"Why We Sing Hymns" Ephesians 5:19 Sunday Evening Worship Service

I'm going to read tonight Ephesians 5 18 and then 5 19.

We'll get to these in a few months in our own well, a few years in our own progress of Ephesians Sunday morning, but for now.

Paul says, Do not get drunk with wine, for that is debauchery.

But be filled with the Spirit, addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord in your heart.

This is a passage that provides a contrast with what it means to be drunk with wine versus filled with the Spirit.

Every believer is, of course, filled with the Spirit at their conversion.

The Spirit indwells them, seals them, brings them from darkness to light, from blindness to sight, from death to life, and opens the eyes of their hearts so that they can behold wonderful things from God's Word and worship Him.

That's what happens in the heart of every single believer.

Drunkenness is a very much a contrast to that.

Drunkenness is taking the Spirit and deadening it.

Drunkenness is putting alcohol or other kinds of intoxicating substances into your body to the point that your spirit is no longer under your control, where it is subject to whatever your passions are, whatever is going on in your physical body begins to take over you spiritually.

And that's what the word debauchery means.

That's something that brings you down and you lose control of your spirit, of your emotions, of your body, your affections.

But your spirit, I think, is what Paul has in mind here.

What a contrast that is with singing and worship.

And that's exactly what Paul is going for here.

There's the debauchery that is drunkenness.

There's the debauchery that is dissipation.

In contrast, there is the exaltedness of being filled with the Spirit.

That is the Spirit seals your heart, as the Spirit transforms you, you sing not songs of revelry, but songs of gospel, songs of Jesus Christ, songs that bring glory to the Lord Jesus.

And so in Paul's mind, it's not an artificial contrast between drunkenness and worship.

Both are expressions of the spirit, drunkenness of dissipation and worship of being spirit-filled and exalting the Lord.

But there's a pair of words in here in verse 19 that I want to look at more carefully, where he contrasts, or he gives at very least a distinction between hymns and spiritual songs, he says.

And that's important for us as a church to understand because if you were a Christian in the 1990s or early 2000s, you are a survivor of the worship wars.

Do you remember those?

The worship wars, where churches were divided over this very issue.

Churches were split, they're actual church splits over whether churches should sing as the worship wars phrased it hymns or songs.

And the two sides of the worship war became noted as hymns versus songs, or old vs new, or stodgy vs upbeat, or traditional vs.

contemporary, or dead versus alive.

The terms were phrased by obviously people involved in it.

And I don't think any of those uh descriptions really capture what the divide was about.

Having been a little bit of a spectator, I was a brand new believer in 1994.

I was part of a Calvary Chapel, which is very much a um contemporary Christian, you know, vineyard music kind of church.

The their hymns were kind of few and far between.

And when they did sing a hymn, it was you know called out for, you know, this is this is an ancient song of our faith passed down through the decades, written in 1978.

And so I I didn't grow up with a an appreciation of the worship wars, but I have read several books about them.

And what strikes me in the in the worship wars is how much the two sides of the war didn't rightly identify what the real issue behind the worship wars was.

You know, on one side, the contemporary music side in church was painted as a side that was evangelistic, a side that wanted uh non-believers to come to church and to feel welcome at church and to feel like they could relate to what was happening at church.

And on the other side, the hymns side of the debate, they were painted or painted themselves as those that cared about the passing down of the faith to the next generation and guarding what was true.

And I think the the reality of that debate and the reality of that divide, it wasn't about music, it was about a philosophy of church.

It wasn't so much about style of music as much as it was a philosophy of conversion or of lordship, this idea that people could be lured to church by a certain kind of music, and if they heard music they liked in church, they would stay in church.

And it became, it was part of a whole system, the whole seeker-sensitive movement was built around this, designing a church, designing a whole worship attitude to appeal to those who are outside of Christ.

The idea that if you had the right chairs and you had the right music and you had the right lighting, then you would get people that wouldn't normally associate with church and voila, revival.

Mark Dever often pointed out that the problem with that approach to evangelism or outreach or church is that eventually you have to call people to get out of their nice comfy chairs and pick up their cross and follow Jesus.

And at that point, music style is not going to cut it.

Nevertheless, that was the way the debate had been framed: hymns versus songs, old vs new, stodgy vs upbeat, traditional versus contemporary.

Now, where did this debate come from?

Because it has not always been through church history.

Churches in the 1940s were not dividing over worship style.

So where did this come from?

And in some, I'm just gonna give you a brief history of this from a couple books that I read recently.

One of them called The Worship Wars, which is a fantastic book about this issue.

The other one called The Juvenilization of American Christianity, another great book.

