Here in this video, we learn of the role of music in true worship. We learn that music is a means to an end, not the end itself. Music is for the worship of God not our own emotional high. Music should arouse our hearts to the worship of God not just arouse our emotions. 

In most worship services today in modern day evangelicalism, if you were all of a sudden in the middle of a song to pull the plug on all the instrumentation, all the microphones and everything, you would find that the congregation is hardly singing. We very often become worshippers of ourselves. We're not worshipping God. We're simply worshipping the feeling that we're having about God. When it comes to the issue of music, it's one of those areas where, you know, the battle is likely to continue until the Lord comes home.

What we have done is we have elevated music to, it seems to be a place above the teaching of the scriptures. Music in worship has three purposes. Codify, unify, glorify. That gets the gist. That the purpose of music in the worship of God is to codify the truth so that it can be sung to the glory of God down through the generations.

Welcome to The Family That Worships Together. In this session, we're going to focus on the important yet very controversial subject of music. And as we consider the subject of music, as with all things, scripture alone must be our guide when it comes to evaluating music. Scripture and scripture alone. Well there's no subject in the church today where there's more disagreement, nuance, confusion, some people call them worship wars as there is in matters of music and the spectrum is so broad ranging from the people who say Why should the devil have all the good music?

To those who believe that there should be absolutely no musical instruments in the worship of God at all. So in this session, you'll hear many voices who will deliver warnings about music in terms of its potential for idolatry, fleshliness, man-centeredness, and really more importantly, disconnection from biblical absolutes. And they'll identify things that you ought to look for and they'll also speak of the joys of singing and of music in the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ. Well here are a few questions that we will address. Are we singing or just being entertained?

Are we singing good theology with dead hearts, without any joy? What about the use of the mind or emotions in worship? How should we think about singing psalms in worship? What should our position be on performance? How do we evaluate the presence of sensuality in worship in music and also in worship leadership?

And how do we know when music is elevated too highly in the worship of God? Now finally, at the end, the very end of this session, I'm going to offer several biblical requirements for our worship. But in all of this, I pray we will remember the words of Psalm 149. Praise the Lord! Sing to the Lord a new song, and his praise in the assembly of the saints.

Let Israel rejoice in their Maker. Let the children of Zion be joyful in their King. I pray that that is the legacy of this session. You know, people ask, what are the great errors in worship, modern worship, contemporary worship in evangelicalism today? It's the same problem that we have everywhere in evangelicalism, that those who declare that they believe in the inerrancy of scripture have not proven by their actions that they believe in the sufficiency of Scripture.

That everything that is done in the church and in Christian life must be done according to the Scriptures, conformed to what is written. We are a people of great invention. Not all things in the Bible are proved in the exact same method. For example, there are certain pretexts in the Bible where it's like that silver bullet where it very clearly says do this or don't do that. That would be one way of proving things in the Bible.

Another way would be through the idea of the various principles of the Bible or the patterns of Scripture. And so given that the issue of music, at least from my perspective, it's hard to find a very clear proof text or a pretext that says do this or do that. We have to look at the patterns of Scripture and ask some of the hard questions. Again, what kind of music exalts God and lifts up our soul? And what kind of music do we believe would contain good and godly truthful doctrine that would be beneficial for the people of God to recite to God and secondly to bring into their own mind and soul.

It's become one of my major concerns in our own day because as an itinerant preacher I have been to places where they've basically moved the disco kind of music, the night club kind of music, and brought it into the church context. So that you've not only lost sight of the music accompanying the words, but even without the words people are being whipped into an emotional frenzy. And that's wrong. That's really an adulteration of worship. It's a hijack of the place of worship because people are no longer thinking of the words because ultimately That's what worship is.

It's words. It's you coming to God, saying to Him, Wow! This is what you've done. This is who you are. And we are saying it to you in a context of praise.

Now that's been lost completely. It's now just heavy metal music, it's just dancing, away the hours, and so forth, and by the time the preacher is being asked to preach even his own soul has not been prepared to deliver the Word of God in that context. It's a far cry from what worship was in the Old Testament, what worship was in the New Testament times, and what it's been across the ages. It's really darkness that's creeping in and destroying that which ought to be the most reverent season in the soul of a human being. We are people who are strong in the arm of the flesh.

