In the last half of the 20th century, the singing of the Psalms hardly existed in the evangelical church. But Psalm-singing has made a resurgence. Why is this? It’s happened as increasingly more Christians and local churches have embraced the sufficiency of Scripture, recognizing that God has given His people an inspired hymnal of 150 psalms. 

 

In this podcast, Scott Brown and Jason Dohm, joined by special guest Scott Aniol, discuss this encouraging trend. There’s great value, they explain, in learning and singing the entire book of Psalms. As with expository preaching, this practice forces us to sing about themes we may not need in the moment, but we do need for shoring up our souls for the entire Christian life. Learning the full breadth of the Psalms will form our hearts to repentance, trust, thanks, and praise—giving us the posture that’s needed for every experience we face as Christians. 

Welcome to the Church and Family Life podcast. Today we've got Scott Anial with us to talk about something that's rising. It's called Psalm singing. Hardly existed in the latter part of the 20th century in evangelicalism, but something's changed. We're here to talk about it.

Hope you enjoy the conversation. Jason, today we're going to talk about something new, in a sense. Well, it's new for we who grew up in the second half of the 20th century. But, you know, here at this part of the 20th century, there's this resurgence of actually singing the Psalms. Oh, if only we had an inspired song book.

I know. Oh, wait. And we have we have the Sultan of Psalms here with us, Scott Anial. He just wrote a great book about it. I reviewed it.

I love this book. And he also produced a Psalter to go along with the principles that are in that book on the Psalms. So, hey, we get to talk about this resurgence of psalm singing. So let's do it. Scott, so there is a resurgence of psalm singing.

Hey, you know what? In the latter part of the 20th century, I don't think hardly any evangelicals were intentionally singing Psalms except Presbyterians. The Presbyterians had their Psalters and they were doing it, but not in the mainstream evangelicalism. And that's changing. What's going on?

Yeah, yeah, no, it's very encouraging. By the way, that title you gave me, that's a new one. I'm gonna have to put that in my bio, I think. But no, it's really, really encouraging, I think. I think part of it is maybe in so many circles, so many evangelical circles, the singing, the songs sort of devolved to such a shallow level.

And maybe some of the younger generations now recognize that and are saying, hey, we need something more substantive, we need more meat. And part of that is recognizing, well, we have an inspired hymnal. We have 150 songs that the Spirit of God Himself has given to us. Let's look at those. Let's start there.

I don't believe for a minute we only have to sing psalms. I think writing new things, singing hymns is a wonderful thing. But making the Psalms, making the God-inspired songs our standard is what it should be, because the Bible is our standard. So the Bible is a standard of our theology, the Bible is a standard of our living, and the Bible is the standard of our worship. And so it's really encouraging to see more and more people recognizing the necessity of actually singing the words that God has given us in the inspired Psalms.

Here's what's interesting about this little group here. We didn't grow up singing the Psalms. We grew up singing John Newton, Isaac Watts, and all kinds of other really sound authors of songs. I mean, these are wonderful Martin Luther's hymns are just so life-giving, but we didn't grow up this way. But now that's changing.

But I wonder what are the forces that are in play? I want to just suggest one. There really has been, over the last probably 30 years, an increased awareness of the doctrine of the sufficiency of Scripture. And so you had various movements that have popped out of that, the biblical counseling movement. The creationism movement.

Maybe somebody thinks this is a stretch, but the family integrated church movement is a Sufficiency of Scripture movement. So there are all these movements that have been rolling through the church, and they actually have had a cascading influence on one another, I think. But Is it possible that this is just part of a progression of a returning to the sufficiency of scripture, the regulative principle of worship, things that we really weren't, I wasn't really aware of, you know, before the turn of the 21st century. Yeah, I think that's definitely true. And right along with that is that an interest, more of an interest in Reformed theology and even church history that studying the great Reformation era theologians of the past who championed the sufficiency of Scripture and then coming to recognize, I mean, even Martin Luther, who absolutely did write hymns, still championed the Psalms.

