we were still in the middle of sort of finding out who we were.
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You know, I had been the pastor for a few years.
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We were still trying to figure out who we were in regard to how we were going to express ourselves in worship and as you know, the worship wars typically have been over the years, whether you're going to do all hymns, whether you're going to do all contemporary or whether you're going to have a mix and we tried to have a mix.
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Which is possible.
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But it's difficult.
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The current pastor that I work with is famous for saying things like that are attention to be managed.
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Yes, yes, and it is attention.
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You came in and we had other men here.
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There was Aaron Bell and there was Robert Bales and Jim Hildreth, or not Jim Hildreth, that's my father-in-law, Jim Dutton and Nathan Dutton and you guys played together and you played the piano, you played the keyboard and we also had an organist at that time.
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So certain songs were played with an organist, which really did make for an interesting feel because you have some songs that had this very high church organ feel.
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Well since then, the organist has retired and so we have actually, we gave our organ to a school.
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We donated it to West Nassau High School, so we no longer have that.
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But we are now, I think we've somewhat settled on still being a mix.
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We still do hymns, we still do contemporary songs, but really you were part of bringing that in because up until the time that you came, well, I would say James Harper was a big help because he preceded you and it was his grandmother who played the organ.
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And just for clarity's sake, it's easy for us to look back on those conversations and point to my specific contributions because I will agree there were some turning points there, but James Harper did all the heavy lifting.
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And again, his grandmother played organ, he had preserved the relationships, he didn't do anything stupid.
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A lot of guys, man, they'll come in and they're like, well this is the new direction and this is where we're going to go.
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And it's like, good job, man, you single-handedly alienated a large portion of your congregation.
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That's not good ministry.
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James came in and he really did the heavy lifting and he already had teams of people in place and he just, he kind of had, you guys had worked together to point the ship in a direction, you just needed some tools.
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I just happened to have those tools.
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That was all it was.
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Yeah, one of it was a really nice soundboard, I remember that.
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Yes.
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That was one of the tools, yeah, absolutely.
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So again, just kind of giving the listener who doesn't know us or doesn't know our history, we have a long history together.
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And so the topic that we're going to discuss today is, we may disagree a little bit, but we've got a long enough and loving enough relationship that we can do that and we can have a positive conversation because a lot of the conversations around this subject do not go in a positive way.
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Totally.
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They end with name-calling or accusations of apostasy and things like that.
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Or underhanded name-calling where we don't really come right out and use a word that we would interpret as negative, but there's an intent behind it.
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It's really clear.
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Absolutely.
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Just recently you and I had an opportunity to play at the same event and that's when we had this conversation.
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You were with a group that played and I was there too with our worship team and we were at Set Free Ministries and we had an opportunity to both play.
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And I felt sort of like, I don't know if you're familiar with the language, but like the whole student-teacher mentality of the karate student who's got his teacher.
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You're over there watching me play the guitar and you're a very good guitar player.
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And I say this, I'm not blowing any smoke here.
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You're a great guitar player and I'm sitting there just picking my four chords that I know really well and I'm thinking, well, he's going to be laughing at me later.
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You give yourself nearly enough credit.
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And let me say this about that.
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It was a beautiful night.
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The expressions of worship were very different, but Christ was exalted.
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The gospel was proclaimed and yeah, man, that's great.
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We can talk about skill levels and the tools and the technology that we use, but man, every day there are people all over the world who are worshiping freely with nothing but their voices and buildings with thatched roofs and dirt floors.
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So yeah, Jesus was exalted.
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Amen.
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And my wife took my keys home, which meant I had to get a ride that night.
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And that was one of the wonderful things was you and I had an extra hour to talk because you had to drive me home.
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It was great.
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Well, let's talk about our topic of discussion today because where the worship wars used to be, and they still are in some churches, it was old versus new.
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And we still have had people, and I'll give you a good example.
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My wife on Facebook will sometimes notice people who are looking for churches and she'll just put our name out there.
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She's a part of Facebook groups and one recently a lady put up looking for a church in the Oceanway area, and my wife and a couple of the ladies from our church all posted our church.
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And then the lady, just a few minutes later, she posted, no Calvinists, all hymns, King James only.