We are the people who are always looking and desiring to figure out a new way to do something. And that has affected our evangelism. It's affected our church life, but it's affected our worship. How do we make people evangelize? How do we make people come to church?

How do we make people worship? There's only one way. They must be regenerate, They must be filled with the Holy Spirit and they must be growing in maturity. If you're going to throw that reality out, then you're going to have to come in with a new invention to prop the whole thing up. And I think that Worship Today has been influenced more than any other thing by our culture of entertainment.

It's easy to get thousands of people to come to your church. Easy. Just have good entertainment. And so you go to worship services and you're entertained. The music, the lights, the action.

You are entertained. The preacher comes out. He has a lot of funny stories or heart-rending stories. You leave contented. You leave satisfied emotionally.

I'm for numbers. I'm for reaching people for Christ. But when you become numbers driven, then everything in the worship service is aimed at that. If you have numbers, you have to have big churches. If you have big churches, you have to have big debts.

So you have to have people to come. You have to entertain them and cause them to be emotionally satisfied. And so, once again, we're back to this man-centeredness that has destroyed worship in the 20th century. People knew how to worship God by and large in the 1800's. I'll give you an example.

I have been in recent, the last two years, with a group of young people. You could not find a more dedicated group of young people, more desirous of studying Christ, knowing the Gospel. They're sincere, they're converted, and they love the Lord. But they come out of contemporary Evangelicalism. And even though they love the Lord, they'll fast, they'll pray.

When we're in our worship service, you see that they really don't sing with great zeal. They don't put forth a joyful noise. They Don't shout unto the Lord in song. And I've tried to figure out that, you know, why is that going on? And it's not because they don't love the Lord.

It's because they've been raised in a Christianity where it has a music director, a music band, a worship team that does almost everything. Combined with that and the culture of entertainment, they've been taught to come into church and watch other people do their worship for them. And in most worship services today, in modern day Evangelicalism, if you were all of a sudden in the middle of a song to pull the plug on all the instrumentation, all the microphones and everything, you would find that the congregation is hardly singing. Even when the congregation is filled with people who love the Lord, because we've almost trained them to watch. And that is one of the greatest problems in evangelicalism today.

Music. Music has generated The great hymns of the faith that Christians have sung for literally hundreds of years are now rejected out of hand as being irrelevant, as being boring. In their place has come this highly repetitious, I can't think of any better word than tacky music, where I'm expressing my emotional state rather than confessing what I believe about the living God and what God has revealed about Himself. Whereas the music in the worship of God must reflect the majesty and the dignity of a worship service And the words of the hymns must be based on truth, and not on my emotional state, but on truth. Now let's look at most hymns today, and it's a repetition of what I feel.

I feel this way. God makes me feel so good. Whereas the hymns that the people of God, and the Psalms, and the spiritual songs that people have sung for generation after generation have been based upon truth as revealed in Scripture. And then the music matches the majesty and the dignity of the words. We've lost that today.

Today we have these songs that come in waves. A song becomes popular, a praise song, whatever they call them, becomes popular and then a year everybody has forgotten about it. A Mighty Fortress Is Our God has been sung for 500 years. I Greet Thee Who My Great Redeemer Art 500 years. There are also hymns that we have sang in the church today that go back 1, 800 years.

The Te Deum Laudius, a Laudibus, one of the early prayers of the early church, still in some hymn books. Those are the great hymns that are full of truth and full of majesty. So I would say the demise of preaching, the degeneration of music, are two of the leading factors that have destroyed worship in our culture. When it comes to the matter of music and worship, we as human beings often associate certain kinds of music with worship. One of the great problems is that when a certain style becomes ingrained in our mind as part of worship and we're only responding emotionally to the kind of music, very often then what we end up doing is worshipping ourselves rather than God.

We want to feel a particular way that we associate with worship and therefore you know if a backbeat does it or if something from the 16th century does it, only that is what is worshipful. And the tragedy is that if it's just something that tickles our emotions, regardless of whether we would call it legitimate or not, we very often become worshipers of ourselves. We're not worshiping God. We're simply worshiping the feeling that we're having about God. We're dealing with people who come from a lot of different backgrounds and they have a lot of influence from other places.

