Worship,
Hymns and the Spiritual Life; Psalm 71:23
Psalm 71:23 NASB “My lips will shout for joy when I sing
praises to You; And my soul, which You have redeemed.”
The core idea of worship is submission to God. We submit to God because
He is the creator. This is the theme of that first hymn of praise that we
studied that was directed to God by the 24 elders in Revelation chapter four,
because God is the creator. Because He is the creator He is worthy to be
worshipped. We express that authority orientation through gratitude, through
praise—we sing songs that focus upon His person and His works. We worship
through giving, through ritual—in the church age we have communion and baptism,
both of which speak of spiritual realities. The ultimate form of worship is
learning His Word, because as we learn His Word, the mind of Christ, we learn
to think as God thinks. God the creator defines reality, determines what
everything is, and it is only when we orient to God that we can orient to
reality as it is.
As the Davidic monarchy unified the nation Israel David expressed his
desire to build a permanent house for God, a temple in
The concept of wisdom and understanding and discernment are linked
together in wisdom literature. In Job, the wisdom of dealing with suffering in
life; Psalms, wisdom applied in singing praise; Proverbs, wisdom is taking
doctrine and applying it in different areas of life; Ecclesiastes is also
wisdom literature, and the Song of Solomon. There are two issues in music
today, one is the lyrics and the other is the music. We should have some
discernment about quality music and quality hymns.
Example of contemporary chorus:
I
need you
My
heart is restless in me,
My
wings are all worn out;
I’m
walking in the wilderness
And I
cannot get out
I
need you, O I need you.
Blessed
Saviour come;
I
need you, O I need you,
Filled
with every longing in my soul.
O how
I need you Lord,
I
need your perfect Word;
Tearful
eyes to see,
The
sin that I abhor.
I
need to weep and pray
For
all the thousand ways
That
I have failed you
Just
today.
What we are dealing with here is what would be like a penitential psalm,
a confession of sin. But the emphasis here is totally based on “me,” the
writer. When we have gone through these hymns in the past we have seen that
even though they may talk about personal experience they are always
theocentric. This song, like most Christian choruses today, is anthropocentric.
Also, we look at this term “I need you, I need you.” What we see is a focus on “me orientation.”
This whole concept of “me” and focusing on what people need is an outgrowth of
modern secular psychotherapy. We don’t find this kind of terminology in the
Bible. The Bible never approaches anything from the viewpoint of man’s needs.
That is not the Bible, it is just human viewpoint worldliness, secular
psychotherapy. It has nothing to do with the Bible. Further more, it emphasises
remorse and weeping and sorrow as a means to somehow impress God that he needs
to do something for me because I feel so badly about all of my sin, or whatever
is going on in my life. So I need to weep and wail about this to get God’s
attention. So it encourages wallowing in self-pity and guilt over what we have
done and the idea is that I need to weep and wail. We don’t find that kind of
terminology anywhere in the Scripture. Because we see words in here like “I
need your Word,” we tend to think this is okay. But it is couched within a
psychotherapeutic view of life and not divine viewpoint.
In terms of these lyrics they are simplistic and it is not good poetry.
This doesn’t even rise to the quality of basic nursery rhyme. If we look at the
Psalms we don’t have the music, we just have the words, but they are considered
by people who don’t even believe the Bible to be some of the greatest poetry in
all of human history, especially in the Hebrew. When we look at some of the
great hymns that we have seen and just take the words apart from the music and
read them, and they are fabulous poetry. They are full of good poetry; it is
quality literature. But when you take these words in the contemporary chorus
they barely even rise to the level of the trivial and the mundane. And that
isn’t even talking about their theological input.
Now we have to have a comparison, a penitential psalm; from modern man’s
impression of his need, his psychotherapeutic-oriented relationship to God, to
how this same kind of thing is expressed by David. This is after he has
committed adultery with Bathsheba and conspired to have her husband murdered.
This is David’s prayer to God and his reflection upon how sin has affected his
life. He is not talking about how he needs God, he is focusing more on the sin
that he has committed and how it has affected him. He is not describing his
misery to impress God, he is merely describing it because that is the effect
that this sin has had on him and this is part of the natural consequences of
that sin.
Psalm 38:1 NASB “O LORD, rebuke me not in Your wrath, And chasten me
not in Your burning anger.” The focal point from the beginning is directed to
God as a prayer to God for grace despite his own failure. [2] “For Your arrows
have sunk deep into me, And Your hand has pressed down on me. [3] There is no
soundness in my flesh because of Your indignation; There is no health in my
bones because of my sin. [4] For my iniquities are gone over my head; As a
heavy burden they weigh too much for me. [5] My wounds grow foul {and} fester
Because of my folly. [6] I am bent over and greatly bowed down; I go mourning
all day long. [7] For my loins are filled with burning, And there is no
soundness in my flesh.” As the guilt has worn on him he is describing how this
has affected and impacted him physically. He is in depression because of sin.