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And so we were like, she's not looking for our church.
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No, no, she's not.
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And it wasn't all three of those, you know, because we're certainly Calvinistic.
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So the no Calvinist thing, and we're not King James only.
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But the big one, I was surprised that she said all hymns, that she only wanted a church that was singing just the hymns.
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And I tend to find among people who make that argument, it almost is like, it's not just that they want all hymns, but the hymns have to be written before a certain date.
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Because people still write hymns today.
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The Gettys are hymn writers.
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100%.
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So there, you know, we mess up so bad with definitions of words and dictionaries don't help because we all have these connotations that linger.
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So what I have found in the, you know, short couple of decades that I've been doing this is when people say, I want a church that sings hymns, what they're really saying is, I want a church that sings the hymns that I know in the way that I used to hear them.
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Amen.
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So even if I was to play, say for example, Holy, Holy, Holy on the acoustic guitar, same chords, same key, same everything, it doesn't have a piano and organ, that's really not what they're looking for.
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Yes.
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Absolutely.
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Absolutely.
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And you saying that about their way.
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For instance, I want to ask you this question.
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You define this for me.
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I would say there are songs that are not necessarily hymns, but are actually more what I would call gospel songs or Southern, like Victory in Jesus.
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Is that really a hymn? But a lot of people who say, I want hymns only would be satisfied with Victory in Jesus.
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But you think about it, it starts out, I heard an old, old story of a savior came from glory.
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And I remember, who is it, Rod? Who's the guy from the group that, oh goodness, the Gaithers, the Gaithers, the big tall guy with long hair, Rod, I can't think of his name right now, but he, he sang it and he came out and he goes, you all know, this is a barn burner.
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And I remember we said barn burner, I like, that's usually not how you describe a hymn.
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Well, but, but again, Keith, what is your definition? See, I honestly, I, I, I know what it sounds like, sort of like defining beauty, right? I know what a basketball is because round it's, it's bounces and has black lines on it.
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But to say what is beauty? It's hard to define.
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And what is a hymn? I'm sure there's a textbook definition.
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Well, again, and this is part of the problem in the, in, in the human condition and in history, when you think about the human condition, we have this innate inability to communicate because we try to communicate through language, but we don't think through language.
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We think through pictures.
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So if I say the word car, you don't picture C-A-R in your head, a picture of your, a car comes to mind.
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So when we say hymn, that's a thing that's hard to define.
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And so what we do is we associate with it an experience or something that we know.
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So conversely, if you go to a modern definition of what it, if you go to a modern definition of a hymn from a modern dictionary versus if you went to Strong's Concordance and looked that up, it's going to say that it is a Greek word and it is a song of praise.
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So what is a hymn by definition? It is a song of praise.
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Now does that mean that a hymn has to be about God? Well this was the conversation we were having just before we went on air was that some songs are actually directed, it's still about God, but it's directed at us, like on we're Christian soldiers.
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That's calling people to move forward.
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That may be true in a Christian context.
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Oh, you're asking if there are hymns that are secular.
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Exactly.
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Okay, I'm sorry.
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Yeah, absolutely.
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So think about this.
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If you're in North Korea, they write songs of praise to their leader.
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Oh, wow.
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Okay.
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Guess what those are? By definition, they're hymns.
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It's a hymn.
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And so then you actually have the contextual definitions, which now this really complicates things.
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So when you get over to Colossians and Ephesians, we're told in both letters, speaking to one another in psalms and in hymns, right? And spiritual songs.
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And spiritual songs.
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So what's the significance of the words psalm and hymn in those two letters? Because the churches that they were written to were an amalgamation of Jewish believers and non-Jewish believers, correct? So to every Jewish believer, if you use the word psalm, what comes to their mind? The psalms.
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Right.
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Which are Hebrew songs of praise, correct? But to every Gentile believer, if you use the word psalm, I don't know what that is.
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Because that's not their background.
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They had a different way of expressing praise, and those were hymns.
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They wrote hymns to their secular gods in the same way they now come into the church.
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They're trying to express admiration, love, respect, honor.
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That's a hymn.
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So when you look at that in context, the first half of both of those books is all theology, right? So it's the greatness of God.
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We as Jews had the gospel.