You can tell which side, that guy, that The Juvenilization of American Christianity, which, by the way, is an exceptional book, and I strongly recommend it.

But, you know, that that div divide, that debate comes to the church.

It gets framed in those terms old versus new, hymns versus songs.

It gets framed in those terms largely because of the influence of the contemporary Christian music industry, CCM.

The contemporary Christian music industry really exploded in the 90s, and it was this whole approach to Christian music where the Christian music was designed to sound like secular music.

That was the design of it.

And perhaps you remember those little charts in the Christian bookstores.

I remember my first time in a Christian bookstore, there's a big poster on the wall with if you like this secular artist, then you should try this Christian artist.

You know, I looked up one of those old charts on Google today doing my work for me.

Do you like REM?

Try Audio at Adrenaline.

Okay.

Do you like Metallica?

Try Petra.

Do you like 80s one-hit wonders?

Try DC Talk.

No, I made that.

I made that last one up.

I made that one up.

That's not what it really was.

It was newsboys.

I'm sure you remember those charts.

They were on the wall at every Christian bookstore in the 90s.

And at that point, the music wasn't making its way into the congregational worship at the church.

It was the Christian radio that was designed to sound like secular music.

And I'm not saying that's good or bad.

I'm making that in a value-neutral statement right there, where the whole approach to CCM was to find a sound that was like secular music, so that if you like secular music, you would listen to something more wholesome, something more, the same sound but with better content, the same sound with better lyrics.

And I the idea was that it would be evangelistic.

And I don't know how effective that was.

I do remember in 1996 or so, I've been a believer for two years driving with my friends in the car, and a jars of clay song came on the secular radio station.

And I was like, oh, I was the friend that I've been witnessing to, and now there's jars of clay, a Christian group on our secular radio station, and we're in the car together, and you know, my Christian friends, I don't know what they would think of me listening to secular music, but it's okay because jars of clay is on right now, and my friend is totally going to get saved.

So I'm like trying to be quiet and not have a conversation so he hears the music and the song goes off the air at the end, and he goes, Oh, I didn't heard that so before.

That was kind of cool.

No salvation.

He did not get saved from the jars of clay.

I would left disappointed, but I did like jars of clay.

Eventually, that approach to music bridges the gap and gets into the church and becomes an approach to worship in the church.

Christian artists begin to capitalize on their growing audience by trying to find a style that could become congregational.

This led to what some radio stations called the radio worship crossover.

You know, you've heard of the secular Christian crossover where a band like Jarves of Clay could be popular in both worlds.

The new approach in Christian music came to be known as a radio worship crossover.

You could be popular on the radio and then be sung in churches.

This presented a whole new market.

Christy Nordoff, who's a songwriter and she's won Dove Awards for her songwriting.

She's now a manager with, I think it's integrity music.

She wrote in the book, The Worship Wars, that the goal of those musicians during this time were to be borderline congregational, borderline worship in their sounds.

So to write songs that you would hear over the radio, but would have refrains in it that could sound congregational.

The idea was that if you heard a refrain or a bridge that was somewhat congregational, you would want to sing it in church.

The song would then enter the church and its market spreads.

Chris Hausler, who's a manager and executive for a large network of Christian stations, he wrote in a Christianity Today article on this quote: The goal of songs during that time period was to be catchy.

Fewer words, simplified melody, limited emotional range, with the goal that the congregation would catch on to the song by the second verse.

And here's where you start to see that approach to CCM, contemporary Christian music, changing as it entered the church.

Where these artists are now, they're not designing songs.

They're not designing songs to sound like their secular counterparts.

Now they're designing songs that will make the bridge into the church.

I'll read that quote one more time.

Because this is not, this is this is not a quote from an antagonist.

This is not a quote from someone who's anti-CCM or anti-that kind of music in the church.

This is a quote from one of the managers of those groups who was doing this.

He said, quote, the goal was to be catchy with fewer words, simplified melody, limited emotional range, with the goal that the congregation would catch on by the second verse.

This led to the introduction of what we call bridges into songs, where you would have refrains, you'd have choruses, and there would be a second, perhaps repeated or musically distinct part of the song.

This is not something that's generally in secular music, but it makes an appearance in these Christian kind of songs that can be congregational then.

And I submit to you that this is not a healthy turn in church music.

Before I talk more about that, I want to give you some definitions from Ephesians 5, verse 19.

Ephesians 5:19

Here's the commands that you address one another in psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs.

Now, whenever you see these kind of lists in scripture, there's always a temptation to make much of the distinctions between the words, and sometimes that leads to artificial distinctions where you say one is this and not that, and the other is this, but not the other one.