Any time we try to attach a style or a mode or a genre of music to worship, I think the danger and the greatest pitfall in that is that we're not being honest with ourselves. We're really saying we're worshipping me. We're saying I'm only here as long as you're going to do something that's going to meet what I want, what I desire, and what I like. This worship of a holy and a righteous God is not about me feeling like I've been satisfied with what I wanted. It's that I'm realizing I'm submitting myself to the lordship, to the kingship, to the majesty of Almighty God.

And that I want to guard the way my flesh wants to worship Him and look to this word and say, Dear God, how instruct me to worship You. How do I worship You? One danger is to have good head knowledge, good solid sermons, good content, but the sermon doesn't go beyond head knowledge. It doesn't reach the heart, doesn't stir the emotions, doesn't impact the conscience, and doesn't woo the soul with the affections of the truths of God's word. That's a danger actually in some reform circles.

The intellectual part is all right, but the heart seems to be missing. The other danger is to have all emotions, to aim for the emotions of the soul before you've informed the mind. And that's done in a lot of Pentecostal, Charismatic circles today. There's all kinds of music that stirs up the emotion, but there are choruses that just get very repetitive, and people just get excited and emotional by the very beat of the music or whatever, but the heart is not being moved by the propositional truth of the scriptures. So what happens in such situations is people get all excited by music and then the sermon becomes an afterthought, almost a letdown, and that sermon too then usually is not very contentful and the sermon and the worship suffers.

So in some circles where it's all intellectual and there's no heart, people leave the Reformed Church and they go to Pentecostal churches where it becomes all heart and no head. And the Reformers and the Puritans had such a good balance here. They ministered to the whole man in the worship service. And so what they said was the music must all coincide with the spirit and with the reverence of the sermon. In fact, if a sermon was very warning that particular morning, because it was a warning text, the music must have a warning note in it as well to coincide.

So the whole worship service becomes seamless. If the text was very comforting, the music should be very comforting. I think some of the pitfalls that I've noticed and see is a lot in how worship gets defined. Many people identify and define worship as this event that's surrounded with music. Certainly we can see biblical context that worship may include music, but when it's properly defined and when we look at it deeply in Scripture, that it really shouldn't be relegated out to only this element of music.

So worship ought to impact and affect every area of a man's life. I would long that worship would affect the way I wake up each day, the way I address my wife, the way I perform the duties of my jobs and the tasks that are before me. Certainly I may find myself in singing and praising while I'm thinking of the goodness of the Lord and His mercy and His grace, but That pitfall would be that I must protect myself from thinking that I'm not worshipping while I'm doing this duty. I'm only worshipping whenever I'm gathered with the church, gathered with the saints. It's that element that happens just prior to the teaching and the preaching of the Word.

I think that's a dangerous pitfall that the church is in today. We have elevated music to, it seems to be, a place above the teaching of the Scriptures. It is what, and I'm not speaking of all churches, but many churches, music is the focus of the Sunday, and the teaching of the scripture is secondary. When we have people and believers who say, I need better music in the sense that music that is appealing to them, yet they're fine with the strong teaching of the Scriptures. When we have people who leave churches over things like that, as opposed to saying, listen, I can tolerate bad teaching as long as the music's good.

We seem to have a generation that's like that these days. That it's more about Christian music or Christian, you know, singing than it is about the teaching of the Word. Now music is important and we will sing and we will continue to sing, But I think we have elevated it to such a point that it has been a bigger issue than the teaching of the Word itself. When we look at Acts 2.42, the doctrine, the fellowship, the breaking of bread and prayers, I believe singing is a part of that. We can sing songs that are doctrinally sound and we can sing in our fellowship.

We can even sing prayers to the Lord. But it's not one of those ultimate requirements, I believe. It is not, and I think that's one of the big misunderstandings of so many believers. They feel that worship is not worship until we sing. And that is not what we see in the scriptures.