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You did not.
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We had the law and the prophets.
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That's how it was delivered.
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But now we've been grafted in, you know, Ephesians 2, but God being rich in mercy, he's given you now that same grace.
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We're all one together.
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And then you get into the second half of both of those books.
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And in both books, to reconcile the two, what Paul tells us is sing to one another, or speak to one another, in Psalms, the Hebrew language of phrase, hymns, the Greek or non-Hebrew language of phrase, and spiritual songs, which is both.
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So when we look at words for definitions, we can't just go straight to a dictionary.
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We also have to kind of interpret that context.
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So the argument that I make is, in our modern context, when people say hymn, they probably have a very different definition than you might have of a hymn.
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I hear the Gettys, the things that Shane and Shane produce, and man, everything within my soul says that's a hymn.
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Well, for some people, it's just as I am.
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Yeah.
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And so, very often, that is the point of tension.
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It's what do we define these words' meaning? And very often, the tension has been, I want to be in a place where people sing the songs I know that make me feel comfortable.
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And I don't always think that's the most God-honoring thing.
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But that is often, more than I think we want to admit it, that is often the thing that matters most.
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Not so much, and I'm not saying for everyone, and I'm certainly not putting everybody in the same basket, but I'm saying in general.
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It's less about what honors God and more about what satisfies my taste.
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And to that, I would say, welcome to the human race.
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We're glad you're here, because we all have a sin problem, and part of the way that manifests is me, me, me, me, me.
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Sure.
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I want what I want and I like what I like.
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And then I tend to separate from those who prefer things to be different or for those who understand things different.
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Sure.
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But you would also agree, and this is where we're going to start maybe going in the direction of where we're going to start looking at some particulars.
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You would also agree that there are certain songs, whether they be traditional hymns or not, that are theologically incorrect.
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Would you say that? Would you agree with that? Well, I would say that based upon what my understanding of correct theology would be.
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And I would say as a pastor, as any pastor, you are going to encounter songs that don't necessarily line up with your understanding of theology.
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Yeah.
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And this is where I think the strongest arguments that I seem to run into happen to come from.
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It's not so much style, even though there is an argument about style.
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I don't know if you've ever seen it, but there's actually a YouTube video of a guy who argues that where you place the emphasis on the beat makes it godly or not.
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Oh, 100%.
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You've heard the syncopation argument? That argument has been around for forever.
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Back in the day when I was a kid, the Bill Gothard seminars had...
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If the beat is on the one and the three, it's godly.
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But if it's on the two and the four, it sounds like rap or hip hop, and therefore it's intended to cause you to become tranced.
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And I don't know if you've ever heard that argument, the syncopated beat is...
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Oh, and the argument that it alters your heartbeat and...
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Yeah, it alters your state of mind, everything.
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And I tend to not agree with that.
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I tend to say that there is no such thing, and you may disagree with this, but I'll throw it out there.
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There's not necessarily such a thing as Christian music, there's Christian lyrics.
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Because how you sing often tends to be related to culture and background.
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How people sing in Africa, where we have a missionary we support who is Scott Phillips.
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He goes to the Tao people of Indonesia and lives with them.
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And he wears a stick through his nose when he goes, because that's part of their culture.
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And I'm sure that their songs are not the same as ours.
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I don't know, I've never asked him.
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And I'm also sure that there are people who would take a scripture about not marking your body and say, man, you can't put that stick through your nose.
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Sure, absolutely.
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So, I mean, I think where this whole conversation becomes entirely dysfunctional is when we can't have a loving and honest and transparent conversation.
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That's where I get really uncomfortable in all of it.
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And again, it goes back to the name-calling, the backhanded statements, the underhanded statements.
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And like I said, the conversation used to be, what can we sing? And it still is.
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But now it's evolved, and I think that this really has been...
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Or devolved.
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Well, devolved.
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Depending on how you look at it.
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It has certainly devolved.
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But over the last ten years particularly, I have noticed a big conversation arising not about what we sing, but who we sing.
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Exactly.
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And the question is, should we be singing songs from certain, I would say artists, but not just artists' churches.
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The three big ones, I'm sure you're aware, is Bethel.
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And this of course, you've got Bethel Reading out in California, but there are other Bethel churches, but that's the big one.
