James Yoo

Harping on Praise

— Originally published in print // Permalink

Praise the LORD! Praise God in his sanctuary;
praise him in his mighty heavens!
Praise him for his mighty deeds;
praise him according to his excellent greatness!
Praise him with trumpet sound;
praise him with lute and harp!
Praise him with tambourine and dance;
praise him with strings and pipe!
Praise him with sounding cymbals;
praise him with loud clashing cymbals!
Let everything that has breath praise the LORD!
Praise the LORD! (Ps. 150)

When you read this psalm, what do you see? Do you see a call to praise God with all our musical resources or a model to praise Him with beautiful lyrics? Are we to praise God with emotional enthusiasm or intellectual integrity? Ideally, we want both, but realistically, we rarely ever do.

Jesus commands us to “love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength” (Mark 12:30, ESV), but why does it seem we praise God with only our hearts or with only our minds? Of the various church services I’ve attended over the years, I’ve yet to find one where the congregation responds wholeheartedly to the songs and where the lyrics are beautiful (not just passable). It’s almost as though the two scenarios are mutually exclusive. In 1 Thessalonians 5, Paul exhorts us not to “quench the Spirit” but also to “test everything.” Instead, we seem to do one or the other, but can we do both?

The reasons why this division exists are numerous and seemingly unchangeable. After all, most of us don’t pick out which songs are sung on Sundays. Still, there has to be something we as worshipers can do. There must be something that we can do to bring about a kind of worship that encompasses the entirety of one’s being in worship. Our Lord only deserves the best.

Here’s my vision of what great Christian music would look like: songs that have deep lyrics that can cover a wide variety of emotions to which the Christian faith is subject, musicianship that rivals even the best artists and bands of today’s music industry, and congregations that sing and dance like Sunday’s a party. When I think of praise, I think of King David when the ark returned to Jerusalem (2 Samuel 6): how he danced in his underwear because the dwelling place of the Lord had returned to Israel. For us partakers of the new covenant, how much more should we be praising that the dwelling place of God is now the church with her members as “living stones” (Eph. 2:19–22)?

What’s lacking in much of contemporary Christian music isn’t musicality, though; it’s depth. Take a look at the average song put out by today’s Christian artists. You won’t look long before you find lots of words about recommitting your heart to God, which is good, but you’d have a harder time finding lyrics about the complex and varied emotions we face as Christians.

Dear refuge of my weary soul,
On Thee, when sorrows rise
On Thee, when waves of trouble roll,
My fainting hope relies
To Thee I tell each rising grief,
For Thou alone canst heal
Thy Word can bring a sweet relief,
For every pain I feel
(Anne Steele, “Dear Refuge of My Weary Soul”)

This is a hymn from 1760, but it’s amazing how well it speaks of our dependence on our Savior. How much more wonderful would our Sunday services be if the songs were just as meaningful!
Instead, the songs we sing look like this:

All Day
All Day now
All Day
I’ll follow You
I don’t care what they say about me
It’s all right, all right
I don’t care what they think about me
It’s all right, they’ll get it one day
(Marty Sampson, “All Day”)

Then we repeat until the guitarist’s fingers bleed. Of course, most praise songs don’t have lyrics of such poor quality, but so many come close.

Oh, but we’ve come a long way in music in the past century and half, right? We’ve learned to harness the power of music to heighten our emotions in worship of God. The question is this: are we doing it the right way? Music’s a powerful tool, and using it to reinforce one’s convictions isn’t wrong. A problem arises when we, in our efforts to see the visible power of the Holy Spirit, use music to fabricate an encounter with this Person of the Trinity, as many churches seem to do these days. This approach to music, however, is not just risky, but it’s potentially damaging. D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones reminds us that “we call the Holy Spirit the ‘holy’ Spirit in order to show what he is in contrast with certain other spirits, evil spirits, headed up by the devil, who, as the apostle reminds the Corinthians, is able ‘to transform himself into an angel of light’ in order to deceive God’s people” (from The Gifts and Baptism of the Holy Spirit). Praying for the Holy Spirit and then creating a musical scene that heightens the emotions to look like the Spirit is dangerous. It would be a sad thing indeed if a Christian with a timid or melancholy disposition were to question his or her salvation for not “feeling the Spirit” during worship.

What about the churches that focus less on the music? What about the churches that sing songs with intellectual depth but seem to lack in emotional fervor? The tragedy of many churches like these is that there’s a great—perhaps too great—focus on the intellectual knowledge of God. Lost is the Hebrew meaning of the word “knowledge,” and instead we’ve become familiar with the Greek meaning. Whereas the former suggests a holistic understanding of God, the latter deals primarily with facts, evidences, and logic that lead to understanding of God. In fear of offending God in proper worship as laid down in the Bible, we tend to discourage too much enthusiasm, sometimes to the point of restricting some instruments from being played altogether.

Let’s recall Peter’s words: “Though you have not seen [Jesus], you love him. Though you do not now see him, you believe in him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory, obtaining the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls” (1 Pet. 1:8, ESV).Why can’t we have this joy in our worship? Why does it seem that sometimes we’re just chanting and not really singing? I don’t know if this problem is something that leaders of a church can change directly; it’s something that must be confronted within the hearts of us, the members.

Here’s a challenge, then, to you: test the way you worship. Make absolutely certain that God is the focus of worship and not the pursuit of a feel-good experience, but also make sure that your academic or theological prowess doesn’t hinder you from giving Him your whole being in worship. It’s a challenge that I struggle with every day, and perhaps it’s a struggle that the church will face until the end of this creation: the struggle to worship God in our praise with all we have.
Let’s keep at it, though. Let’s

Praise God with trumpet sound;
praise him with the electric guitar!
Praise him with snare and bass drum;
praise him with bass and keyboard!
Praise him with crash and high-hat;
praise him with loud clashing cymbals!
Let everything that has breath praise the LORD!
Praise the LORD!