And when there's a lot of overlap between those words, nevertheless, these are three different words that Paul obviously used, and the Ephesians understood what they meant.

And Greek dictionaries are pretty united in what they what they mean by it.

The word for Psalms is just that, the word for Psalms.

It's the book of Psalms in the Old Testament.

In fact, the Psalm that we read tonight, uh Psalm 48, I believe, it begins with that word, the Hebrew word that is translated Psalms in the Septuagint, it begins with that word in the heading.

It's a psalm of the sons of Korah.

Psalm 8 begins with that, a psalm of David.

Many of the psalms begin with that word.

It's recognized by the church as the Psalter, the songs that are in the Psalter that were sung then.

Sometimes that word is followed by with the stringed instruments, as you know from the inscriptions and psalms.

And so what Paul is saying here is that churches should sing the psalms.

They should put the psalms to music and they should sing them.

That's his command to them.

And it's not as if he's introducing something new to them.

These are Jewish, uh people saved from a Jewish background.

Some of them were.

We know that from earlier in Ephesians.

They would have a grid for coming together and singing psalms.

Jewish believers had many of the psalms memorized.

It was normal for them to sing them.

And so Paul's not telling them, hey, here's a radical idea, sing the book of Psalms.

He's telling them, keep doing what you're doing in this.

You're singing Psalms, keep singing Psalms.

Then he gives a different word hymns, and then a third word.

And he says, spiritual songs.

And so it's worth asking what are the distinctions between those two?

Let me do a song first.

The idea of a song, most Greek dictionaries define it as a personal expression of praise sung with your mouth.

And that's the way Greek dictionary, that's the way any dictionary is.

It's a song of praise sung with your mouth.

As opposed to your ear, I guess.

I don't know what else you would sing it with, but that's the idea.

It's just a word for something of as opposed to instrumental, is what it's going for.

But it's a it's a song that you are singing, expressing your personal encounter with the Lord, your personal expression of praise to the Lord.

That's what a song is.

It's almost like a testimony put to music.

I think a lot of the songs that we sing in church today fall into that category.

They're personal expressions of praise.

But the middle one, hymns, that's the one that I want to draw our attention to tonight.

As I mentioned this morning, many people lack a functioning definition of what a hymn is, and their mind a hymn is something older than they are.

And there it's a hymn.

T.

David Gordon at uh Grove City College writes that he gives a survey to his students every year.

He teaches worship theory at Grove City.

He says he gives a survey to his students often and asks them what their favorite old hymn is, and that most of the students, uh, the most common answer he gets is How Great Thou Art, which he points out entered the English language in the late 1950s and is literally younger than he is.

But his students often reference that it is their favorite old hymn.

It makes him feel great about himself.

The definition of a hymn is not something that's old.

The definition of a hymn is not about the music that's played with it.

If it's played in an organ, it's not a hymn and a guitar, it's not a song.

That's not the definition.

The definition of a hymn is poetry put to music.

Poetry put to music.

And this is what makes a hymnal functional.

And you recognize this when you look at hymns, because poetry is going to have different stanzas that follow the same pattern, the same syllabic count, the same measures and whatnot, and they can be put in parallel construction.

And that's how a hymnal works.

The first time I opened a hymnal was in seminary.

Kid you not.

I went to the master's seminary, our first chapel, the guy gets up and says, take the hymnals from in front of you, open to this page, and I didn't know how to read the hymnal.

So I'm reading the first line of the first song, and I jumped down to the first line of the second stanza.

Then I felt bad for the music leader because I thought, wow, this guy is, I mean, he's lost up there.

He's not reading the words in order.

Eventually he caught back up to the, you know.

We took uh music uh worship theory classes at the Master Seminary, but not in the first semester.

That came later.

I needed help earlier.

But that's what poet, that's why a hymnal can work, because it's poetry put that way, stanza upon stanza, so they're they're paralleled like that, so you can see the contrast between the stanzas, so that you can follow along.

Certainly it saves space, but more than that, it's designed to draw your attention to the fact that the song is symmetrical.

The song is poetry and is put to music.

That's what makes a hymn.

Now, if you think, what is the difference between a hymn and a song, then a song is obviously going to be much more free-flowing, much more personal, perhaps even more spontaneous.

And a hymn is gonna require discipline in how you write it.

It's gonna imply structure.

This is the beauty of all poetry, by the way.

It's the difference between a novel and a poem.

A novel is a free-flowing expression, whereas a poem is going to have structure to it.

It's not that one is more beautiful than another or one is better than another, it's that they have different functions or different purposes.

Where the purpose of a novel might be to tell a story.

The purpose of a poem is to capture an expression that you feel brought into and then to bring you along through that experience.

