How Should You Sing on Sunday?      

Singing with Understanding

Welcome to No Compromised Radio Ministry. My name is Mike Apendroth. I am glad you're listening. At least someone listens. Pity Party, make sure you go give us one star. Oh sorry, you're supposed to give me two stars.

One star because that's a bad show. The second star is from Jesus. Oh, I just had one Lay's wavy potato chips chip. Normally you say potato chips. That's why I just said that. Plus I can't really talk today.

I don't know what happened. I was so tired yesterday. I went to bed at like 8 .50 p .m. In the old days, I'd stay up till two or so. Then it was one, then it was 12. Now it's like 11 .30. Last night it was 8 .50.

Well, one chip because I'm counting carbs. Sometimes I give you updates on what I eat, what I drink, what you drink during the show. Anyway, I'm counting carbs. I'm still in ketosis. I did mention before I was on carnivore for about 10 days, like lost a pound a day type of thing with that.

Then for health reasons, because I got my blood numbers from Dana-Farber and normally if you're on carnivore, the blood numbers are fine, but the medicine that I'm taking plus carnivore caused some bad numbers.

Then I just switched to keto. What I have done is I'll say, I'll have two strawberries and just savor those two. I'll have three raspberries, savor those. I have found out though that the gummy vitamins, they have a few carbs, the gummy fish oil, they've got a few carbs.

Metamucil's got a few carbs. I mean, wherever you go before you know it, if you're not careful, eating kind of no real food, you're already up to 10. If you're trying to stay at 20 carbs or less a day, you shouldn't have any supplements or vitamins.

I like beets, but now I just have like a small slice of beets and then that's it. You can eat as much spinach pretty much as you want because the carbohydrates and that's just fiber plus Popeye ate it.

Anyway, feeling pretty good. I saw some pictures of myself over the summer and thought nobody loves me enough to tell me that I've got a gut. The gut is gone. I hope you can see that on radio here. If I had any sense, I'd have a camera here and we could do radio so you could all see my face.

But then again, this isn't... I was going to say carnal Christianity. That would mean everybody who does that is carnal and that's not true. Projecting takes one to know one. Today, I'd like to talk about singing.

Singing. When you sing, you're supposed to pronounce the last letters and stuff like that. Habits. Highly ineffective. Christians. Written by Chris Fabry. I'm not going to talk about that book today, but it's sitting right here.

Sitting right here. I sat it there and it's sitting there because I sat here. Sometimes in my Nebraska ease, I can't get those words correct. I can spell them, but I can't write them. Sorry, I can't say them.

That would be bad if you could spell them, but you can't write them. There'd be a serious disconnect in that. I'm talking about singing today and specifically corporate singing on Sunday morning, Lord's Day worship service.

I'm not going to talk about, should we sing Hillsong songs at church? The answer is no. You say, well, there's some good Hillsong songs. Okay. Sing them at home. That's my rule. I'm not talking about singing Bethel songs at worship service.

I'm not talking about that at all. I was thinking about Calvary Chapel the other day and my background in Calvary Chapel and Raul Reese and Calvary Chapel songs. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about how we should sing, not what we should sing, but how we should sing.

How should you sing? Now, if you're not a Christian, I get it, but I think I'd really like to talk first to the men, because if you're like me and you're a man and you've always been a man and you don't have a anything like that, and then you're a new Christian maybe, or you don't know the song, it's harder to sing.

I know it's hard for ladies if they don't sing well, if they don't know the songs. That's all true. But I'm talking to the men because A, I'm a man, and B, if the husband sings, the dad sings, everybody else goes along, right?

No children are going to be singing very much, especially as they get older, if dad says sing, but then he doesn't sing. So if you're a Christian, I want you to sing. Should you sing? Yes. What should you sing?

Well, maybe your psalms only. Awesome. Go for it. Maybe your psalms and hymns. Great. Wonderful. Neither of those things I want to talk about today. Psalms only, I suggest that you listen to Robert Godfrey.

Psalms and hymns, and most people go for that. But today I want to talk about how you should sing. Now, often I've been told by Sinclair Ferguson, sing like you're holding a hymnal with Jesus. In other words, he gave you the voice.

In other words, say to yourself, I'm praising Jesus. I don't want to mumble or not sing because I'm too embarrassed. But I found a little tract. And of course, Chapel Library down in Pensacola, Florida, chapellibrary .org has all kinds of awesome tracts.

Once in a while they have something I might disagree with, but hey, they probably listen to No Compromise Radio and disagree with it all the time, allegedly. This little tract, How Should We Sing, is by a man named Hercules Collins, around 1702.

Updated for moderators. Moderators. Modern readers enunciate and spell out each sound when you're singing. How should we sing? So, I'm going to read this a little bit, make some comments. It's almost like the Beza briefing, which is sitting right here, which I know I'm behind, but don't remind me of what I already know.

