An Oft Neglected Plea of the Apostle Paul
What is your favorite worship song during the corporate gathering of the local church on the Lord’s Day?
No, really, play along… pause and think, say it out loud… what is it? What is that one song that just seems to find the corners of your soul more than any other? Every time you hear it, you can’t help but zero in on the truths and the implications of them; this inevitably produces a zealous proclamation of your mouth as you join with one voice the brothers and sisters to your right and left, praising God. What is that song? If you didn’t say it out loud, do you at least have it in your head?
Was your answer a psalm? Was the song you just deemed a favorite one of the 150 inspired worship songs contained in Holy Scripture? A song written by our Triune God, the very object of our worship?
Mine isn’t. I’m guessing yours is not either. Why? How is it that none of us picked one of the songs that God himself wrote for us to sing in worship? What can we learn from this? The Apostle Paul makes a plea in several places from the New Testament (Colossians 3:16, Ephesians 5:19) to
“sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs.”
Could it be, that the reason a psalm didn’t come to mind for any of us is because we have generally neglected them in our worship? Now there is some debate as to what “genre(s),” Paul is referring to with this triad, but what is almost unanimously affirmed by scholars is that this is an imperative, to sing the psalms of the Bible in worship. So why is it that in the broad scope of evangelicalism, we gladly sing “In Christ Alone,” (either the classic hymn or the more contemporary version) and yet, possess no qualms about skipping the songs God wrote himself? They are missing from our favorites. Have we neglected the plea, the imperative, from the Apostle Paul to sing the psalms?
So it seems. Not many churches today regularly sing the psalms in corporate worship. The reasons for this vary from “they are too old” to “they don’t attract the younger crowd” to “they don’t talk about Jesus” to “they aren’t catchy enough” to “it’s hard to do.” All of which seem to be drastically poor reasons to disobey the command of Scripture. They are all man-centered excuses.
The above question, the question we began with, albeit innocent, is an irrelevant one. It doesn’t much matter what our favorites are. If God is the object of our worship, shouldn’t we be asking him what he would like us to sing back to him in worship Brethren, if we are bold enough to ask such a question, the answer from God’s special revelation is quite clear:
“sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs.”
Might we heed the Apostle’s plea!
Jordan Embree