Pay Attention to What You’re Singing
As Christians who live in a predominantly pagan culture, we regularly hear words or phrases that betray commonly held but false assumptions based in a pagan view of reality. We filter these out daily in nearly every context, from academic lectures, to media consumption, to conversations with family and friends: “billions of years,” “karma,” “follow your heart,” or even the kindly stated, “good luck.” Discerning Christians find themselves continually filtering what they see and hear through the lens of a biblically informed conscience.
Unfortunately, Christians often have to filter language even in church. How we worship God and what we say in our worship necessarily shapes our beliefs about God, just as what we believe about God informs how we worship Him. When you attend church, pay attention to what you sing, because what you sing will tell you a lot about what your church really believes. Just as a tree is recognizable by its fruit, a church’s theology will be recognizable by the way that she worships and the songs that she sings.
If you aren’t paying attention to what you are singing, you could be missing out on some of the richest spiritual moments of your life. When we engage with the Word of God and with rich theological music, the need for exercising our minds in the worship of God becomes more essential, not less so.
If you find yourself zoning out during the music of corporate worship, singing in a routine manner, or not singing at all, I encourage you to undertake an exercise that will train your mind to interact at a deeper level. In my undergraduate hymnology class, we were given a recurring hymn analysis assignment that required us to identify all the scriptural references or allusions in a given hymn text and to paraphrase the hymn in our own words. This was a memorable and enriching exercise that forced us to engage with hymn texts in a deeper way than feasible while singing through them in a worship service. Aside from being a moving devotional exercise, I found myself singing these hymns with greater appreciation and understanding. When a Christian sings attentively, his mind, will, and emotions connect with great truths.
What happens when we pay attention to what we sing? Assuming we are singing worthy lyrics by means of a fitting tune, many things: We fulfill a biblical command that unites our hearts and minds in an inexplicably powerful way to worship the living God, which is the highest purpose of our existence. Our minds are renewed after the things of God, our theological understanding is deepened, our hearts are stirred, our prayer language is enriched, our gaze is fixed heavenward, and our earthly troubles are put into eternal perspective. In short, we experience a foretaste of heaven.
Of course, we must not approach the worship of God for what it can do for us. This kind of idolatrous mistake is responsible for many churches losing their way with worship.
The aforementioned benefits of paying attention to what we sing are simply byproducts of genuine worship—the benefits to the human spirit of encountering and rightly responding to God. But how can we expect to encounter the living God and remain the same? We cannot. Rather, we find ourselves, in the words of Charles Wesley, “lost in wonder, love, and praise.”