Sing the Truth

May 24, 2024 | by Anthony Wade

Music is a central part of life. As much as a person may not want to admit it, I believe everyone loves music. Whether it’s listening to the radio, singing a little ditty while making your morning coffee, humming under your breath while you work, or blasting out your own version of Whitney Houston in the shower, each one of us must admit that music is a part of life that is here to stay.

Not only that, but music teaches us. I would venture to say that you learned your alphabet with a song. I did. I also learned the days of the week and the months of the year with the aid of music. To this day, you can ask my wife to recite the different states and she will sing “The Fifty Nifty United States of America” for your listening pleasure. And the one that blows my mind comes from my brilliant daughter. She can tell you the first 200 digits of Pi, all because of music. I’m not that smart, but I can tell you what the wheels on the bus do.

Not only is music important in preschool, but it also plays a vital role in our spiritual life and development throughout our Kingdom journey. And this is no new concept. All throughout the Word, we see the significance of music in mankind’s path and His-story. In fact, Jewish rabbis will tell you that God not only spoke the world into existence through what they share as “the ten expressions” of creation in Genesis 1:3-29, but that He sang the world into existence. And modern physics has now confirmed what these rabbis have known for centuries. We now know that all sound is made up of movements, vibrations, and frequencies that form sound waves. These waves hit our eardrum to signal our brain what we are hearing. Well, science can now show us that everything we see in our world, down to the table you eat dinner on or the bed you sleep in contains energy. Indeed, every atom contains a frenetic world of movement, vibrations, and frequencies that create energy. Einstein said that all matter is energy, and it is this movement that was created from the beginning by our amazing Heavenly Father.

I didn’t mean to get so deep on you there. The point is that music is a creative force in our lives, so it matters what you sing. I can remember when I was in college, I heard a speaker share this idea and I immediately threw away hundreds of CDs that I didn’t want to influence me any longer. However, it isn’t just Snoop Dog or Metallica that we need to beware of. The music in some churches is almost as bad. Why? Because it creates a belief system in us, and the last thing we want is a belief system built on lies. You may think I’m being too harsh or critical, but A.W. Tozer once said, “Christians don’t tell lies, they just go to church and sing them.” Ouch.

This is why we are picky about what we sing at our church. For the first 1600 years of the church, few wrote their “own songs” to worship our Father. In Acts 16:25, we see the important part that singing played in the deliverance of Paul and Silas. I won’t give any other examples now, but suffice it to say that music is key to the Christian life, and I don’t want to reinforce a man-centered gospel or ideas about God that are based on emotion. I want to sing the Word. I want to sing truth and allow that to create in me a strong foundation of God’s goodness.

I love you all and am so thankful for you. Have an awesome day!

Pastor Anthony