But notice he is not crying out in terms of his needy psychotherapeutic
framework! [8] “I am benumbed and badly crushed; I groan because of the
agitation of my heart. [9] Lord, all my desire is before You; And my sighing is
not hidden from You. [10] My heart throbs, my strength fails me; And the light
of my eyes, even that has gone from me. [11] My loved ones and my friends stand
aloof from my plague; And my kinsmen stand afar off.” He is saying that now his
sin has affected him so much that he is in isolation, he has become almost
non-functional and his enemies are about to take advantage of him. He is
calling upon God to rescue him from his own bad decisions. [12] “Those who seek
my life lay snares {for me;} And those who seek to injure me have threatened
destruction, And they devise treachery all day long. [13] But I, like a deaf
man, do not hear; And {I am} like a mute man who does not open his mouth. [14]
Yes, I am like a man who does not hear, And in whose mouth are no arguments.
[15] For I hope in You, O LORD; You will answer, O Lord my God.” Everywhere he
focuses his attention on God. His only hope is in God. [16] “For I said, ‘May
they not rejoice over me, {Who,} when my foot slips, would magnify themselves
against me.’” He has expressed his confession in the form of an argument to God
to grant him forgiveness and to deliver him. [17] “For I am ready to fall, And
my sorrow is continually before me. [18] For I confess my iniquity; I am full
of anxiety because of my sin. [19] But my enemies are vigorous {and} strong,
And many are those who hate me wrongfully.
He is in anguish over his sin and we are at times in remorse and sorrow
over sin in our life because we recognise how it has offended God. There is
nothing wrong with that, but that is not what impresses God to forgive us. We
confess our sins and God forgives us because of Christ’s work on the cross, it
is not based on how we feel about it at the time. God is not impressed with our
remorse. It is not that it is wrong to have remorse, but that is not what impresses
God.
Psalm 38:21 NASB “Do not forsake me, O LORD; O my God, do not be far from me!
Compare the hymn, Come, thou fount of every blessing. It was written by
Robert Robinson and it is a hymn where he is dealing with the same kinds of
things, with sin in his life before God, and we note how he expresses this.
COME, Thou Fount of every blessing!
Tune
my heart to sing Thy grace;
Streams
of mercy, never ceasing,
Call
for ceaseless songs of praise.
Teach
me, LORD, some rapturous measure
Meet
for blood-bought hosts above;
Let
me sing the countless treasure
Of my
GOD’S unchanging love.
JESUS sought me when a stranger,
Wandering
from the fold of GOD;
He,
to rescue me from danger,
Interposed
His precious blood.
Oh,
to grace how great a debtor
Daily
I’m constrained to be!
Let
that grace, LORD, like a fetter,
Bind
my wandering heart to Thee.
Prone
to wander, LORD, I feel it,
Prone
to leave the GOD I love:
Keep
my heart from wandering, keep it,
Till
I’m perfected above.
Here
I raise my Ebenezer,
Hither
by Thy help I’m come;
And I
hope, by Thy good pleasure,
Safely
to arrive at home.
This is theocentric, it is not anthropocentric. It is the result of a man’s
profound study of the Word and his mature spiritual growth as he reflects upon
the grace of God despite the fact that he is prone to be a wandering sinner.
This is why we sing and are careful about what we sing. It is because if
we are to do all things, as the New Testament says, to the glory of God, then
that means what we sing and how we sing it should be done with quality, with
excellence. It should not reduce itself to the trivial, the commonplace and the
mundane.
In the New Testament the first time we see worship is in Matthew chapter
two with the Magi. They came to worship, and this is the Greek word which means
to bow the knee, to show obeisance to one in authority. Matthew
Later on in Matthew 14:33 NASB “And those who were in the
boat worshiped Him, saying, ‘You are certainly God’s Son!’” They realised who
Jesus was. Worship is defined here as recognising who Jesus Christ is. This
brings us back to the fact that worship is recognising who God is and what He
has done. In Matthew 15:9 Jesus quotes the Old Testament NASB “BUT IN VAIN DO THEY
WORSHIP ME, TEACHING AS DOCTRINES THE PRECEPTS OF MEN.” There is right worship and
there is wrong worship. When we teach our own opinions, our own viewpoint, when
we teach motivationally and don’t go into the Scriptures and exposit and
explain the Word of God, and we are teaching the precept of men, that is not
worship; it is false worship.
In John chapter four Jesus is talking to the Samaritan woman at the well
and in the context of the conversation they talked about whether the Samaritans
worshipped correctly. “Jesus said to her, ‘Woman, believe Me, an hour is coming
when neither in this mountain nor in
The phrase en pneumati [e)n
pneumati]
is found in another important passage, Ephesians 5:18 NASB “And do
not get drunk with wine, for that is dissipation, but be filled with the
Spirit, [19] speaking to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs,
singing and making melody with your heart to the Lord.” The first result that
Paul mentions related to the filling of the Spirit is that is an attitude of
joy. Joy is the second fruit of the Spirit mentioned in Galatians 5:22. There
is this rejoicing over the grace of God and that rejoicing is expressed through
singing hymns and spiritual songs. It flows out of the soul to God. Colossians
3:16 repeats the same principle where it is not related to the filling of the
Spirit, it is related to the Word of Christ: NASB “Let the word of
Christ [doctrine] richly dwell within you, with all wisdom teaching and
admonishing one another with psalms {and} hymns {and} spiritual songs, singing
with thankfulness in your hearts to God.”