That's why poetry can often be compared to a river.

It's got banks, it's got borders, and that's what gives it direction.

Where songs or novels can be compared to floods.

You know, there's no borders, there's no boundaries, it just goes.

They can be powerful, but they lack that kind of structure.

That's what a hymn is.

That's the way this word was used in the Greek language during Paul's lifetime, and that's the way it exists to this day, although many people don't know that.

That's the definition of a hymn: poetry put to music.

Now, all three of these psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs have a place in music at church.

They all function well in church music.

But tonight I want to focus particularly on the hymn part of it.

As I mentioned, what makes something a hymn is not style of music, but the substance of it, the structure of it.

So let's back up and ask this question.

Are there popular secular hymns?

And in a sense, not really.

You might have a national anthem or something that was literally poetry, then taken to music, but for the most part, not really.

Hymns have a particular function in a religious environment because they are designed to channel your thoughts and channel your affections in a certain direction.

This is why hymns are important.

Because they transcend your own personal experience in reading them, or your own personal experience in singing them.

You're connecting with something that is greater, bigger, deeper, more profound, and more transcendent than you are.

And that's why it's helpful to ask, what are we doing at church?

When we come to church, what are we doing here?

And the answer is we're here to glorify the Lord.

We're magnifying his glory by singing the truth of the gospel, by singing this kind of doctrine, by singing the attributes of God, by drawing our hearts in line with the truth that's in his word.

What we do in church is by its nature transcendent.

It's supposed to transcend us.

It is supposed to transcend our culture.

Christianity, if Christianity is cultural, it's not true.

If Christianity is confined to a certain culture or a certain cultural expression, then it ceases to be true.

The point of the gospel is that it transcends culture.

The point of the gospel is that Jesus is the Savior of the world, not only of the Jews.

And so this is why the stress on transcendent music becomes critical as a corporate expression of our prayer of our praise.

I mentioned earlier that contemporary Christian music was partly responsible for bringing this kind of worship into the church, but you might ask yourself, where does contemporary Christian music come from?

This is addressed in some of those books that I read, but contemporary Christian music certainly came from the juvenilization of American Christianity.

This idea that entered the church, and you'll resonate with this when I start describing it, but this idea that a healthy church is a young church.

That age, younger age, is a virtue in church, and older age is a liability in church.

This became a big driving force of the Youth for Christ movement that started with Billy Graham and others that really exploded in the 1960s and 70s when you have civil rights disobedience and the hippie movement.

You had Christianity responding to that with, I think, what was a right focus on young people.

You saw young people going off to the war, or young people going off to the draft, or dodging drafts, or protesting, and the whole really hippie movement.

And you Christians rightly wanted to give them an alternative by rescuing a younger generation from that lost life and bringing them the gospel.

Churches begin to structure their outreaches around this.

This is where you see youth groups introduced in churches.

There were not youth groups in churches before this event.

There weren't youth pastors in churches.

You're not going to find a youth pastor in the 1950s, you know.

There's no youth pastor at a church back then.

But now, usually you've got a two-pastor staff, the second one's going to be the youth pastor.

Families are looking for a church.

They want to find a church with a youth program.

That's normal thinking now.

It is very new thinking in church history.

But it's something that entered the church then with this idea to rescue younger people from the lost life that waited them.

So churches begin to structure youth programs, to staff youth programs, and then to define their success.

If you're staffing something, you want to define its success.

So you define its success based off of its attraction to young people.

This mirrors what's happening in the culture too.

It's not unique to the church.

The culture, advertising begins to focus on young people.

And you go back, you know, 60 years, it was advertisements had older people, wise people in it.

You wanted to, you know, wisdom.

There's the older people that you wanted to model yourself at.

Not anymore.

Now advertisements go at the young people.

You want to be young.

The wisdom ceases to be a virtue.

Coolness becomes a virtue as described by youth.

And that certainly catches on in the church.

Beyond that, there's this idea that music is what defines that.

Music draws people.

And so you want your church to demonstrate to everybody that you are a church open for young people by having music that young people listen to.

That's what is going on.

I don't think contemporary Christian music works that way.

Now, and I'll explain why later, but in the 90s, that's definitely what it was functioning as.

To demonstrate that you were concerned about reaching the new generation by having music that sounded like they listened to on their own time.

By the way, this is going to lead to an immature church, isn't it?

If a church is focused on attracting young people and cultivating young people, what attracts immature people is not going to be what makes mature people.

Do you understand that?

What attracts immature people is not going to then foster maturity.

This is why so many of those churches that started in that seeker-sensitive movement ended up imploding, ended up falling apart.

