Why Do We Sing?

The songs we sing in church are a continual negotiation between competing interests. We sing in the musical language of our particular time and place, yet we mine the musical and lyrical riches of the historical church. We want to quicken in our congregations diverse and proper emotions as they worship God, yet we never want to manipulate an emotional response from them. We want to shout our praise, as the psalmist does, yet we want to do so reverently. We want to approach boldly the throne of our heavenly Father, yet prostrate ourselves lest we be consumed by a holy God.

These tensions are not new. David knew something of them when he admonished the kings of the earth in Psalm 2 to “rejoice with trembling.” This is an emotion that the world knows nothing about, but one which we seek to engender weekly in our churches. And while an armistice of sorts appears to have been reached in the worship wars of twenty years ago (the rough terms of which seem to be that the millennials have agreed to sing traditional hymns as long as the old folks let them add a chorus, a bridge, and a smoke machine), one question seems to have been left unanswered: Why do Christians sing in the first place?

It is this question, among others, that Bob Kauflin goes about answering in his 2012 sermon "Why Do We Sing?" The title of the sermon gives away some of his methodology: By moving the discussion from “Since we sing, what now?” to the more fundamental question “Why do we sing?” we sidestep unproductive discussions of musical style. (Basically, he says, we all prefer the style of music we liked when we were seventeen—a sobering thought considering that when Bob was seventeen, The Steve Miller Band is what passed for good rock and roll).

But, more importantly, this approach functions etiologically, fashioning out of the whole counsel of God a kind of “Just So story” of how and why our churches do what they do musically. Don’t be confused by the coffee cups under the chairs and charismatic roots; Sovereign Grace Churches (along with every other church) has a liturgy, unwritten and casual though it may be. "Why Do We Sing?" is a kind of charter document for making sure the musical portion of it is biblical.

Colossians 3 does yeoman’s work in any discussion of worship in the age of the church. And while Paul’s admonition in that text to teach one another in “psalms and hymns and spiritual songs” (verse 16) occupies a central place in "Why Do We Sing?" the sermon is not meant to be a strict exegesis of that passage alone. Instead what we get is a close look at Colossians, a backward glance at the Old Testament, and a forward glance at Revelation. In doing so, Bob answers the question of “Why do we sing?” with this three-part answer: 1) We sing to remember God’s Word, 2) We sing as a response to God’s grace, and 3) We sing as a response to, and a reflection of, God’s glory.

We pick up the thread of each of these three aspects in Colossians 3:16, but when any one thread is plucked, we see it vibrate throughout Scripture. Paul understands singing is a component to letting the “word of Christ dwell in you richly”—a mnemonic device, in other words, to help us remember Scripture. Memorizing and recalling prose is hard. Memorizing poetry is easier. But a song? Just ask me to sing all the verses of “American Pie,” and I’ll show you. But this isn’t an idea original to Paul. In Deuteronomy 31:21, God himself teaches a song to the Israelites. Why? Because “it shall come to pass, when many evils and troubles are befallen them, that this song shall testify against them as a witness; for it shall not be forgotten out of the mouths of their seed.”

Bob is also quick to relate each of these dimensions of corporate worship to practical issues of how we, as congregants, should approach corporate times of worship. Paul’s plea that the “word of Christ dwell in you richly” becomes an opportunity for Bob to pivot and remind us of what should be obvious (but often isn’t) that it is the word which is to dwell in us richly, not the music or the worship experience. Our worship must be rich in content and avoid the emotionalism of “striving for an emotional response regardless of where it is rooted.” But it is not emotionalism to have music elevate our affections to the place where our thankfulness for Christ’s atonement (the great subject of our singing) sensibly requires them to be.

Similarly, that we are to admonish one another in “psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs” speaks, at the very least, to the fact that the church is edified by a diversity of song. God is pleased by songs to him that are both simple and complex, ancient and modern, carefully planned and spontaneous, pulled straight from his word and original. Our churches should be filled with musical variety, not in an attempt to accommodate our culture’s shifting fads, but to represent to those within a particular culture the panoply of God’s attributes and to inspire within them the appropriate (indeed, commanded) response to God’s character and works. No one style is sufficient to capture all that God is or would have us to feel about him.

The idea that we sing in church for the benefit of one another is one that I have heard Bob explore in the past and it emerges, too, in this sermon. “Worshiping God together in song is meant to deepen the relationships we enjoy through the gospel,” he says. When the lights are dim and the band is loud, it’s easy to hear a statement like that and assume that the only relationship meant to be deepened in worship is each individual’s relationship to God.

But of course Colossians makes it clear that our time of corporate singing is not just about us and God. It is also about one another. Sing to the Lord, for sure. But sing for your brother, too. Sing loud so that the person in the pew in front of you can hear your voice, specifically, urging him on in faithfulness and praise. Lift your hands to God as a sign of surrender and sacrifice. But lift your hands, too, so that your children will see that their father cares more about worshiping his Savior than he does about looking respectable. King David says that those who look to the Lord are radiant and their faces are not ashamed. In worship, the heart matters, but so does the face.

These answers to the question of why we sing are, admittedly, a little earth-bound. What of angelic harps and Seraphs’ songs and mention of the God who rejoices over us with singing? Isn’t music more than just a memory aid and a pat on the back to the guy in front of you in church? Isn’t it, you know, important, in some cosmic, eternal way? Don’t be ridiculous, of course it is. But here Bob is commendably careful not to confuse music’s ability to reflect God’s glory with the misguided notion that music somehow adds to God’s glory. Nothing outside of God can ever add to God’s glory. To alter only slightly the words of Psalm 50, if God had need of a song, he wouldn’t tell you, for the world is his, and the fullness thereof. And yet...and yet, he loves our song anyway. He receives it as the sacrifice of praise.

The corporate song of praise on earth and in heaven reflects God’s glory in its expression of the unity that Christ died to bring us. We are each individuals, yet we sing the same song. The timbre of each voice is unique, but the melody is the same, just as our Savior is the same. Our songs of worship reflect, too, the singing that God himself engages in (Zephaniah 3:17) and the song that will continue for eternity around his throne.

Music is, in a way, the boiling point of our emotions. As Christians, we have a responsibility to make sure that those emotional boiling points are produced (to stretch the metaphor nearly to the breaking point) by a godly flame. God’s common artistic gift to all humans grants us the freedom to enjoy any music that inspires righteous emotions. For our record collections to shelve Stravinsky, Mingus, and Dylan alongside the Gettys or Bach is not merely permissible; it is God-glorifying in nearly the same way that taking a walk through a garden is. At some level, we don’t much care whether or not the gardener reads his Bible.

But the music we sing in church is different. It exists for different reasons, for different ends, and we judge it on the basis of whether the music produced there can credibly be called an instrument for reaching those aims. A question perhaps even more fundamental than “Why do Christians sing?” is “What music does God like?” But Scripture provides no clear answer to this—only an answer to what God likes music to do. He wants it to teach and encourage. He wants it to exist as a unique method of discourse in which the languages of sincere emotion and verbal truth are uttered simultaneously.

And he wants us to sing for his own pleasure. He was the one, after all, who mysteriously and wonderfully created music, loves music, and has set up the world and redemption’s final culmination to reverberate with music for eternity (Revelation 5:9–10). Perhaps we can speculate that his relationship to music is like his relationship to wisdom—personified and pictured in Proverbs 8:30 as daily being his delight and having rejoiced at his throne before a single nail had yet been pounded for the earth’s creation. One imagines music to have been there too. It will be there, certainly, when all the nails of this earth are pulled up again.

Phil