You can sing and worship the Lord, but the worship of the Lord does not always require singing. And I think that's where we've missed it. So when we have, especially if we have an immature generation of believers who feel that worship is equivalent to singing. Yeah, we need to go to scripture and here's a particular text that gives us in a more definitive way what's supposed to be a part in worship. We're to address one another, Ephesians 5, 19, in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with all your heart." So a text like that gives us some sort of framework of the kinds of music that needs to be in the service.

Certainly the Psalms ought to be a part of our singing unto God. It's the very center of our Bible. And here God in his own words has given us music that was used in the temple and ancient Israel. Thankfully during the time of the Reformation new tunes have been given to those psalms because we lost all the tunes with the destruction of the temple in 70 A.D. So that's been recovered and we can sing those psalms unto the glory of God.

And we have hymns, hymns which would be those non-inspired tunes or different songs that would nonetheless take the concepts of Scripture and exalt Christ and all of his ministry here on the earth, and we ought to be singing those. And then lastly, those spiritual songs, which I believe that means were a short snippet of scripture is taken and set to a fitting tune, which then could be sung in worship. And we find various examples of that in the Bible. A good example would be in Philippians 2, where you have a portion of scripture, which if you analyze that passage starting in chapter 2 verse 4 on through verse about 12 you see what I believe is an ancient song which was sung in the New Testament Church which is then put into scripture. That would be a spiritual song.

Where we're actually taking a short portion of scripture, we're giving it a tune, we're singing back scripture to God. When it comes to the issue of music, it's one of those areas where the battle is likely to continue until the Lord comes home. Because remember I talked about the Regulative Principle, and the Regulative Principle talked about the elements of worship and narrowed it down to a basic number. However, when it comes therefore to singing, you then have the issue of should it be only a cappella, no instruments, or should there be instruments. Again you will find that the Christian Church has generally gone into two camps there.

You have those that will teach that instrumental accompaniment was only for the Old Testament because it was part of the type which was therefore fulfilled in Christ. Whereas you still have others who insist that the instrumental aspect is an essential ingredient. It's simply part of music. To try and divide music between voice and instrument is to introduce an artificial barrier. And so therefore they would allow the instrumentation.

So then if we can then move on to the side of instrumentation, again there the question then arises, which instruments do you use? My basic counsel to people is always, in fact, I've written in the book that I've done entitled Foundations for the Flock, I've addressed this matter to quite some extent. And I've given a general principle that circumstances must serve the mode of worship and the mode must serve the element. So if instrumentation is beginning to take away from the singing, then it's taking a life of its own and it needs to be arrested. If it is accompanying the singing, if it's making the singing that much more meaningful, then it is playing a secondary role, it is aiding, which is what it ought to be doing.

So that would be my word of counsel, and I would know that even in our family of churches, which is the Reformed family of churches, there would be others that would take exception to that, but I would respect that. And that's why whatever a person's position is on psalmody or hymns or whatever, one should focus on this, that psalmody should not be excluded because the psalms really center on worshiping God. And there's a reverence about them. The psalms have a way of keeping us from becoming self-centered. And the worship service just becomes the I, me and my thing.

Oh yes, by the way, it happens to be related to God, but it makes me feel good. The Psalms have a way of keeping us theocentric. So it's great to sing Psalms in worship, to keep that spirit of reverence that coincides with the sermon. They are to be sung to God and about God. I mean, you see the great examples in the book of Psalms.

I mean, that was the hymn book of the Jewish people for many, many centuries. And We don't limit ourselves to the Psalms because as the redemptive acts of God proceed in Scripture in the Lord Jesus Christ, God's people continue to add new songs to Him, of praise to Him. But they are to be God-centered. They are to be about God, not simply about ourselves. And if we do talk about ourselves, it is in relationship to God.

And they must be sung to God. So even when we sing, you know The Bible says in Ephesians and Colossians we are to encourage each other with Psalms, hymns and spiritual songs. Nevertheless, the ultimate direction of all of our singing in worship is in praise of the triune God. Douglas Bond wrote a very good paper on music in worship. He said that music in worship has three purposes.

Codify, unify, glorify. That gets the gist. That the purpose of music in the worship of God is to codify the truth so that it can be sung to the glory of God down through the generations. So as to unify the church. Not just unify the church on the street corner, but talk about the unity of the church, the catholicity of the church down through the centuries.