Because they were not progressing people on to the fullness of Christ.

They weren't producing mature followers of Jesus Christ.

A church that pursues coolness will end up sacrificing maturity.

And this happened all over American Christianity.

And it had effects that go on through the church history.

It has this idea that you want, you know, what happens after the youth pastor?

What happens when those high school kids phase out of high school group?

You next guy you have to hire is the young adults pastor.

You know, and then the young adults group, it begins to expand its definition.

You soon have churches that have a young adults group made up of people in their 30s, literally older than Jesus was, making up the young adults ministry.

It's astonishing.

But that's the way many American churches went.

They had to have a young adults ministry, they had to fill it out with those people in their 30s, and now those people are, you know, they're in their 40s now, still clinging on to that kind of music as if it defines a healthy church.

You're really in a situation in some American churches now where you've got a whole bunch of people that were in the worship wars that want that kind of young-sounding contemporary Christian music like they listened to in their 20s, sung now, without realizing the irony that younger people are growing up not listening to that kind of music.

This is where the CCM movement came from and where the juvenilization of the church came from and how it wormed its way into our music.

This is why we have to recognize this is a new phenomenon in the last 40-50 years.

It's not just confined to the church, it's all over the explosion of technology.

The medium becomes the message.

As Neil Postman said, the medium, the way we structure our music, becomes the very message we give it.

When the medium is superficial, when the medium is shallow, when the medium is few words, limited emotional range, catchy phrases, that becomes the gospel message.

The gospel message becomes reduced also, along with that approach to music, and I'm sure you've seen that.

That quote I read earlier about the focus of what would make music acceptable in churches describes much of evangelical theology, and it is a cause and effect relationship.

The medium becomes the message, where Christianity theology becomes few words, catchy phrases, maybe with a limited emotional range.

And it really is tragic.

The history of adolescence is bred into the church and has grown up and become music leaders in many churches.

It still has a hangover in some people's minds where they think, you know what, when I think of the different styles of music, I prefer, this is the way I usually hear the phrase, I get that, you know, there's hymns and there's songs.

I don't know exactly how to define them, but honestly, I prefer the more catchy kind of songs.

That's what I prefer in church.

So that's what I'm looking for in a church, is that kind of music, because that's the kind I prefer.

It becomes a preference issue.

It's very hard to argue with a preference issue, right?

If something gets painted as a preference issue, it's hard for you to make a positive argument one way or the other.

You know, some of you might like the old TV show Lost, and you would be wrong and foolish, and that's I don't know how to help you with that.

But I can't argue out of it because it's your preference.

Okay, I could argue for, you know, a better TV show like Longmire or something.

I would argue for that.

And, you know, you may be persuaded, you might not, but it's just an issue of preference.

It's not transcendent truth.

Just an issue of preference.

But I want to submit to you that if you say something like, I prefer these kind of contemporary Christian music songs in church, that's what I prefer in church, you're not really making a preference statement.

It'd be more like you saying, you know, I think of all the languages in the world and I prefer English.

I just prefer it.

You know, English has its strengths, it's got, you know, lots of synonyms and, you know, an easy-to-understand syntax and word order that gives it structure.

Very different than some languages.

You know, in Greek there's no word order.

Everything is just all over the place.

Spanish lacks synonyms to it.

You know, English is got, I prefer it.

Well, the reason you prefer it is because you grew up speaking it.

That's why you prefer it.

You didn't examine all the kinds of music in the world and settle on CCM.

That's what you grew up with, and so you feel drawn to it in the same way that somebody grows up speaking English feels like they prefer that.

But that's the wrong way to think about church music.

I can give you a parallel.

Think of preaching.

Preaching is the primary way of God addressing us through a preacher bringing his word through his word.

Singing is our primary means of addressing God.

Not all public speaking is preaching.

Preaching is how that takes on in church, and it has a different effect and different style and different delivery than normal public speaking.

The same thing should be true with church music.

It's a different style with a different intended effect, a different structure than the music that you would grow up with in the world.

If music was only a matter of taste, that means music is only a matter of entertainment.

If your argument towards music is I prefer this style of music, what you're saying is that music for you is a form of entertainment.

And that's not how church music is supposed to function.

It's not like people prefer contemporary Christian music as worship music because they've evaluated all the options.

They prefer it because that's what they've been exposed to.

And it's not like they prefer it because they are actively rebelling against Jesus.

I don't want to paint it that way.

Like people that like to sing those kind of contemporary Christian songs in church, they're they're rebelling against Jesus.

That's not true either.

It's just that they have been trained to view things like music as entertainment, subject to preferences that are now played out in front of them at church.

And it's such a world switch from the world of the Bible.

