From the outside looking in at church, I think the expectation that every single person sing when they come to church, whether they are musical or not, that practice of congregational singing, has to be one of the weirdest things about church, and I love it so much. Hi, church. In today’s video I want to go through some highlights from a book that I do not think we have in our resource desk just yet, but one that we studied in 2023 at our church, a book called God Sings. These videos we are doing are for everybody, but they are addressed to our church, so if you are new here, my name is Ryan Rench. I am the pastor at Calvary Baptist Church in Temecula, California, and today I want to review the book God Sings. As always, I do not agree with everything in the book, but I learned a lot about congregational singing from this book, so I wanted to distill some of the main thoughts from it so that we can be a better singing church.
Acceptable Worship
After the first couple of chapters, which talk about the title from a verse in Zephaniah about God singing, the first main point Douglas Bond makes is that we should bring God acceptable worship. He quotes Hebrews 12:28-29, which says, “Wherefore we receiving a kingdom which cannot be moved, let us have grace, whereby we may serve God acceptably with reverence and godly fear: For our God is a consuming fire.” When you see that “serve God” there in that verse, it is not the service we think of, like a deacon serving. The “serve God” there, and you can look this up, is talking about the worship of God. So when we are talking about serving God, we are talking about worshipping God, and a good portion of our worship services is filled with congregational singing. That is when all of us join together to sing to God. So if we are singing to God, man, we want to sing what He wants to listen to. We want our hearts to be involved in this. So when we serve God, when we worship God, what is acceptable worship? When it says “serve God acceptably,” what is that? The answer is right there in the verse: “with reverence and godly fear: for our God is a consuming fire.” That fear does not mean we are scared of Him; it is a respectful fear. It is a fear of God that produces awe and reverence and respect, so that even our joy and praise does not lower Him to be buddy-buddy with us. Even our joy and praise is with reverence and godly fear.
Making an Idol of Our Style
So it is not necessarily about a style, but that kind of leads into the next point he makes, which is that we can make an idol out of our style. Some people might say, “Yeah, preacher, get them! You get those evil contemporary churches, with these rock bands and drum sets and this emphasis on rhythm and kind of a performance, look-at-me mentality. Go get them, these people out there. I cannot believe they are picking churches based on the music they like. They are just going to church for entertainment. They are in it for themselves.” That is kind of the mentality. But sometimes those same exact people will say, “Yeah, we come to Calvary Baptist Church because we like the old hymns. I grew up singing the old hymns, and I just like how I feel when we sing the old hymns, and it reminds me of my childhood.” Hang on. If you are picking a church based on those preferences, as though those are the only reasons for picking a church or the only reasons for singing hymns, if the only reason is because that is how you were raised and it brings you back to your childhood, is that not the same preference we sometimes blame the other side for? I mean, why do we sing the songs we sing? Why have we chosen to sing hymns? The author quotes Sinclair Ferguson. He said, “Sinclair Ferguson referred to the danger of using music for its own sake in worship. So he draws a line between going to a service for the worship and going to a service to worship the Lord. The distinction appears to be a minor one, but it may imply the difference between the worship of God and the worship of music. This too can work both ways,” he said. So man, even hymns themselves, as great as they are and as much as I love them, can become an idol when we love the hymns more than we love the God of the hymns. Bond also says, “Wise, self-aware Christians will ask themselves a hard question: which pole am I most prone to? We see the ecstasy of the other guys and call it fake joy, superficial, unsophisticated. They see our solemnity and call it dead formalism, boredom, spiritual rigor mortis. Sometimes we are right, and sometimes we are not.” I appreciate that honesty. I appreciate that distinction.