And in fact, his hymns are often actually based on Psalms. And then of course, men like John Calvin, John Knox, were strong advocates of psalm singing. So I think that it's in that same stream, emphasizing sufficiency of Scripture, reform theology, the natural next piece is, we need to recover Psalm singing. Well, one of the things I love about Psalm singing is it pulls us out of some bad habits. You know, Self-centered content is a bad habit.

Modern worship music tends towards that, not exclusively. I don't want to slander the people who are putting out really good stuff now. But you don't find the Psalms being typically self-centered. You find them being very God-centered. Another bad habit it pulls us out of is having to have everything be sunshine and Roses.

Actually, that's not what you find in the Psalms. But I think if we followed our own inclinations, everything would be happy all the time. But the problem is life's not happy all the time and the Bible is for all of life. And so we should be singing about all of life. Yeah, yeah, That's absolutely true.

You know, the self-centeredness thing, I think what is so remarkable and helpful about the Psalms is that it's not that they don't focus on the self. It's not that they don't focus on the individual. Some of the Psalms are very much about the psalmist's deepest struggles and any sorts of things, but they do it in such a way that they are not self-focused, right? They're about the expression of the heart and my relationship with God or the struggles and how to deal with that, but they're composed in such a perfect way, which obviously shouldn't surprise us because they're Scripture, in such a way that even the way that I deal with my inner struggles or the way that I express my inner praise is done in a profoundly God-centered way. And that is a huge corrective for us in our singing, in our music, in our worship today.

Yeah, in the Psalms, you have expressions of dealing with slander. You have lamentation. You don't find much lamentation in modern hymns or really even in the classic hymns either. But you have a psalm about betrayal. The Psalms take you deeper than many of the hymns do.

They take us into a richer, fuller expression of the way that life really is. What do you think the impact of that is, or the impact of the lack of that on the church previous to psalm singing? Yeah, no, I think it's true. We've developed a sort of very thin Christianity that doesn't know how to deal with the pain and suffering of life, because the pain and suffering is here. But as both of you have sort of mentioned, Many of the songs in recent history are much more about joy, which is a biblical affection, but a kind of joy that doesn't know how to handle sorrow, that doesn't know how to handle pain, that doesn't know how to handle confession of sin.

And so, I really view intentionally singing the Psalms, and by the way, singing all of the Psalms, not just picking and choosing, but making sure that we sing all of them, I really view that in the same way that we view the benefits of expository preaching, preaching through books of the Bible. Because what that forces us to do then is not just pick and choose what might be our favorites, not just pick and choose how we might be feeling right now, but by intentionally singing all of the songs that God has given us, it forces us to sing things that maybe we don't recognize we need, but we absolutely need for the shoring up of the faith of our souls, and that will guard us and prepare us for down the road when we might have to go through that deep dark valley, or when we go through a period of time when we sin grievously against the Lord, and now we need language for the expression of confession. Well, we've already been shaped by that by singing Psalm 51, by singing the great penitential psalms. And so, these psalms are teaching us, they're shaping us, they're molding us, just like the faithful expository preaching through books of the Bible does, but it's doing it through singing and through shaping our hearts as well as our minds, whereas preaching is doing that from a little different angle.

So let's talk about applying this. Let's talk first of all about the home, and then let's talk about the church, about how to, you know, just create an interest and a methodology. So let's talk about the home. How does this happen in the home? Yeah, so I'll, you know, I can just tell you what we do in our family, what we encourage in our, in our congregation as well.

So every evening when we gather for family worship, among the other things that we do is every evening we're singing at least one psalm and at least one hymn intentionally. And so you've got to have some resources, right? So obviously, I'd recommend Psalms and Hymns of the Living God. So every member of the family has one. We've got our daughter who's artistic, she created bookmarks for every member of our family, for the psalm section, for the hymn section, and we just work one after another progressively through the psalms and then the hymns.