Singing with Zeal, Grace, and Spiritual Joy

Hercules Collins, How Should We Sing? Number one with understanding. As we must pray, so we must sing. We must be guided, not only by the tune, but by the words of the psalm. The matter more than the manner.

Otherwise, this would be more the work of a professional singer than a Christian. Regarding this, one cries out, away with the bellowing of the papists, who sing in an unknown tongue. I assume Latin. God will not understand us in this service when we understand it, not ourselves.

Well, God understands everything. I'm sure he knows what your thoughts are and your motives, but the point is still clear. We sing with understanding. Words are more important than the tune. Now, sometimes I know it's true.

You can have a tune, Great is Thy Faithfulness, I mean, words, Great is Thy Faithfulness, and a tune, Yankee Doodle Dandy, they don't go together. I'm trying to think of the one that's more of a oompa-pa song.

Marvelous message we bring, glorious news of the king. Jesus is coming again, bum-bum, coming again, oompa-oompa-oompa, coming again. You're sitting up and down, going around on a merry-go-round.

Jesus is coming again. That's it. I like it that he's coming again, but the bum-bum-bum-bum-bum-bum-bum-bum-bum-bum-bum makes me think about the tuba. I used to play the tuba. All-City Band, brother, fifth grade, something like that.

Nobody else could carry the tuba. The All-Link could carry trumpets. That's the only way I could be in the All-City Band. Same thing when I was in junior high and I got fifth place in 100-yard fly, butterfly, in the city.

It wasn't state. I don't think it was just city competition because there's only five in the pool. The other guys, they were already mature. They had hair on their legs. I was still getting my adult teeth, but I finished.

You got to keep your arms up and out of the water for 100-yard fly. It is a lot harder than you would imagine. How should we sing? Number one, with understanding. Lyrics matter. Pay attention to the words.

Number two, we must sing with zeal and affection. Love is the fulfilling of the law. It is a notable saying of Augustine. It is not crying sounds, but loving sounds in the ears of God that make the music.

It's not loud wailing just for the sake of it, but loving sounds in the ears of God. That is to say, with zeal and affection. You know this God. You've been known by this God that He does things for you.

He has done things for you. He will do things for you. It's a close, intimate, affectionate singing, like if you were singing a love song to your wife or your girlfriend. In all my days of officiating weddings, I used to have this list I'd ask people.

Do you want to have communion? I don't ask that anymore because I don't do it. Will there be a kneeler or something? Don't do that anymore. Kiss the bride. Whatever the questions were. Will there be alcohol served there?

I mean, just all these questions I never ask anymore. I just do the officiating since I just kind of know what to do now after almost 30 years. On the list that I had for seminary, I don't know who gave it to me.

I don't think I got it from the Master's Seminary, but I got a list and it said, will you like to sing to each other? And only one person, maybe two, have ever sung to each other. Up on the alta, number three, we must sing with grace.

It is grace, Hercules says, not nature that sweetens the music. One well notes that grace is the root of the true devotion. God will not hear sinners when they pray, nor when they sing. They make a noise like a cracked string of a lute or a violin.

The raven only croaks. It is the nightingale that sings. The singing of wicked men is but disturbance, not obedience. The saints above sing their hallelujahs in glory. The saints below must sing their psalms with grace.

So, you can already tell he's a psalm singer. It's fine by me, but singing with grace, that is to say, I think he means two things. Number one, if you're not a Christian and you're singing these songs, what does it really matter?

Does God hear here? I mean, obviously, he knows what's going on, but in terms of obligated to listen or to be pleased or anything else, right? Only Christ Jesus pleases the Father, and we're in him, and so we sing, and we sing with grace.

And by the way, he doesn't say this, but I'll add this part, singing with grace. So, sing even if you might not really want to sing. Sing even if you're only half-hearted singing. Sing even if you've got some residue of something going in your mind that bothers you.

Sing if you've just sinned, because you stand in Christ, you're beloved, graced, and it's okay. Run from sin, repent of sin, forsake sin, but you're never going to clean yourself up perfectly and sing with a perfect motive.

So, just sing with grace. Sing, know that you're covered by the ropes of Christ's righteousness by grace alone. Number four, how do we sing? We must sing with spiritual joy. Singing is the triumphant gladness of a gracious heart.

We must sing as David danced before the ark with shouting and rejoicing. So, what he's after there is just joyful, right? And the best way you can be joyful, here's one, not the only way, but right up there, the top of the list.

Remember what you deserve and remember what you get. We deserve hell and we get heaven. Torment, blessing. Woe, weal. Woe, blessing. Curse, blessing. Number five, how must we sing? We must sing with faith.