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That's the one when everybody says Bethel, they're really talking about that.
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Yeah, yeah.
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Is it Bill Johnson is his name? Yeah, yeah.
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That's the one they're referring to.
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And then you've got Hillsong, which is...
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You've got Hillsong Australia, Hillsong...
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There's a bunch of those, but still it's sort of Hillsong United.
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It's an umbrella organization.
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Exactly.
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Yep.
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And even the third one, which not maybe so many people are familiar with, but that's Elevation, which is Stephen Furtick, and they put out a lot of music as well.
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And I will say from the beginning, and I think we would agree, but maybe you'll have some thoughts on this.
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I would say that these churches have a false and dangerous theology regarding things like the New Apostolic Reformation, which is the idea that there are modern day apostles who have the same authority as the apostles of the first century, and that they're rising up a new apostolic reformation, of course, what NAR stands for.
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The idea of word faith, which comes out of the positive confession movement, the ability to speak and make things happen, to have the same power that God had in the beginning when he created things by the word of his power.
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We have the same power to create or cause.
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I remember people in our own church who would be sick, and I would say something about their sickness, and they would say, oh, don't confess that over me, pastor.
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Don't say that I'm sick, because I'm not sick.
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And I'm like, no, you certainly are.
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You can try to convince yourself that you're not.
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Your skin is green.
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Exactly.
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Yes.
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You're sick.
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Your positive confession, make if you're not, not sick.
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So those are the dangers.
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And as we were talking before the show, there's even the one big one, and that is the seeing Jesus as a man.
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Talk about that one for a minute.
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Seeing Jesus not as divine, of having divested himself of his divinity.
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Yeah, that hurts.
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That is totally devoid of my understanding of Christ being fully God, being fully man.
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Which is the traditional, historic, and people sometimes don't like the word tradition, but you know what? You don't take down a fence until you know why it was put up, and tradition does have a purpose.
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And when we say traditional, when I say traditional, what I mean is 2,000 years of Christian history, that Christ is fully God and fully man.
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The confessions have confessed this, the creeds have, I don't mean to interrupt you, but this is the hypostatic union.
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This is just us talking, and for those people who know us really well, they're listening to this right now and going, man, they are incredibly restrained, because they talk on top of each other all the time.
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We love to have conversations because we genuinely love each other, and we're concerned about a lot of the same things, and this is a concern of mine, but this is indicative of our relationship as well.
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Your tendency is, this goes against 2,000 years of Christianity, and so it's a very historical argument.
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My argument is, take me Scripture translated into a language a native speaker would understand who has anywhere in the world never heard the Gospel.
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We give them the Word of God and walk them through it, they're gonna come to the same conclusion because that is how God is revealed in Scripture.
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It's not just that the Church has taught this for 2,000 years, it's that that is the picture that the Word of God lays out for us, that He is, not He was, He is the exact, I'm sorry I'm preaching now, the exact representation of His glory.
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How can you be the exact representation of anything if you have divested yourself? And so...
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When it says all the fullness of the Godhead dwell within Him bodily, it doesn't say some of it, or He let it go, but go ahead.
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I think, again, back to what we talked about with language, I think God chose the words that He did for a reason.
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I think He meant the words that He chose, and I think in order for us to understand them we have to look at the context in which they were written.
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And looking back in that, I just don't see any biblical grounding whatsoever for an argument that Jesus laid down His godliness in order to become one of us.
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I think what He did, and I think this is what's clear in Scripture, is He added humanity to His godliness.
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We talk about, you know, the word that we use for the season is nativity, and what does that word mean? It means you were born into something by right.
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So we talk about someone who is a native speaker, it's a language that they're born into.
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Jesus preexisted within the Godhead, but then He's born into this experience.
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The Bible doesn't make it clear anywhere that He gave up His godness in order to become human.
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That's right.
