Hypnotic Spiritless Singing

Scripture declares, we are to speak to “yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord” and “one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord,” but are we taking this a little too far nowadays?

What I mean is it is no secret that music (whether Christian or non) moves our emotions both in positive and negative ways. I would also be willing to say that it is most often the beat, melody, etc. more so than the words that move us rather than the other way around, for sometimes the words can barely be made out or even heard. While other times, some words found in the so-called Christian music (not limited to just contemporary either) can be easily heard, but are so far from Biblical Truth, it is quite amazing that we (well some) still use them.

Just because it falls under the label of psalms (not the Psalms), hymns, or spiritual songs doesn’t mean it is Biblically sound. Just curious, to YOU, what makes a song spiritually sound? Is it the words, the music, both, or because grandma, grandpa and the local church have always sung it?

I have a fear that many a person in modern-day Christianity is experiencing emotional highs with Christian music, but their very soul remains dead in trespasses and sin. Sure they feel good, their flesh may even enjoy the sound, the beat, and even the choruses, but does their spirit rejoice with the moving of the Spirit of God? I’m not saying I can look at one and tell, I believe this is something we each need to ask ourselves when we believe we are “in the Spirit” being moved by the music played by the band, soloist, choir, or pianist.

Let’s be honest, can not many a soul be moved to both joy and sadness by the tunes of a movie, a play, a missionary story, etc.? Is this by the Spirit of God or merely our emotions being moved by what we see and hear at the time, only to walk away from such back into our “normal” lives whereby we usually forget such?

Please tell me why we have so many giving their lives to Christ, shouting “Holy, holy, holy”, crying out with great tears, falling down to worship God, ONLY to walk out of the church, the stadium, wherever merely returning to their daily lives as if the “experience” never really happened and their lives are never really changed?

Did (Does) the music move their (our) souls to confession, repentance, and salvation, or has it just been a case of Hypnotic Spiritless Singing embraced by the flesh and emotions never reaching their (our) dead or backslidden spirit?

Let us not be hoodwinked by our emotions simply being tossed to or fro during the hype of music, but let us judge our experiences by being grounded in the Word of Truth.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Each individual human being possesses a unique, highly
developed, and sensitive perception of variety. Thus
aware, man is endowed with a natural capability for enact-
ing internal mental and external physical selectivity.
Quantitative and qualitative choice-making thus lends
itself as the superior basis of an active intelligence.

Human is earth's Choicemaker. His title describes
his definitive and typifying characteristic. Recall
that his other features are but vehicles of experi-
ence intent on the development of perceptive
awareness and the following acts of decision and
choice. Note that the products of man cannot define
him for they are the fruit of the discerning choice-
making process and include the cognition of self,
the utility of experience, the development of value-
measuring systems and language, and the accultur-
ation of civilization.

The arts and the sciences of man, as with his habits,
customs, and traditions, are the creative harvest of
his perceptive and selective powers. Creativity, the
creative process, is a choice-making process. His
articles, constructs, and commodities, however
marvelous to behold, deserve neither awe nor idol-
atry, for man, not his contrivance, is earth's own
highest expression of the creative process.

Human is earth's Choicemaker. The sublime and
significant act of choosing is, itself, the Archimedean
fulcrum upon which man levers and redirects the
forces of cause and effect to an elected level of qual-
ity and diversity. Further, it orients him toward a
natural environmental opportunity, freedom, and
bestows earth's title, The Choicemaker, on his
singular and plural brow.

- from The Season of Generation- Choicemaker Joel 3:14 kjv