Why Hymns
In the rest of the book, Bond makes a case for deep, doctrine-rich hymns being the main course of our church music ministry, and not just an add-on to appease the older crowd. Bond gives several reasons to prefer hymns to most modern music. A lot of the book is comparing the bulk of modern music with the bulk of older hymns. First, he says, they are typically deeper in content than some of the newer songs. Again, these are just generalizations, but some of the newer songs would have less depth to them, and some of the newer songs would typically be softer. He brought out some references to songs that mentioned a blunder instead of a sin. Another main reason he gives is that more of the hymns came from students of theology and literature. Before they were musicians, they were theologians and poets. This really shaped my thinking on poetry, and it was just so helpful to see the richness of the poets and theologians who wrote many of our old hymns. He says, “The poet who wrote ‘Christian, Dost Thou See Them?’ not only had formal literary training; he was a teacher of literature. Until only very recently, education centered around literature, and literature was almost entirely poetry. Hence Theodulph, and Andrew, and the Venerable Bede (‘A Hymn of Glory Let Us Sing’), Bernard of Clairvaux, Ambrose of Milan, Prudentius, and many other hymn writers of the early centuries were skillful writers. They had mastered all the subtleties and nuances of poetic imagery and cadence.” Fast forward to the last forty years. Here is one of the great differences, he says: “The vast majority of worship songs and praise choruses were written by musicians, usually young guitar players, often new converts with no shortage of enthusiasm and zeal for the gospel. However much formal musical training they have had, most have had little or no formal literary experience and training. They are musicians first, who have learned songwriting by listening to and then imitating their favorite pop bands from the last few decades.” Now, I know this can be a caricature of modern songs, and I realize there are some good modern songs we could, and perhaps should, be singing today. But on the whole, comparing the whole of new versus the whole of old, you will typically find a richer language in the older hymns.
The Highest Form of Poetry
The poetry of the hymns is much more than just rhyming words. I had never truly appreciated poetry until reading this book. I still do not consider myself a poet or some literature expert, but I appreciate poetry so much more as a result, and seeing it in the hymns has been so helpful. Bond says, “Excellence in poetry is supremely a gift of God, but honing poetic skill requires study, imitation, submission to form, practice, and experience, just like playing the cello or the banjo. Poetry, as with all gifts of God, ought to be used for its highest purpose. ‘The highest form of poetry is the hymn,’ wrote Whittier. If poetry adorns and delineates the ideal, what possible higher ideal could there be than Christ Himself? Even the French Catholic de Tocqueville felt uneasy about American poets using their quills to gush about streams and mountains and themselves instead of celebrating,” quote, “‘the providential designs that rule the universe, that show the finger of the Supreme Governor, that reveal the thoughts of the Supreme Mind,'” close quote, “notably themes appearing in the Psalms and the finest hymn poetry,” Bond says. I wonder how many of us would have thought of the words we were singing in worship as that highest form of poetry. At our church we have been pressed sometimes to make music more catchy, more approachable, more accessible, but boy, I would hate to lay aside such powerful poetic hymns and sacrifice them on the altar of what is always just new. I am not saying new is bad. New is not bad in itself. But I just see an appetite in people for new songs, songs that reflect their tastes, and there seems to be comparatively little thought given to “serve God acceptably with reverence and godly fear: for our God is a consuming fire,” and to songs that reflect that nature of God. As a kind of case study, the author nitpicks the popular song “10,000 Reasons,” and I think he does a fair job in that. He ends the section with this: “Worship is going to stretch us beyond anything that comes readily to hand. Though we were made for worshipping the living God, we are broken and distorted beyond recognition by the Fall. True worship, worship in spirit and in truth, is going to require the transformative, almighty power of God. True worship has never been about what we are capable of doing; it has always been about what God alone, by His sovereign omnipotence, has done in us, rescuing us from all our foes.”
Spurgeon and Congregational Singing
I absolutely love our church’s congregational singing. I love it so much. And I love the heart Spurgeon had for the church he pastored too. Someone said this about Spurgeon: “The singing was almost overpowering. When that ocean of people rose and sung ‘Grace, ‘Tis a Charming Sound,’ it seemed as if the windows of heaven were opened. This seemed like worshipping God, like making melody in the heart unto the Lord. How unlike this is an organ and a choir making music for a sitting, silent congregation! Mr. Spurgeon evidently takes delight in the service of song and is anxious above all things that every man, woman, and child in the place should sing. In announcing the hymn, he generally makes some remark, such as, ‘Let us sing joyfully the 48th Psalm,’ or, ‘Dear friends, this hymn is full of joy; let us sing it with our hearts.'” Spurgeon later himself said, “The devil has seldom done a cleverer thing than hinting to the church that part of their mission is to provide entertainment for the people, with a view to winning them.” If you have never read this book, I especially appreciated his section on poetry, and if nothing else, that might be worth the purchase price of the book. That is it for now. I encourage you to sing heartily, as unto the Lord, this Sunday wherever you are assembled, and for our church, of course, that is right here at Calvary Baptist Church. Until then, grow in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. We will see you in the next video. God bless you. Well, thank you for watching this video. This whole channel is dedicated to videos kind of like this, so if that is not for you, that is fine, but if you did enjoy it and you would like more of this kind of content, would you help us out by clicking the like button and subscribing to our channel? We look forward to seeing you in the next video.
