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God's expectations for music
Let's look a the first of God's expectations for music:
[1. Faithfulness to his purpose for music]
» 2. Faithfulness in serving God's people
God's purpose for music
In Colossians 3:12-17, God gives a model for corporate worship at a church, including an instruction to sing:
Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God. And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.
The outworking of Christ’s word in our lives is to be filled with thanks for all God has done for us in Christ, and to encourage one another give our lives to him as Lord. Singing is the expression of that in a fundamentally human way. God has given us only a few ways to express our relationship with others. We can speak, we can touch, we can read and write, we can gesture. And we can sing.
It seems to me that singing is one of the most emotive ways human beings can communicate their thoughts and feelings. From the joy of a love song, to the triumph of the winning team’s anthem, the rhyming taunts of the schoolyard bully, or the grief of a funeral hymn. Songs affect us in a way that mere spoken words can’t. They are emotional. They fill our eyes with tears, or cause us to lift our hands with joy.
Music has been at the heart of creation from the beginning of time, and has been the inescapable emotional response of God’s creatures to his goodness. When God laid the foundations of the earth, “all the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy” (Job 38:7). And at the end of days, at the wedding feast of the Lamb, the great multitude will sing “Hallelujah! For the Lord our God the Almighty reigns!” (Revelation 19:6).
When King David established the Levitical music ministry in the tabernacle, he appointed 288 singers and musicians “to play loudly on musical instruments, on harps and lyres and cymbals, to raise sounds of joy.” (1Chronicles 15:16 and 25:7). The purpose of David’s music was emotional - to help the people of Israel express the joy of knowing the Lord was their God, and all he had done for them.
So what does it mean to be faithful to God’s purpose for music at church? Our singing should be an emotional response to the God who has revealed himself in the Scriptures. Having been restored to God through the death and resurrection of Jesus, we can confidently “draw near to the throne of grace” (Hebrews 4:16). And within that relationship of grace, this is God’s purpose for music: