Considering Sing!

I got a free copy of Sing! How Worship Transforms Your Life, Family, and Church by Keith & Kristyn Getty from a local bookstore as part of Pastor’s Appreciation. I’m glad I was gifted the book. I ended up buying copies for our worship team.

I read this short book on study leave. It is a quick read. It was a good read.

They want the book to be read by worship teams, pastoral staffs and even congregations. They want people to understand why it is important that we sing, and that this should influence how we approach corporate worship, among other things.

It starts with the notion that we were created to sing. I would point to our being made in the imago dei, but they take a more natural law approach to this. God fashioned in us in such a way that we can sing. God sings over us, and made us to sing over Him. He sings over us and we sing to Him and to one another. There is something about us that wants to sing. It isn’t strange, like Prince Herbert in Holy Grail. We sing in the car, in the shower and around the house. Most of us like music. We are wired to do it.

We are commanded to sing. The Scriptures reveal that God’s will for us is to sing. The Bible is full of songs: laments, thanksgiving and more. We sing to express praise, fears, hopes and prayers.

We are compelled to sing. We sing about Christ’s work for us, in us and through us because of Christ’s work in us. The Spirit works in us prompting us to sing. He often overcomes our inner resistance and excuses.

I don’t sing well. I often joke about my lack of a singing voice. But I sing, often with exuberance. I sing, not because I’m great it, but that I have something great to sing about. They want to help us see beyond gifting to calling. We are called to sing even if we aren’t good singers. That is because it isn’t about us.

The Gettys encourage us to sing with heart and mind. All of who we are should be engaged in singing to God. They remind us that singing brings “Sunday’s truths into Monday” and the rest of the week. It is a way to bring our theology into our everyday life. As a result, it can help sustain us in the various seasons of life. We can sing to remind ourselves what Christ has done for us, and promises to do for us.

There are various contexts in which we can and should sing. We should sing in our families, but their main focus is congregational singing. In this regard they are pushing back against some common trends in worship. It is increasingly common to have a praise band perform. Worship is increasingly like a concert and the singing of the congregation seems to be optional. The Gettys, rightfully, want to encourage congregational singing. Singers in praise bands, or choirs, are to help the congregation sing, not to sing on the behalf of the congregation. This is part of why I wanted my worship team to read this.

As we look for a new worship director, I want to choose someone who has this priority too. How we choose and play music should facilitate congregational singing. As a pastor, I love to hear the congregation sing. I think we are a congregation that sings well. Our building is suited well for me to hear them, but not so much for them to hear one another. On Christmas Eve we joined together with another congregation, in their building. I couldn’t hear the congregation very well. It affected my singing. I wasn’t sure if they had turned off my mic. Apparently they could hear one another well, and they sang well. I just couldn’t tell.

The book concludes with some sections, in admittedly blog-like fashion, to different groups or classes of people: worship and song leaders, musicians, choirs and production, and songwriters. They provide some helpful advice for each of these groups. They apply the material and provide some helpful questions.

This was a helpful book. It was a book worth reading. I’m glad they wrote it, and that it was given to me.

Read Full Post »

Considering Calvin and the Knowledge of God

I’ve been reading the new Essentials Edition of Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion since this summer. This is not an edited version, but a new translation of the 1541 edition of the Institutes. I am enjoying it very much. As I’ve been reading, I’ve thought at times, I should blog about this. Unfortunately, for much of the fall I was editing my own book so there wasn’t much time to blog on it. I have a bit more time these days, so I thought I would go back. My desire is to encourage others to read this volume.

It begins with a chapter on the Knowledge of God. This should be no surprise to anyone familiar with The Institutes of the Christian Religion. This volume is not broken up into 4 books like the one edited by McNeill. The material is, at times, covered in a different order. Additionally, this edition is not as exhaustive as future editions would be.

The first paragraph is familiar:

“The whole sum of our wisdom- wisdom, that is, which deserves to be called true and assured- broadly consists of two parts, knowledge of God and knowledge of ourselves.”

As made in the image of God, we cannot truly know ourselves without knowing God. As we know God, we discover that “he is the fount of all truth, wisdom, goodness, righteousness, judgment, mercy, power and holiness.” The purpose of this knowledge is that we would worship and honor him.

The purpose of knowing ourselves is “to show us our weakness, misery, vanity and vileness, to fill us with despair, distrust and hatred of ourselves, and then to kindle in us the desire to seek God, for in him in found all that is good and of which we ourselves are empty and deprived.” In other words, we see our depravity and the marring of his image that we might seek like in him. It sounds harsh, but it is similar to Paul’s discussion of the purpose of the law prior to conversion, to reveal our sin and drive us to Jesus.