Faith puts a pleasantness upon every duty. We must bring faith always to Christ's table, or else Augustine says, if faith be asleep, Christ is asleep. Faith carries on this ordinance of singing in such a way that it may be accepted of God.

What I think Hercules is after is this. Remember, the just shall live by faith. And remember, that's just shorthand for something like this, the just shall live by faith in the risen Savior who loved me and gave himself for me.

Faith has an object. And so, we're singing with an object in mind. Now, the words will help us with that. If they're good words, certainly the psalmist, if you're singing psalms, you're singing God's word, you're not going to have to worry about things then.

But faith, if it's asleep, I'm not thinking about the one I'm singing to, then he says, Christ is asleep, and he's just using a figure of speech. Number six, we must sing with excited grace. Not only grace habitual, but excited and active.

We must cry out with David, awake love, awake delight, Psalm 57. The weights on a clock must be pulled up before it can guide our time. God loveth active grace and duty, that the soul should be ready trimmed when it presents itself to Christ in any worship.

Excited with grace. Now, it seems to me, I've said some good things about this, but in a critique, and by the way, I haven't read this before I did the show. That's why I do the show, because I wanted to read it and do two things at once.

Some of these just kind of slip together, and some of these are like, okay, in a Reformed, Continental Reformed, English Reformed way, I'd say Puritan, but of course Puritan can be used in a lot of different ways, applies to a lot of different people.

It's just like too many points. I mean, singing with excited grace and singing with grace, what's the difference? I think if you sit in a worship service and there is a call to worship, confession of sin, assurance of pardon, whether that's formal or in prayers or set up with scriptures, then I think you're on your way.

And excited grace, I don't really know what that is. To be happy, yes. To be enthusiastic, yes. I don't think you should sing just murmuring, although there's sometimes you're just so sad, you lose a loved one, you're crying, and you let the other people sing.

Singing to one another with psalms and hymns and spiritual songs. Number seven, we must sing in the Spirit. The Spirit must breathe as well as act of grace. One says they are called spiritual songs in relation to their origin from the Spirit.

The Spirit excites and completes the soul to this holy service. Thus, in Ephesians 5 .18, He exhorts to be filled with the Spirit and so calls us to sing spiritual songs as the effect of this fullness.

This wind must fill our organs before we can make any music. He's not talking about an organ either. He's talking about our bodies. The Spirit is called wind in John 3 .8. Anyway, the Spirit of God helping, guiding, we're filled with the Spirit, controlled by the Spirit, and there we sing.

Have no problem with that. Number eight, how do we sing? We must take great care to keep our hearts while about this work. One observes, without this we may please men with the artificial smoothness of the voice and displease God with the odious impurity of the heart.

So, we confess our sins in the worship service, assurance of pardon, we begin to sing, and it is certainly true that we all don't want to just belt out the songs and sing really loud, but our hearts don't really care.

So, I like to look at the words. I like concentrate on what the words are actually saying. I like to just muse, think, contemplate. Number nine, neglect not preparatory prayer for singing as well as for other duties.

Jehovah is the great harmonist who must put every heart in tune, screw up every peg of affection, and strain every string of meditation. Kind of related to the Spirit, singing in the Spirit, and since what I said, I believe if you have confession and assurance and those things in the worship service, then this will already take place.

Number 10, labor to see your interest in Christ clearly when you go about this work of singing. If we are not in Christ, we are certainly out of tune. True. It is Christ who must make this service acceptable as well as all others.

Here, the altar must sanctify the gift. Christ perfumes the prayers of the saints, Revelation 5, 8, and he must articulate their singing, that is, give expression to. Though we have Esau's garments, he can give us Jacob's voice.

If we are in him, he can raise our hearts to a pleasing elevation. All right. What I would say about that is, does God accept your works as a Christian? Well, second question, dear Christian, are all your works perfectly done with the perfect motivation of love for God and love for neighbor?

Do you ever do the right thing with less than a perfect attitude, with a bad attitude? Have you ever served someone where you didn't have the best intentions and it was costing you and you're grumbling and complaining?

Well, we know the answer to all these questions. The answer is, of course. So why does God accept our works? Because he's perfect. It's not some type of weird Baxterian, Richard Baxter, new law. It's not some type of Romish papist, you know, God will count your, you know, your works aren't that good, but your motives, you know, were good.

So he counts the works as better, especially if your motives are bad, how does that all work out? But God accepts your works because he accepts you in Christ. That's true, isn't it? And you've heard me say it many, many times.

I've done no-co videos on this and everything else. When someone gives you, dad or mom, a picture that they drew of you when they're five years old and it's really weird, your head's too big, your eyes are too small, hair's not right, you're either a stick figure or something else that doesn't look like you at all.