You see, what relationship do we have to the previous 2, 000 years of the Church if the only thing we are singing are songs that were written yesterday. Now I am not opposed to singing songs that were written yesterday if they are true and if they have dignity and majesty and beauty. But we have no relationship in worship to previous generations of Christians if we're not singing the same songs that they sang. So the purpose of music in worship is, of the words, is to codify the truth, to unify the church all over the world and through the ages, and to glorify God. That is one of the reasons that Calvin himself didn't want to use musical accompaniment.

He was afraid that people would become idolatrous of their feelings. And I believe he was completely right as far as the danger. I don't think we have to live in idolatry, but we must be aware of the danger of worshipping ourselves because of how we feel in worship. Now musical instruments has an additional purpose that is beautifully stated. The purpose of instruments is beautifully stated in the Old Testament and that is to raise sounds of joy.

To raise sounds of joy. Calvin wrote some of the greatest things about the effect of music, good and bad, on the emotions and on the mind and on the heart. And it does raise sounds of joy. It creates in the worship of God and in the people of God who are worshiping Him when they hear this beautiful God-honoring music behind the hymns that enables them to hymn. It does increase joy as they sing.

Now that doesn't necessarily mean that they are going to show that joy. I mean a lot of the music today gets all people stirred up and they want to dance around and clap their hands and jump up and down on the pews and all those things. But bear in mind that the deepest part of a river is not the rapids. The deepest part of the river is placid on the outside. I mean, you know, sometimes people come to Reformed churches and say, you're too austere.

There's nothing joyful about your singing. How do you know? Do you see my heart? Can you see my heart and tell me there's no joy? I mean, sometimes I can stand there and just be bursting with joy.

You couldn't tell it. I don't care whether you can tell it or not because the purpose of worship is not to impress you. God sees the heart. Well these men have just made it really clear that Scripture does direct us to have a specific atmosphere for our singing, that there actually are biblical absolutes that must govern worship. And I want to give you eight questions to help you understand this a little bit further.

Question number one, is the music emphasizing the teaching or does the music become most prominent? Well, Colossians 3, 16 and 17 teaches us that our singing is designed to teach us to let the Word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom, teaching and admonishing one another, in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord. The issue is, is the Word of God dwelling richly as the result of the singing or is the music dwelling richly? Question number two, does the music deliver accurate instruction? Colossians 3 16 also speaks of this matter of teaching and admonition.

The lyrics must have biblical integrity. Question number three. Does the music come from a wrong motive? Does the worship arise out of some evil in the heart? 1 Kings 1.26 is an example of this.

Jeroboam created a whole worship scheme to draw people unto himself. Number four, does the music worship the right God in the wrong way? Nadab and Abihu are examples of this. The Golden Calf is an example of this, where the attempt was to worship the true God but in a way that didn't please God. Number five, does the music foster reverence?

Because reverence is a biblical absolute. In the worship of God you find people falling on their faces before God. In Malachi, reverence had gone out the window, and they were just bringing whatever lame and blind offering they wanted to, and the prophet says, try to give these to your governor. There was no reverence there. But we're obligated to bring music that fosters reverence and sobriety.

Number six, does the music foster holiness or sensuality? And this can be discerned both in the style of the music, because music can be sensual in nature, and also in the way that the leaders conduct the leading of worship, particularly when you have women involved in the leading of worship. Number seven, does the music foster orderliness? The Apostle Paul said, let everything be done decently and in order. And then number eight, does the music foster love?

The goal of our instruction is love. And so there ought to be such a sense of love toward God and love toward mankind in the way that God defines it. Well, Here's maybe one of the overriding principles in all of this. And that is that music is designed by God to enhance the words of the message and to make the message meaningful. But we have to ask, does the music make me love the music too much and the message too little?

And any music that fails to do this creates a conflict between what Jesus spoke of as worshipping in spirit and in truth. Well, our great prayer for this session is that we would become living pictures of what we read about in Psalm 150, which says, praise the Lord, praise God in his sanctuary, praise him in his mighty firmament, praise him for his mighty acts, praise him according to his excellent greatness. Let all music take us in that direction. You