In the biblical world, all music was sacred.

Music was designed to be sacred, it was designed for worship.

We live in a world surrounded by music.

So we like different styles or kinds of music.

You listen to the radio in your car, you go on a trip, you have Sirius XM.

You go to the grocery store, it's playing on the speakers in the back of the grocery store.

You have friends over your house, you put on the radio in the backgrounds, you have you wake up with a song on your phone.

I do anyway.

I have a song that wakes me up.

I have songs throughout the day I'm listening to.

I'm reading, I have music in the background.

That's the way our life is now.

Very different than it was even 80 or 90 years ago.

We're surrounded by music, different styles and different genres.

So it takes work in our mind to train our mind to get back to the biblical world where music had a religious function.

The Trinity hymnal begins with this quote: quote, it is well known that the character of a song is almost equal with the character of the preaching that controls the theology of the church.

A church can cultivate good theology by the way the preaching happens, and a church can cultivate good theology by the way the singing and the music happens.

And so when I'm talking about hymns that are poetry put to music designed to structure your thoughts and your affections, I'm not talking about the age of a song.

I'm not talking about the style of music to the song.

I'm not talking about the history of it.

I'm talking about the structure of music that's designed with a repeated structure to bring you deeper into God's truth, to cause your mind to think and memorize words and concepts that would be unfamiliar to you, that you then reflect and magnify in your heart.

That's how you magnify the Lord by singing hymns.

I've had people say, you know, there's no biblical prohibition against singing contemporary music in church, CCM style music in church, and I know, but just because something is lawful doesn't mean it's beneficial.

That's what Paul says.

Just because something's lawful doesn't mean it's beneficial.

There's no Bible verse that says you can't use a kazoo in corporate worship.

That doesn't mean it would be beneficial.

It might be distracting.

It might be.

So church music ought to be theologically true, theologically significant, literarily apt and thoughtful, with lyrics that are appropriate to music, that draw people's hearts into the deep character of God, that transcend our own personal experiences, as we magnify the truth of God in our heart.

This is the problem with if your approach to music is to have catchy phrases with a minimal emotional range.

You're not, you're outside of the hymns right away.

You're outside of poetry right there.

Catchy phrases with a, you know, lower vocabulary and limited emotional range is not poetry.

You can't write poetry in those kind of in those kind of restraints.

It won't work.

That's the problem with pop music, by the way, pop music in general, pop entertainment in general.

It's not designed to be transcendent.

It can barely be beautiful or ugly.

It's designed to exist and then disappear.

It's designed to be popular, but I remember it like pop like the bubble.

It's designed to be there for a second and be gone.

The songs all start to sound the same.

They cycle in and they cycle out, and 40 songs are on the station this week and 40 different songs next month, and you can't remember when one started, another stopped.

They all blend together in your mind.

That is pop music, which is fine for the culture.

I know I sound like an old man ranting right now, but it's it's fine for the world, but it ought not be fine for church.

Malcolm Gladwell, an author who I love reading, has a fascinating podcast on revisionist history where he compares pop music to country music, and he makes an observation that has stuck with me when I think about hymns versus songs.

His observation about pop music versus country music is that you look at the top 50 pop artists of all time, and they are from 50 different cities, 50 different backgrounds, practically 50 different ethnicities.

They are from all over the world.

And for their songs to be equally transcendent, their songs have to be about nothing.

They don't have substance to them.

And you just read through the top 50 pop songs of all time, and man alive, they have just insane lyrics that don't make any sense at all.

In contrast, you got the top 50 country artists of all times.

They're all from basically three or four different cities.

They're from the exact same culture, the exact same background, and so their songs can be very, very specific.

And so their songs, country songs, have a different emotional flair to them because they draw you in emotionally when you understand that the guy lost his girlfriend, his pickup, and his dog, all in the same tragic accident.

I know that Ford F-150.

I know exactly what happened.

I know the railroad crossing he was at when he got hit.

I know it.

You can't have any of that in pop music because there's none of that shared experience.

I'm not saying church music should be like country music, although Alex does his best attempt sometimes.

The parallel is music designed for Christians, by Christians, is rooted on a similar, concise experience with the Lord, so that it can be very specific and it can provoke you.

You hear of John Newton talking about his amazing salvation in a song form.

It doesn't matter that you weren't a slave trader on a slave tra ship that got radically saved.

That doesn't matter.

What matters is that his experience is your experience, even in a different circumstance.

So the more specific he is about his experience, the more powerful it is in your own singing.

Christianity of all things should not seek to be stylish because the whole point is that we have something that transcends time, transcends worldly culture because it's united in biblical culture.

