The Right and Wrong of Song

Sing to him; sing praises to him; tell of all his wondrous works!
(1 Chronicles 16:9 – ESV)

The priority in worship must be about God Himself, and then about Him including us into His plan, not us including God into our plan. Worship is about His love for us before it is about our love for Him. Most everyone, upon careful consideration, would agree to this. But does that mean we are not supposed to sing about how we love Jesus, or how we feel about what He has done for us? Does this mean if the song has a lot of “me” or “I” in it that it is no good? Does this mean the old songs are always better, or that we can never sing the new praise choruses?

It certainly isn’t that all the old songs are good and all the new ones are bad, or that using personal experience is never warranted. In one very old song, within 6 verses it uses I, me or my seventeen times. A quick reading shows an emphasis on what God can do for me.

It’s known as Psalm 23. Indeed, many of the Psalms initially seem to have their focus on the writer’s feelings and emotions and what they want God to do for them and to their enemies. However, they always return to God and who He is. The mind is grounded in God.

Thinking about one the most beloved of all hymns, "Amazing Grace", it does refer to "me", "I", and so on, but the focus is on what God has done, not on what I have done.

You see it’s not an either/or answer, but a question of where the overall focus is. Primary emphasis must be on God, His greatness, His holiness, and His attributes, because God’s promises are only as reliable as the God they come from. We must understand His faithfulness, and explore that, in order to more fully appreciate the reasons we can have faith. That is worship, discovering more about Him, and developing that theme in our songs.

In saying that we must first look at Him, and His perfections, we are saying that there is a proper order and levels of primacy, not that there is nothing else. Secondarily, therefore, we must also consider, ponder, mediate on, and sing about what God has done for us. Worship does include our response to His holiness. This is also a matter we should have as a higher focus or more emphasized fact than what we want or our devotional response.

Thirdly then, as far as preponderance of emphasis, is the matter of our devotional response to Him. It is because we can trust His works for us, and that being because of whom He is, that we can rightly declare our allegiance to and love for Him. If we should include songs about our devotion, and it is my contention that we should, then we must always include songs that inform us as to why we should be devoted and how we can be devoted also. We love Him because He first loves us, and the only reason we can love Him is because He first loved us, and so we must sing of Him loving us as primary and in that way more important than us loving Him. His faithfulness is not negated by our lack of it, and that is reason to worship.

Fourthly we come to God asking Him for mercy and grace to help in time of need, and we can do this in song. We thank Him for what we have before we ask Him for what we need. These needs are for corporate or individual outpouring of God’s Spirit into the worship situation, into the lives of others to bring salvation, or sanctification, into lives for mercy and healing, or requests of God to help in whatever situation we may find ourselves or others in.

Thinking about a song set rather than an individual song, perhaps a very simple hierarchy of emphasis and overall focus for our songs might look like this.

1. His perfections / who He is / His holiness, His attributes and character
2. His purpose / His mighty works / what He has done for us
3. His praise / our devotional response to Him
4. His provision / our requests of Him

Let us endeavor to do it all, but let us be diligent to make it primarily God entranced, centered on Christ, and speaking of the glory of the Godhead, with our singing the praise of His awe and wonder, our heartfelt devotion and neediness of the now following in proper response.