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Oftentimes the argument is the Philippians 2 argument, which refers to Him, in my mind I'm losing it right now, but it's the Carmen Christi, the argument that Jesus Christ, though He was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made Himself of no reputation, coming in the form of a man, and they'll say that's the, and this is actually the word there I think in the Greek is kenosis, it means to humble, and the argument they make is that's the point, where He divested Himself of God, that's not what that means, and I don't have time today, and it's not the point of this conversation to have that theological argument, but yeah, I agree with you, that's a dangerous thing to say that we're going to base on Philippians 2 something that it's not saying, that it's not saying that Jesus divested Himself of His divinity, and so there are several things, but in the midst of that, and this is where I'm going to hit you with a good question, even though Bethel, Hillsong, and Elevation, even though those churches would teach those things, and I would say would make them a dangerous church for someone to learn from, I don't know if you'd say that, I think you would agree with that, you're shaking your head yes? Yes.
27:57
Okay.
27:57
100%.
27:58
Okay.
28:00
But you would still play songs from them, am I correct? Yes, certain songs, not everything.
28:08
Okay, and that's a good point that you're making there, but choosing to play those songs, even songs that you would say are ones that are theologically accurate, have you run into issues with that? I haven't experienced much of that yet.
28:32
I had a friend that I was leading worship for recently, and the one question he asked was, are you guys going to do Reckless Love, because I've got some very strong convictions about that song.
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And so my immediate course of action is, well, what are your convictions? Because Keith, even when I was here with you, I'm here to serve the Lord, I'm here to serve the congregation, but as a worship leader, I'm also here to serve the pastor.
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I have to be, or it cannot be a healthy relationship.
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And so I need to see where this individual is in their theology, because he may be saying, man, that's the greatest song ever, and we need to do that.
29:18
Okay, well, we can talk about it.
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But he may be saying, as he was, I really struggle with describing God as reckless.
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Yeah, the language.
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Right.
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And so, okay, we'll just stay away from it.
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It's not even worth having the discussion and the issue, because it's going to be divisive within the context of worship.
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Does that make sense? Sure.
29:37
No, absolutely.
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And I appreciate you saying that.
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I think, as one of the things that I have noted over the years, I've been very thankful for the people I've gotten to work with, because we've had a pretty open relationship, especially you and I, and Brother Jim and others, we've had a good relationship.
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But I know of other pastors who almost battle their worship leader, because it almost seems as if they are not concerned with the convictions of the pastor, who does, along with the other elders, hold a place within the church of guidance.
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And even though we might say this is a, and all of our elders would say, this often comes down to an issue of preference.
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But on an issue like this, we're not basing our preferences just on our own liking of a tune or something.
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We're basing it on how we understand the scripture.
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And so, for a worship leader to come in and say, well, I just don't care what the pastor thinks, that would be a dangerous...
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Oh, that's a recipe for disaster on so many levels.
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And what's really scary when you look at scripture, everybody points to resolution within the church in Matthew 18.
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And so this is this process that we go through for people who have openly sinned, and we know about it.
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But then if you go further into the New Testament, what happens when you have someone in a church intentionally sowing division? You just give them one warning and you give them the boot.
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And I really worry that sometimes we see people who land so hard on this issue that they can't have conversations with church leadership, whether they're a part of that leadership or not.
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That, I just, I don't think that ever brings glory to God.
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I just, I don't.
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I think anytime there's division and hostility within the group, I don't think that's what God intended for us to do.
31:40
Amen.
31:41
Amen.
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A few folks specifically in our church, not recently, but over the years, as I said, I would guess this is a 10-year issue.
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How long has Bethel been around? Well, that's a great question.
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I am not sure.
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Don't know.
31:58
Yeah.
31:58
No.
31:58
Yeah, I can't.
31:59
But I started hearing about this just a few years back.
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That's what I'm saying.
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I'm saying within 10 years, but maybe less.
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Because obviously there are guys out there who have made this issue central to their ministry.
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Justin Peters, particularly, I love him.
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He has a seminar called Clouds Without Water.
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Listener, if you have never heard it, I do encourage you to go listen to it.
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But Clouds Without Water is where he takes apart the false teachings of many of the modern faith healers.
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He is himself, I think he has cerebral palsy, and he has had people accuse him of not having enough faith because he's not been healed.
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And you remember, we had a lady in our church who was in a wheelchair.
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And people had told her, well, you're in that wheelchair because you didn't have enough faith.
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And she told me those stories, and that broke my heart.
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One, that somebody would have the gall to say that to another human being.