So our music is less accessible than the world's music.

That's fine.

Now I said earlier that CCM started with trying to make contemporary Christian music sound like secular music and then it brings into the church.

But that is not true today.

That is not true today.

So if you're thinking about the contemporary Christian versus hymns structure, that debate is still framed from the 90s or the late 2000s, then you are very outdated in your thinking because contemporary Christian music today sounds nothing like secular music.

Nothing at all.

You look at the top ten artists today, there's not a Christian song.

You wouldn't mistake Hill song for Drake, okay?

You're not going to make that mistake.

You turn on a in my car, I have a secular station off and listen to, and my girls like the message, that serious exam station.

It does not take more than two guitar chords before they can identify if it's my station or theirs.

There's no overlap now in the sound.

They develop their own different styles and their own different sounds, which is also fine.

I don't mean that in a moral judgment or a value judgment.

I'm not saying today's Christian music should sound more secular.

I'm glad it doesn't.

In fact, I think its own style is good and is more wholesome, and I'm glad my kids listen to it.

But that does not mean that it is always fit for church.

For the same reasons I mentioned earlier.

Let me give you another way of explaining that.

If a pastor's prayers were as trite as many of those songs are, you would find them insufferable.

If my sermons were as trite as many of those songs were, you would not listen to them.

Few lyrics would provoke anything were they not set to music.

I mean, let me put it this way.

You would freak out on Sunday morning if we recited the Apostles' Creed four times in a sermon.

If we said the Lord's Prayer four times in a sermon.

That would seem weird and stretched, and okay, once it was fine.

Second time, did you forget you did it, you know, this is the second service, you stop repeating it.

At the fourth time, you would probably come get me.

And yet we sometimes think nothing of singing the same chorus seven, ten, twelve times in a song.

That's much more trite than some kind of creed.

So I submit to you that contemporary versus traditional is a wrong way to think about the worship wars.

There's even churches that did it I I still know churches that do a contemporary and a traditional service.

Cracks me up when I see that on the websites.

I I went to one church with a friend of mine, they had three services.

Okay, the first service was the um, I don't even know what they called it, but it was like the uh, it was what we would think of like passion praise kind of music, that that kind of thing.

Um they did that service and the pastor preached in, well, what I'm wearing now.

And then the middle service was the traditional service, they had acquired an orchestra, the pastor would go up to his office and put on a tie.

And the third hour was the more modern young adults service where they would have a full band and you know that kind of music in there, and the pastor would come out wearing a polo shirt and jeans tucked in.

It was totally strange, totally strange.

You and when your worship begins to reflect that cultural appeal, that's the problem.

That's the problem.

And I submit to you that our worship should strive to be transcendent, it should transcend ages, it should transcend cultures, because it's poetry that's put to music.

It's poetry that puts to music.

Vernacular does not mean contemporary, by the way, just because something is accessible to sing doesn't mean that it's accessible to your experience.

It's better to have songs and hymns that transcend our culture and connect us to the deep truth of Scripture.

Now, I don't want to come across as saying that there's no place for the songs category in church.

Of course there are.

And we, I think Emmanuel, this is not a critique of what we do at Emmanuel at all.

I think David has an incredible balance of this in his music selection because he is usually very good about singing a song that is drawn from the Psalms, that's singing some kind of more songy kind of songs that are personal expressions of someone's relationship with the Lord, and then singing hymns.

You saw that this morning.

We did all of those this morning.

What a wonderful time of worship this morning.

And that all of these have a place in church.

Songs and hymns and psalms all have a place.

What doesn't have a place is the idea that catchy phrases and music style with a condensed and compressed experience will make a church accessible to the world.

That's a functional approach to ministry.

That's what I object to.

Hymns are a way of guarding against that because they structure your music and your singing in such a way that drives you deeper into truth with carefully crafted words that channel you into the deep things of the Lord.

I'm glad that songs can be personal, songs can be repeated, songs can be spiritual, hymns can be poetry, hymns are instructive, hymns are progressive.

Together they form a rich worship service at church.

So let me end here just by rattling you off a quick little outline here.

What we think through when we choose music at church.

First of all, we sing true songs.

We sing true songs.

We choose songs not by how they sound, not what the catchy phrases are.

We sing songs based upon their truth.

The chief and cardinal rule of leading worship music is to not put falsehood or error into songs, but to sing truth.

That's the lowest bar.

Is everything in the song true?

The next bar is that it actually progress you and increase your understanding of truth.

John 17, 17, truth is what edifies and build up, so we only sing the truth.

God is only truly worshiped when we sing true things about him.

Second, we sing thoughtful songs.

We sing true songs and we sing thoughtful songs.