And so we started in Psalm 1 and we're just singing through them. And again, what that does is it exposes my family and my children from the youngest to the oldest to a regular progressive diet of the entirety of the Psalter as God has given to us. So one night it might be a psalm of praise, and the next night it might be a psalm of confession and a psalm of lament. We're singing straight through them. So having resources, having Psalms in your home, and then just intentionally, progressively singing through all the Psalms is a great spiritual benefit to your family.

Scott, do you use an instrument to lead that or you do it a cappella? Yeah, we do a cappella. We could, you know, my wife plays piano, I play piano, my kids play instruments, but we intentionally don't because we want to just encourage the harmony of our voices together. But, you know, there are families who might not have, you know, that might have singing in their background. The wonderful thing is there are so many resources today that can be used to aid this.

I mean, for instance, even just with the Psalter hymnal that we produced, we recorded piano accompaniments for every single psalm and hymn in the entire collection that are in our G3 app. And so you can just put that on and you've got an introduction, you've got all stanzas that are accompanied. And so for a family that might feel a little less comfortable, a dad who might not be super confident with leading, well, there's a resource and there are other resources like that on YouTube and in other places where you can get some accompaniment to really help you sing. So many resources today that there really isn't an excuse, you know, for being able to do this in a family. Oh, that's fantastic.

That's really neat. Any, you know, in terms of family life, anything else, I think that that sounds so helpful. So let's, let's go to church. Let me, let me just tell one quick story about that. This just happened yesterday.

My wife was telling me when I got home that in morning homeschool time with our two youngest kids who are five and seven, she pulled out Psalm one to read for the day. And as soon as she started, they just started singing it because we had been singing it as a family. And so there's an example of just the fruit of that. And it's not something worth forcing down their throats or trying to, you need to memorize this song or they just started singing it because we sing it at home. And it was just a wonderful thing.

That's so good. You know, that's, this is one of the important things about singing at home. Your children will begin to walk around, you know, humming. Many times when my kids were at our home, I would be driving to work and I would, and a song was going through my mind. And I was realizing my daughter was humming that, You know, we're just walking through the house at breakfast.

It would, and it had an effect on me. I was, what a great effect. You can actually shepherd your father by humming, you know? And, but yeah, those, you know, what kinds of songs are going through your kids' heads? Are they from some stupid Hollywood movie?

Or are they actually something nourishing and directing and comforting and really speak about real life? That's such a valuable thing. Okay, so the church. Cultivating, psalm singing, and the church. Now this is like for churches like ours, it's new.

You know, we're not Presbyterians, we're Baptists, we didn't grow up with Salters in our hands. So, and most of the people, well, probably a large number of the people in our churches, you know, they are just like us. They didn't grow up with Salters. Right. Yeah.

Yeah. So I think you have to teach on it first because what will happen when you start singing Psalms is they are going to sound different maybe than what we're used to. And you're going to sing, if you're singing Psalm settings that are very close to the original, which I highly recommend, then we're going to be singing about things that we don't typically sing about. And so, I think you want to give your people a little bit of a sort of a teaching and a foretaste explanation, why are we doing this, which is really, really important. And then, again, I mean, this is very similar to how to do it in a family, you know, have a plan and just start regularly singing the Psalms.

And so here too, in our own church, This is how we started both reading and singing the Psalms. So, reading the Psalms, we just work progressively through the 150 Psalms. One week we read Psalm 1, the next Sunday it's going to be Psalm 2, next week is Psalm 3. So again, we're just making sure that we're not just picking and choosing, but we are reading progressively through the Psalms. We'll get, you know, Psalm 119 we didn't read in all one week, right?

We split that one up. So some of the longer Psalms we do divide up, but mostly, you know, we'll try to read them all in their entirety. And so again, you might get to a week and you might read a Psalm and it's a deep song of longing and lament, but that's good for our souls. And by reading progressively through them, we're making sure that we're giving our people the full counsel of God in terms of the Psalms. And then in addition to reading progressively, in every service we sing at least one psalm.