This is why it is wisdom; this knowledge is to be acted upon, not simply studied abstractly. Knowledge of self is intended to encourage us to seek after God, and leads us to find him. Calvin then notes that “no one ever attains clear knowledge of self unless he has first gazed upon the face of the Lord, and then turns back to look upon himself.” This is similar to Isaiah 6, when the prophet saw God in his glory and then finally saw himself as he really was.

Calvin notes that an awareness of God is common to all people. We all have some “understanding of his majesty.” Calvin is quite dependent on Romans 1 as he thinks through all of this. He is not a speculative theologian, but one who seeks to understand what has been revealed to us in Scripture, and its implications. Romans 1 instructs us that people turned from the true God to idols, “exchanging the truth for the lie ” (Rom. 1). In rejecting the truth, we have become perverted by self-will. Instead of seeking all good in God, we have settled for the lie of the Serpent in the Garden and seek it in and by ourselves: for our glory, not his. Instead of seeking to submit to him, people resist and rebel against him. As Paul says in Ephesians and Colossians, people are at enmity with God. We fall prey to superstition and servile fear. People flee from him, as a guilty Adam and Eve fled from the sound of God approaching them.  This servile fear is “not enough to stop them from resting easy easy in their sin, indulging themselves and preferring to give fleshly excess free rein, rather than bringing it under the Holy Spirit’s control.” In other words, pride drives us to think we deserve better, and know better than God what is good for us. Fear leads us to believe that God does not have our best interests at heart and therefore his law is oppressive.

As we discover in the Psalms, he is good and wants good things for us, including trusting him to guard, guide, protect and provide for us. He wants us to trust him to redeem and rescue us.

Calvin briefly discusses the “Book of Nature” or creation which reveals his invisible qualities. If we study nature, and we should, we will discover much that testifies to his wisdom. We also see that he is revealed in his works of providence. We see that foolishness has consequences. (see Psalm 19 for instance)

But, as Romans 1 makes clear our thinking has become dark and futile. We don’t see what we should see, even though it is clear. The problem isn’t the Book of Nature (natural revelation) but how we understand and interpret it. We are without excuse. Instead of believing, we “so obscure God’s daily works, or else minimize and thus dismiss them” so that “he is deprived and robbed of the praise and thanks we owe him.”

We are dependent on God’s special revelation (Scripture) as a result (the second stanza of Psalm 19). We needed a book because we are prone to forget and are easily led into error. To know God we are utterly dependent upon the Scriptures (and the Spirit’s illumination).

Here Calvin reminds us that Scripture’s authority comes from God, as his word. It is not determined by the church (contra Rome). He briefly develops the ideas of the Spirit’s inner witness, it’s wisdom and truth and history of the truth which confirm the authority of Scripture.

“It is therefore not the role of the Holy Spirit, such as he is promised to us, to dream up fresh and original revelations, or to fashion a new kind of teaching, which alienates us from the gospel message which we have received. His role is rather to seal and confirm in our hearts the teaching provided for us in the gospel.”

The chapter ends with a slightly different form of “triple knowledge” than that expressed in the Heidelberg Catechism: “God’s mercy, one which the salvation of us all depends; his judgment, which he daily visits on the wicked, and which awaits them with even greater vigor, to their eternal shame; and his righteousness, by which his faithful people are generously preserved.”

“However, since God does not allow us to behold him directly and up close, except in the face of Christ who is visible only to the eye of faith, what remains to be said concerning the knowledge of God is better left until we come to speak of the understanding of faith.”

 

Read Full Post »

Considering God Loves Sex

God Loves Sex, now that is a book title! Sadly that is a concept that is foreign to so many Christians. It is easy to get that idea if you do a selective reading of the Bible. It is easy to find all the “do not’s” and get the idea that God doesn’t really like sex and views it only as a means to a procreative end. This kind of view has led many to take an allegorical approach to The Song of Songs, a book in the Bible which I believe exalts the beauty (and frustration) of a redeemed marital sexuality.

It has been a number of years since Dan Allender and Tremper Longman III have collaborated on a book together. It has been a very beneficial collaboration, in my mind. This particular collaboration is highly dependent on Longman’s commentary on The Song. I recently read that commentary to prepare for a Sunday School series on the Song. I’m grateful that this book was released in time for me to read it as well.

This is not an academic look at The Song. While it is dependent on Longman’s commentary it is not a commentary. Allender’s contribution is seen in the subtitle: An Honest Conversation About Sexual Desire and Holiness. It is written to the heart too, inviting us to ponder our sexuality and its expression in our lives.

Read Full Post »