The lyrics of songs we sing shouldn't be interchangeable with every other song.

There's actual intelligence that went in behind crafting them.

There's a logical flow in the song, there's a meaningful trajectory in the song, a cohesive purpose to the song.

If a song is just a bunch of Christian phrases jammed together, we can do better.

And there are plenty of songs sung in churches that are just a bunch of hackneyed Christianese phrases stapled to each other.

Third, we sing songs that are teaching, songs that increase your understanding of theology.

And that's because one of the best functions, as a pastor, I can say this, one of the best functions of singing in church is it teaches you truths that you otherwise wouldn't believe.

You think of this with God's sovereignty.

You might talk to somebody who rejects the doctrine of regeneration, rejects predestination, rejects selection.

You would never get them to say that God chose me before the foundations of time in Christ.

They would reject that.

But they will stand in church and sing with a loud voice, Father, long before creation, you predestined us in love.

And the more they sing it, the more it resonates in their heart.

It's a phenomenal scene I've seen played out time and time again.

You wouldn't, you'd have heard somebody who has a hard time with the doctrine of depravity, they wouldn't likely say, you know, I'm just a sinful, horrible wretch.

In fact, they might rebuke you if you said that.

Hey, don't speak of yourself so lowly.

Have a higher self-esteem.

That's important.

And they'll gather in church and sing Amazing Grace, How Sweet the Sound, that saved a wretch like me, with loud voices with the hands raised.

And the more they sing it, the deeper that truth goes into their hearts.

It teaches the doctrine of substitution.

You know, I can preach fifty sermons in substitution and not get to the depth of truth in the hymn, sacred head now wounded.

What thou, my Lord, hast suffered was all for sinners' gain.

Mine, mine was a transgression, but thou the deadly pain.

Lo, here I fall, my Savior.

It's I that deserve thy place.

Look on me with thy favor, save me by thy grace.

You get people that are flirting with worldliness in their life.

They don't want to run away from worldliness, but they come together in church and they sing all the vain things that charm me most.

I sacrifice them to his blood.

Or be thou my vision, riches I heed not, nor man's empty praise, thou mine inheritance now and always.

Again, there's a poetic element to those kind of languages, going with the kind of language that goes dip deep and rich in its theology.

Rock of ages cleft for me, help me hide myself in thee.

Let the water and the blood from thy wounded side which flowed be of sin, the double cure.

That's the doctrine of double imputation right there, even described.

The double cure.

A child can memorize that song.

I know because we sang that song every night in our house for a month.

A child wouldn't understand double imputation.

You can't draw that out.

They can barely say the word imputation, but they can sing, Be of sin, the double cure.

Save me from wrath and make me pure.

And then finally we sing different songs.

We sing different songs.

We sing all the songs.

We talked about psalms, hymns, spiritual songs, because we're structuring around the gospel.

We sing the gospel.

You see this almost every Sunday at Emmanuel, where we open with a song that serves as a call to worship, where it's a song about just how glorious God is, and we move to a song that's usually about our sin or our need for Christ.

And we move to a song about the cross.

We move to a song then finally about how we're forgiven and we can worship in light of that.

And I hope you saw that even this morning as we sang through that.

As you're singing songs structured like that, it's making you appreciate the gospels it sets in your heart.

If we want God to be pleased with our singing, and we want to be people that are built up in truth, we accomplish that by singing songs that are intelligently designed and structured to make you think deeply and believe strongly about the Lord.

Lord, we're grateful that you have given us songs to sing to the generations.

We're grateful for songwriters that are alive today that are writing new hymns of the faith that will be passed down for generations more.

We know every generation has a handful of songs that will be sung throughout church history, and we strive to sing those now and cherish them now.

I'm thankful for the joy it is to sing and to worship you through these kind of hymns.

We know that they're not easy to write or compose, and yet you have gifted the church with very skilled and capable musicians who do just that.

I'm thankful for the newness of some of these hymns.

I'm thankful for the oldness and the transcendence of some of these hymns.

Thankful how they join together in the river of truth.

We want to drink deeply from that river.

By your grace, we want to do that.

We ask this in Jesus' name.

Amen.

And now for a parting word from Pastor Jesse Johnson.

Thank you for joining Emmanuel Bible Church today through this resource.

It's my prayer that if you live in the D.C.

area, I'll be able to meet you on some Sunday at Emmanuel Bible Church.

For more information on our church, you can go to iBC.church.

Or for information on the Master Seminary and their Washington, D.C.

location, go to tms.edu.

I hope this resource helps you seek God through Jesus Christ, serve the Lord with joy, and share him with boldness.

May the Lord bless you.