If the congregation knows the psalm that corresponds with the psalm that we've just read, then we'll sing it. And that's often the case. The nice thing about a lot of psalms is you can sing the psalm setting to tunes that the people already know from hymns. You know, so you might be able to sing it to the tune of Amazing Grace or sing it to the tune of When I Survey the Wonders Cross or something like that. So, if we can find a setting of the psalm that was just read in the service and the tune is something that the people know, then we'll absolutely sing that.

But sometimes that's not the case, and so we might sing a different psalm. But again, we're just making sure that we're regularly singing the Psalms. We typically have a hymn of the month in our church where we're teaching people new hymns, but often it's a psalm, right? So the hymn of the month this month is going to be, you know, this setting of Psalm 23 or this setting of Psalm 100. And so just, again, regularly having a plan in order to teach the congregation, both Psalm texts and then tunes that are suitable for the texts, and just making that very intentional is a way to cultivate psalm singing within the church.

Oh, that's so great. Well, what a joy to experience, you know, movements of God in the church. They do flow through the church. And this is a positive sufficiency of scripture-oriented, you know, kind of a move of God. It's refreshing God's people.

People are gathering to sing the Psalms like I've never seen before. And it's really neat. It's a joy to see. One of the characteristics is that these Psalms are sung with vigor, and it's a blessing just to see the vigor with which the songs are sung. So I'm delighted.

That's very true. It's hard to explain, but when you remember that David was a warrior and a musician, there is this perfect union of that in the Psalms that's often lacking in some traditional hymnody and some modern hymnody. It's beautifully wedded in the Psalms and so important for us. Would it be fair to say that not very many of them are breathy kind of songs, sort of feminine, breathy, Jesus is my boyfriend kind of songs? Yeah.

And even the ones that are personal, even the ones that are about love for God, again, it's not a Jesus is my boyfriend love. It's not a romantic love. It is a robust, biblical love for God that is just so perfectly encapsulated in the Psalms. That's so important for just reshaping our hearts when all of the culture around us is trying to shape us in a different way towards a very romanticized sort of view of love. The Psalms are a great remedy to that.

Scott, a moment in time question. At this moment in time, what's your favorite song to sing just today and why? Yeah, Psalm or song period? Psalm. Psalm.

Yeah. Boy, there's so many good ones. Maybe Psalm 130. I love Luther. So here's an example of Luther's setting of Psalm 130.

Some of the things that he wrote that were based on Psalms are more paraphrases. Even a mighty fortress of our God is a paraphrase of Psalm 46, but it's a little looser, right? But his setting of Psalm 130, Out of the Depths I Cry to the Oh Lord, is a beautiful song of repentance that I think captures very, very well the meaning of the actual psalm, which is, I think, the best kinds of song versions of the Psalms are ones that really capture the original psalm as closely as possible. So I love Luther's setting of Psalm 130, Out of the depths I cry to the Lord. That's great.

You know how funny that is this Sunday we're singing that song. No kidding. That song. Yeah. 130.

Fantastic. Wow, Scott. Thank you so much. May your tribe increase. I'm grateful for all the stuff you're producing.

Hope everybody goes out and buys your Psalter and your book on the Psalms. Hey, just give a thumbnail sketch of those two publications and where they can get them. Yeah. So Psalms and hymns to the living God is again, all 150 Psalms. Some of the Psalms, we have more than one setting even, plus many, many hymns in there as well.

So all, you know, bound together in one hymnal. Many, many churches are using this now, which we're really greatly encouraged by. And then Musing on God's Music is my book on the Psalms that really works through how the Psalms, we've done a podcast on this, how the Psalms have been deliberately organized, helping us sort of recognize the God's intent beneath the Psalms. And I really pray that that will help continue to invigorate people to wanting to sing the Psalms. Fantastic.

Hey, thanks for the conversation. Yeah, thank you so much. Really appreciate it. Okay, there you have it. Okay.

Hey, thank you for joining us on the Church and Family Life podcast, and we hope you can join us next time. Dot com.