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But to say something to someone of such rich faith.
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This person you know we're talking about had faith in her Lord.
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And so to say that about a person...
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Forgive us, God.
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Yeah, absolutely.
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Forgive us.
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So I can see where this passion with Justin, it derives from a very guttural place where he's been hurt.
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And he tells a story of a false healer.
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His dad brought him to a false healer when he was a little boy.
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And he walked him up to the lady, it was a lady, and he asked if she could heal his son.
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And she said, well, how much money do you make? Yeah.
33:36
Wow.
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This is his story.
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I mean, I can't tell his story as well as he does.
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But just that moment in time, to think that that didn't totally turn him away from the ministry, which it could have very well done.
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Many people have been turned away from the ministry.
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I know I have family members who have had horrible interactions with churches and fake healers and stuff.
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What was his name, the country singer from back in the day that was blind? Is it Ronnie Millsap? Okay, I don't remember.
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I think it was way back in the day.
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He told stories about being taken to the faith healers, and that not taking, and just the impact that that had on his life.
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Sure.
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And so when we look at that, we know these things.
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I can understand where Justin's coming from.
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And so his admonition to all of us is, don't play Bethel, don't play Hillsong, because you're pointing your people in a dangerous direction.
34:39
Okay.
34:40
So if I could interject this thought on that, his experiences aside...
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And he's not the only one.
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There are others, Todd Friel and others, but go ahead.
34:51
100%.
34:51
But even in this situation, his experiences with faith healers, and we talked about any potential woundings, all of that aside, if that was not a part of his life's narrative, I could still understand him saying what he says within these organizations as just an intellectual argument, and I don't use that word in a negative way.
35:14
No, he's a Bible teacher.
35:15
Exactly.
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He's a gifted Bible teacher.
35:16
Yeah, an argument is not being argumentative, it's a sharing of a thought.
35:20
Sure, absolutely.
35:21
So yes, I understand that completely.
35:24
And that's the thing that since Justin Peters and Todd Friel, and even MacArthur has spoken about this.
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Now, I will say this, I listened to MacArthur earlier today in preparation for our conversation.
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It was only a two-minute clip.
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I'm glad one of us was prepared.
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This is what I do, brother.
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But I'm learning, I'm learning to do it well, trying to anyway.
35:50
But listening to the MacArthur clip, he said...
35:53
He was a little more soft than I expected, because MacArthur has a history of being very bold.
36:00
But he was more...
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In the clip that I heard, and he may have said something different, so if a listener, if you're listening and you say, well, I heard him say something different in the clip that I heard, it was a question and answer at Grace Community.
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He was asked, should we play songs from Hillsong and these things? And basically his answer was that some of their songs are good, some of them are accurate, but a lot of the songs are not, therefore be discerning.
36:24
That was the answer that he gave.
36:26
Well, that'd be a great answer about a hymn book, any hymn book.
36:30
I was going to say, that's kind of where you would land, and that's what you're saying, is that you're not giving a rubber stamp to every Bethel song or every Hillsong song, but you're saying there are some gems, diamonds in the rough, that are worth singing, that's your...
36:52
Am I right? Yes, yes.
36:53
I don't want to put words in your mouth.
36:54
Yeah, yeah, that's...
36:56
And for a different reason.
36:59
When you think about the, again, we'll go back to that word argument, an argument is a thought, that's what it is, it's not a fight.
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So there are certain components to their argument, and when I say they, I mean the group of people that are saying we should not sing these.
37:19
And so you have to go in and address the points of those arguments individually, because it really is a complex issue, it's deeper than, well, no, we're just not going to do this.
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So each pastor, each church leader, and even each individual, you really got to wrestle this bear to the ground.
37:46
I hope you enjoyed that first half of our conversation about worship music.
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I encourage you to come back tomorrow for the second half.
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Thank you for listening to Coffee with a Calvinist, and may God bless your day.
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Thank you for listening to today's episode of Coffee with a Calvinist.
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As you go about your day, remember this, Jesus Christ came to save sinners.
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All who come to Him in repentance and faith will find Him to be a perfect Savior.
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He is the way, the truth, and the life, and no one comes to the Father except through Him.
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May God be with you.