You accept that because you accept the child. Somebody makes you a birthday cake and they put too much baking soda and too much salt in it. You accept it and take a bite and eat it because you accept them, because you have a father.

And I often watch MasterChef with Gordon Ramsay and he sometimes takes the food and throws it, yells, curses, screams. He's a judge. He's judging. But once we have God as father, he's no longer a judge.

Judge requires perfect obedience. And yet now we have a father because of our great triune God and his work, the unbegotten father begetting the son. Together with the father, we have the procession of the spirit.

We now have our works accepted. So Gordon Ramsay's daughter, when she was little, she bakes him a cake. It's not that good. He accepts it anyway because he's no longer judge. He's father. Number 11. And finally, how should we sing Hercules Collins?

I think this dude was a Reformed Baptist, particular Baptist, maybe to be precise. Let us sometimes raise our hearts into holy contemplations. Let us think of the music of the bride chamber. There shall be no cracked strings, displeasing sounds, harsh voices, nothing to abate our melody.

There will be no willows to hang our harps upon. Psalm 137, verse 2. In the bride chamber, there shall be no sorrow to interfere. When we sing the song of the lamb, there shall be no grief to jar the harmony, for which day let us all pray.

Singing in Heaven and Teaching Children to Sing

Okay. That's probably the best thing. I mean, this track wasn't really that great. It's fine. Something to talk about. It's good for us to think about how we sing. But this one's really good. When you're singing, think about the ultimate songs you're going to sing in heaven with the great throng, with the myriads and the thousands.

I mean, when I go to big conferences and there'll be 3 ,000 men singing or 4 ,000 men singing, conferences in Los Angeles or Louisville, it's just wonderful. If there'd be 3 ,000 men and women or 3 ,000 women, but it's just wonderful.

And you think, oh, that is so good. I remember when my mom was dying of cancer and I'm singing with 3 ,000 men, it is well with my soul. And I just have the phone on. You could see other men having the phone on, just trying to let their spouses or their family members hear the singing, just crying, thinking about God is faithful and it is well with my soul.

And if that's great, and it was, I don't listen to much Christian music, but I'll listen to Sovereign Grace together for the gospel compilations type of thing. If that stuff is great, how much greater when we sing sight with sight and not by faith, singing the song of the Lamb, and everything's going to sound awesome.

Once in a while, people play special music here, like for an offering type of thing, and out of tune, make a mistake, whatever, the pianist makes a mistake, the song hymn leader's four-four time instead of the three-four time or whatever, up in heaven, can you imagine?

Never a mistake. That's pretty amazing when you think about it. And if you can't sing on earth, if you don't think you have a good voice, well, hey, I think I just sang today on the radio. Well, you can sing up in heaven and you won't have to hold any hymnal, you'll know it all.

You won't have to hold a hymnal with Jesus because He'll be there in the center of it all, the risen Savior. Pretty amazing. My name is Mike Avendroth. This is No Compromise Radio Ministry. Do you sing?

I'll ask you again. Do you sing? And to pick up where I left off at the beginning of the show, if you're a dad or a mom, do you insist that your children sing? Now, some people I know in the Baptist world, well, I don't have my kids sing because prayer is an abomination of an unbeliever and they're not believers yet.

And then I think, well, I wonder what my Paedo-Baptist friends might say to that. Well, what I would say to that is, of course, they should be singing. Of course, they should be praying. You pray at night with the children.

Do you have any prayer requests? Do you want to pray? You know, age appropriate, not when they're one, but, you know, when pretty soon they can say amen at the dinner table. And then when you come to church, you sing.

I'll tell you what, the Avendroth sing. And Haley, Luke, Maddie, and Gracie sang at church or there was going to be trouble, i .e. discipline, whatever form of discipline that took, whatever I thought was best with Kim, you're going to sing.

And that's just an expectation. You're going to bring your Bible, you are going to take notes, and you're going to sing. And of course, we did it in a more positive way most of the time, not all the time, but most of the time.

And I would reward them for sermon notes. I would give them money if they'd read through the Bible. I would encourage them when they would sing. I would stand there next to them and be singing, singing.

But we sing. You say, well, my kids don't really want to sing. Well, kids don't want to do a lot of things. But the Avendroths, we sing. When I see children not singing, I usually think that's on the dad.

That's on the dad. And by the way, what will help with your children singing is if you sing around the dinner table. You don't have to do it every night. We didn't do it every night, but most of the nights, we'd have Bible time.

We'd have Bible worship, family worship, sing some songs, do some scripture memory, ask some questions. I'd read the Bible. We'd pray, prayer request. And so there's many opportunities to do things like that.

But if you practice at home, then it's easy when they go to church on the Lord's Day.