Gospel Music

Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom; teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord. (Colossians 3:16)

I have been thinking about music and the believer lately, especially what most call Gospel music.

Does it not shock you when you hear of worship sessions performed by Christian ‘worshippers’ in drinking dens to drunkards?

What is Gospel music? What is a Gospel Music Concert? What is the expectation of one who attends such a concert?

Where and when did the Gospel concert start? What is the end game for the Gospel concert?

I am yet to see a concert of whatever name drawing people to repentance. And I am not saying they are not enjoyable. In fact, it is probably where the whole problem is. We sought enjoyment instead of admonition. And we got the exact fruit we sought.

I believe that is where we lost it with Gospel music. We sought to give people pleasure instead of instruction and ended up losing the God element in our music. Then people came to listen to music for music’s sake. Sadly, nowadays people also come to hear preachers for the same reason, entertainment and opportunity to feel good.

Thus, instead of such worship drawing people to holiness, it activates those feel good hormones. Instead of bringing people to repentance, it draws them to having the time of their life.

Whereas in the past people were scared of attending Gospel events if they were not ready to be confronted by God’s truth, it appears that the Gospel concert and crusade are chic places for everybody without caring whether they are right with God or not. It is not therefore surprising to see someone sponsoring their clandestine lover to a Gospel concert which will thereafter lead to another clandestine rendezvous to celebrate sin.

I think the reason is simple enough. We started celebrating instrumental and lyrical excellence instead of doctrine. No wonder there are so many songs with spurious messages yet excellent diction and instrumental arrangement. And they are the ones drawing the masses into those concerts, masses that do not care for Christ’s truth in the least.

Yet that is not our heritage.

Do you think Paul and Silas were entertaining the prisoners, even themselves at midnight when God sent the earthquake? Could it have led to none of the prisoners escaping after the doors broke open and the prison officer in charge asking for the way to salvation?

Do you think it is the kind of music David was thinking when he was playing the harp to Saul that drove demons away? Do you think it was such songs that were sung after the Lord’s Supper?

Yet I think this idea of Christians singing for the fun of it is a very recent creation. It may have found its roots in the Pentecostal rejection of hymns even as they rejected the formality of the worship service and for a good reason – most people were following the motions and mumbling recitations without reflection.

Sadly, they did not have any replacement for those spiritually laden songs and liturgy developed over centuries. They trashed tradition developed by tribulation and need; tradition developed to meet the need to reach the unreached; tradition developed over sweat and tears and blood.

Sadly, in their rejection they forgot that nature abhors a vacuum, and that is what they had just created by rejecting all that history.

Sadly, history is not created in a short time.

I think that is where this whole confusion about worship for fun began. We started creating a tradition without referring to the past. We started behaving as if all the believers of the past did not know what they had been doing. In fact we behaved as if they had all been lost and that we are the ones who had FINALLY discovered the right way to worship.

Imagine starting worship from scratch! Where does one start? And it was made worse by the fact that history was rejected; treated as unworthy, unspiritual.

Any song that therefore looked different enough and was not worldly was accepted as okay since we had no standard to gauge it.

That is where choruses became full-fledged songs; that a chorus could be sung for twenty minutes. Imagine repeating a phrase for twenty minutes? Dancing is the automatic response to senseless excitation from those danceable beats.

Songs started being a spur of the moment doctrine, making them extremely shallow and lacking in spiritual content.

That is when music became an industry, an end in itself. It stopped being an accessory to worship and spiritual instruction. It was finally converted as worship, the truest form of worship.

This is clearly unspiritual as it is unscriptural. Nowadays songs define worship. Sadly there are no scriptural standards of assessing the allegiance to scriptural revelation as emotion and how we feel is the standard we use.

But it is worse. Continuous repetition borders on Hinduism and its mantras. It is no wonder it creates those feelings resembling worship – because it is worship, but of another god. It really is releasing our spirits to another spirit different from the Holy Spirit. And we can easily mistake it with the Holy Spirit because we are chanting words mentioning Him.

That is the reason our feelings end up taking centre stage. We are really looking to the Holy Spirit to do our bidding.

That is what the hymns guarded us from.

Incidentally, I think it was very foolhardy to condemn past worship just because people had resorted to the motions. It is like what people call throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

But it is even worse; we are wholesomely condemning the past church and its leadership. We are saying that the past revival and church leaders were frauds. We are saying that our spiritual heritage was of the flesh. We are condemning all past revelation, but without offering a viable alternative.

All this because we think we have the monopoly of the Holy Spirit. We think the Holy Spirit has been dead and buried since Pentecost, or at least we behave that way.

That fallacy has gone beyond singing to preaching. That is why we have this man-centred preaching. In other words, we are preaching a gospel that pleases man. Some call it seeker sensitive gospel and many other names.

Even giving follows the same rule; self-gratification. We must be shown our profit to be convinced to give.

Christian singing must be hinged on the scriptures. That is what we see when we read the psalms as they were the spiritual songs of the past. They have given us a glimpse of spiritual songs even in pre Bible times,

Interestingly, you will find that songs prior to this Pentecostal ‘awakening’, were scriptural. And I am talking about compositions of choirs and individuals. And I say this because I sang in choirs and so interacted with very many songs. Nobody composed a song to make people comfortable. They composed songs directly from the Bible. Interesting enough is the fact that there were not many Bibles then. But they composed songs using the little Bible they knew.

Another thing you will find with hymns is their unceasing focus on Christ; His death, resurrection and soon coming return, topics that are almost completely absent from songs of today. If 300 years ago singers were longing for Christ’s return, should we not be even more so? Could this be a clear signal that what we are singing is devoid of the divine? Could it be a signal that we are singing to another god, a counterfeit who is using our ignorance to further his agenda?

Let us go back to that ‘boring’ liturgy and see what it is we have lost in discarding it. And I say this because I have been enriched even when I casually go through its writings.

Let us trash all that chanting in the name of choruses and revisit the hymns. Then the composers will start thinking wholesome when composing songs as they will discover no one appreciates their drivel cloaked in pretense.

Worship should lead to holiness, simply because it brings us to the presence of God (and not otherwise, bringing God’s presence to us). No one came in contact with God failed to see their wretchedness. And the responses to that were two; repentance or fleeing, because God is a consuming fire. It is therefore shocking that we have ‘God’s presence’ invoked and even ‘manifest’ yet the congregation goes home untouched and back to their sins. It is even worse that some invoking that presence are sunk in sin but can still endure that presence.

And Christian singing should also lead us that way. It should paint Christ in such a way that in approaching His beauty we will see and renounce sin and selfishness. And that presence is worth more than the world to anyone who approaches it. That is what Hebrews 11 talks about. Some refused to be released from bonds because they may have feared that the freedom could interfere with their worship.

Will we examine this noise we call worship with the view of trashing it?