Worship Part 1: Teaching Christ

What Should We Sing?

I don’t think I have to convince anybody that worship in the church is a topic that has a fair bit of controversy surrounding it. Specifically I’m thinking about worship music and how it plays a role in our Sunday morning church services. I’ve been on my church’s worship team for about six years now; it’s always been an important area of my life especially since both my father and sister have been worship leaders. But what I’ve found myself wondering so much lately is what exactly should determine which songs we play on Sunday mornings? Why should we pick the songs we pick, and create the set lists we create? What qualifies and disqualifies a song for corporate worship? This is a pretty big topic, so I’m going to break it up into a few parts. Here I want us to focus first on what qualifies a song for worship, on what a worship song should be.

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Worship God in Spirit

Maybe the most famous verse on worship is John 4:24, “God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth.” Now, there is some debate about whether ‘spirit’ is talking about the Holy Spirit enabling the Christian to worship, or that we must worship God internally rather than with external religiosity. I don’t intend to settle that debate in this article. Whichever position you take, both facts are attested to us in other passages of the Bible. Our worship must not be merely external, for it’s our heart that truly vindicates or condemns us (Psalm 51:15–17, Matthew 5:27–28, 15:8–9). However, we must also remember that it’s only because we have been made new (2 Corinthians 5:17, Colossians 3:8–11) that we can worship God in the first place (Philippians 2:13, 1 John 4:7–8, 13).

See just how important the Gospel is to worship? It is the Gospel that enables us to worship, not just by the Spirit of Christ, but also the regenerating work of the Spirit changing our attitude to Christ so that we want to worship (1 Corinthians 2:14, Galatians 5:22–23, Titus 2:14).

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Worship God in Truth

“Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, with all wisdom teaching and admonishing one another with psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with gratefulness in your hearts to God.”
— Colossians 3:16

When it comes to worship music, it has been my experience that ‘truth’ is the most hotly debated aspect in this discussion, even more so than ‘spirit.’ Lately though, one verse has been shifting my understanding of truth in corporate worship. Colossians 3:16 has much to teach us about worship, first and foremost being that worship is commanded. The command isn’t just to teach and admonish one another in song— songs already teach by nature— but to let the word of Christ dwell in us as we teach with psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs. Notice the fundamental truth about musical worship: It is instructive. Worship music is a method of biblical education and teaching, and therefore should be held to the same standard and level of doctrinal accuracy as Sunday morning sermons. Indeed, it’s not merely that worship should be used to let the word of Christ dwell in us, but dwell in us richly. Commentator Matthew Henry said of this verse, “It must dwell in us richly: not only keep house in our hearts, but keep a good house. Many have the word of Christ dwelling in them, but it dwells in them but poorly; it has no mighty force and influence upon them. Then the soul prospers when the word of God dwells in us richly, when we have abundance of it in us, and are full of the scriptures and of the grace of Christ.”

One of the things about this verse which has especially stood out to me is who it’s addressed to. We are to be ‘teaching and admonishing one another.’ This is a congregational command, not one given only to the church leadership. I used to think, as someone on the church worship team, that I taught the congregation. However, Colossians tells us that everyone teaches everyone else. Therefore when worship teams choose which songs they will play, they aren’t simply picking out their own teachings for the weekend, but the curriculum for the whole church to teach itself. Truly, if we just look at the previous verse, this is a command given to the whole local body of Christ; the ‘you’ Paul refers to is the whole of the Colossian church. We might read it like this, ‘Let the word of Christ dwell in your church richly.’ This may give light to Paul’s command to “submit to one another out of reverence for Christ,” in Ephesians 5:21 (NIV); especially since the context (verses 18–20) parallels Colossians 3:16.

Again we see how important the Gospel is to worship, for it is the word of Christ which must be the content of our psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs. This ‘word of Christ’ is the Gospel by which not only are we saved, but, maybe more importantly in this particular discussion, by which we are also sanctified (Romans 10:17, Galatians 3:3, 2 Timothy 3:14–17).

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False Standards

Before we finish, I would like for us to examine a few false standards for corporate worship. These are just a few standards I see often that are just simply biblically indefensible; placing a bar to measure up to that God did not install. I highly encourage any reader to examine their own personal standards for worship songs, and then read through the psalms and see if the psalms fit their own standard. If they don’t, then you have some changes you need to make. Until then, here are a few of my own observations.

Melodic preference. I don’t mean that we should allow for genres that would be distracting because they’re so different from what’s normal, but rather those times when the band plays a song for worship and we just pout because we don’t like it. Such an act is a near functional denial of the close relationship between sacrifice and worship (Romans 12:1). I know of no text which says we must only worship to melodies or tunes which make us feel a certain way.

Repetition. This might be more of a false standard in older saints, but I often find people complaining about how repetitive a worship song is. While I don’t condone repetition for the sake of hypnotic emotionalism, nor vain repetition (Matthew 6:7), we can’t say that just because a song is repetitive it should be avoided. Indeed if we simply read Psalm 136 we will find extreme repetition.

Length. This may be more of a functional standard, but, aside from ‘The Doxology,’ we tend not to sing songs for worship unless they are 3-5 minutes long. I wonder how many worship songs have been kept from the church pew because the author thinks they’re too long or too short and are unfinished. Length wasn’t a factor for the psalmists when they wrote Psalm 117 or 119.

Genre. Even the most cursory reading of the psalms would bring us to realize that worship can’t be held to a single genre. Here, I’m speaking more about the literary genre, rather than musical genre. Just in the first three psalms we see themes like instruction (Psalm 1), declaration and narrative with plot and dialogue (Psalm 2), and prayer (Psalm 3). Further than that we have Psalms of praise (Psalm 9), cursing (Psalm 79), and lament (Psalm 42). The latter two of these are certainly underused in the Church today.

Explicit theocentrism (God-centeredness). Once, I heard someone complain saying that they didn’t like a worship song because it was addressed to the congregation rather than to God as a prayer. I’ve heard another criticize a song because it didn’t say much about the attributes, characteristics, or acts of God. Both of these objections are understandable, but I also think they are too stringent. Look at Psalm 1 for example. It is addressed to men, not God. On top of that, it has little to say about the attributes of God, for the exception of verse 6. However even that is merely an explanation of verse 5 which is centered around men. I’m not saying that songs centered around God are wrong, only that Psalm 1 shows us that it’s entirely acceptable to focus on the effects of God, rather than His character in and of itself.

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Conclusion

This was only the first part of our look at worship, and we’ve focused mainly on what worship is and should be; the correct and incorrect qualifications for worship songs. So then with this in mind we must remember: Be sure that it is the word of Christ that you are teaching to others in your worship, and nothing else (Colossians 3:16); worship in your innermost being before your outermost (Matthew 15:8–9), submit to the teaching of your brothers and sisters in Christ (Ephesians 5:18–21), and examine your standards for worship to see if they are really in line with the word of Christ (1 Thessalonians 5:21). As we apply these we should recognise, as it struck me while I studied for this article, just how much freedom there is in musical worship. Songs can vary in length, style, repetitiveness, genre, content, etc. Nonetheless, what has to remain consistent is that our worship songs must teach us the word of Christ, and not just barely, but richly and in all wisdom.