Acclamation and Songs

This fall, we’re spending this time asking two questions: How is our liturgy shaped, and how does our liturgy shape us? Very few of us grew up in an Anglican church, so we are still learning why we worship the way that we do. And for those of us who have worshipped in this way for years now, we could use a refresher course on why we worship the way that we do. Where does our liturgy come from? And what effect does it have on us? For so many of you, the reason that Redeemer is your home is because the liturgical worship that you experience here has had a profound effect on your life and faith. It has moved you. It has engaged your whole self in worship. So we’re taking some time this fall to look at the Anglican liturgy to discover why it is so meaningful and how God meets us when we worship Him in this way.

So the last couple of weeks we set the stage and talked about the liturgy at a macro-level, how the call and response of our worship reflects call and response of the Christian life. Last week we looked at why it’s so important that we physically gather together for worship. And now finally, we’re getting into the actual liturgy of our service. Today we’re examining the the very first movement of our liturgy. How do we begin our service? We begin with songs and acclamation.

“Blessed be God: the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And blessed be His Kingdom, now and forever. Amen. “

Now, because we’re going to speak at length today about singing and worshiping through song, I want to offer an important word to those of us who are not particularly musically gifted. Some of us have music and rhythm in our blood, and some of us do not. That’s completely fine! As the Bible says, the Body of Christ is composed of many different kinds of parts. We are distinct and varied, but we are united as one body, one family. So, I know that some of you are not musically gifted. Now, you will be tempted to think that the liturgy has many different movements in order to appeal to a wide variety of people. So, the musically gifted people can worship through singing. The intellectuals get the sermon. The sacramentalists get the eucharist. Everyone gets their thing. But that’s not the way the liturgy is intended to work. Every movement of our worship is for you, not just the one’s that come easy to you. It’s all for you, and it’s all for me.

So why do start our worship with song and with acclamation? Well in our text this morning we’re going to take a look at three reasons. When we sing together, the Holy Spirit reorients our 1) minds to the story of God, 2) our hearts to love and delight in God, and 3) reorients our relationship with God so we draw near and near to our Father in Heaven. So turn with me to Psalm 95.

95 Oh come, let us sing to the Lord;

let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation!

2 Let us come into his presence with thanksgiving;

let us make a joyful noise to him with songs of praise!

3 For the Lord is a great God,

and a great King above all gods.

4 In his hand are the depths of the earth;

the heights of the mountains are his also.

5 The sea is his, for he made it,

and his hands formed the dry land.

6 Oh come, let us worship and bow down;

let us kneel before the Lord, our Maker!

7 For he is our God,

and we are the people of his pasture,

and the sheep of his hand.

Today, if you hear his voice,

8 do not harden your hearts, as at Meribah,

as on the day at Massah in the wilderness,

9 when your fathers put me to the test

and put me to the proof, though they had seen my work.

10 For forty years I loathed that generation

and said, “They are a people who go astray in their heart,

and they have not known my ways.”

11 Therefore I swore in my wrath,

“They shall not enter my rest.”

Our psalm begins the same way that we begin our worship: “Come, let us sing to the Lord!” Let us come before the presence of the Lord with singing and with thanksgiving. And why? Why do we come into his presence with singing? Because he is a great God. Because he is the king above all gods. Because he has brought all of creation to life through the work of his hands, and because he is our God. He is our shepherd, and we are the sheep of his hand. Why do we come before the presence of the Lord with singing and shouts of acclamation? Because we know Him, and he is good.

You see there is an important assumption that is made at the very beginning our service. The liturgy assumes that the people who have gathered here know the goodness of God. The first words of the liturgy make this abundantly clear. In fact, many Anglican churches have no formal welcome like we do at Redeemer. They simply jump right into it. The clock strikes ten, the organ starts playing, and the first words that are spoken are those of the acclamation: “Blessed be God: the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And blessed be His kingdom, now and forever. Amen.” It is assumed that the people who have gathered know God and have been adopted into his family. And because it is assumed that everyone you know God in all of his goodness and all of his glory, than what have we come to here to do? We have come to bless him with our minds and hearts and tongues.

Martin Luther used to say, “To know God is to worship God.” What he meant by that was that if you truly knew the Lord, if you had been transformed by his redeeming grace, if you had been adopted into his family, if you had communion with the Father through the Son and by the Spirit, than there would be nothing on earth that could stop you from worshiping him. No power of hell and no scheme of man could prevent you from worshipping God.

So when we know God, we come to worship him. But when we’re talking about what work our liturgy does in us, we should also recognize that the inverse of this is true; because when we worship God, we come to know him more truly and love him more deeply. When we worship, the Holy Spirit changes us, as he brings us into greater and deeper truths that we claim to follow. Doxology, right worship, builds and strengthens orthodoxy, right belief. They go hand in hand. And we need the power of worship to reorient our minds to the true story of God, week in and week out.

We need this because we are creatures of story. I touched on this a little last week, but it is worth reiterating. We are creatures of story, and we are constantly being bombarded with stories. The moment you leave church today, you will have some kind of advertisement in your inbox that is telling you a story about how amazing your life could be if you just bought their product or service. You will spend hours watching movies or TV shows that will tell you a story about what’s really worth pursuing in life, what will make you happy, or what you’re missing out on. We are constantly being presented with stories, and they are almost never the story of Scripture. They are not the story of God as your savior, and you as his redeemed people. So, we need to tell our story to ourselves over and over again. We need to reorient our selves to the one true story of redemption.

The primary story that the world presents us with again and again is one that says that we are the hero of the story, but there is some kind of obstacle in our way, so here’s this thing that will help you overcome said obstacle, so now you can be the hero you know that you are. Slap on any product or service, but this is the story that we’re told. We are the hero. We are the main character. The story is all about us.

But we know that we’re not heroes, and this is not our story. Think back to how the Lord’s Prayer ends. It ends with a concluding thought, “For Thine is the Kingdom and the Power and the Glory forever and ever.” You know what that means? That’s a fitting reminder that if life were a movie, God is the Director, the Producer, and the Star - not us. And I need to be reoriented to this truth, because I am prone to forget it.

We need to have our minds reoriented to the true story of the gospel, and in a uniquely powerful way, songs draw our minds to these truths. When we sing together, we’re not just making music, we’re rehearsing our story! We’re rehearsing the great truths of Scripture so that our minds might be even more attuned to the gospel. We need In Christ Alone. We need Great is Thy Faithfulness. We need Jesus Paid it All to remind us what we truly believe and to have our minds reoriented to the one true story of God, rather than all the other false stories we’re told all week long.

So, through singing the Holy Spirit reorients our minds to the story of God, but he also reorients our hearts to love and delight in God. Look with me again at Psalm 95. I’ll read the first two verses, and then hop down to verse 7.

95 Oh come, let us sing to the Lord;

let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation!

2 Let us come into his presence with thanksgiving;

let us make a joyful noise to him with songs of praise! .....

7 For he is our God,

and we are the people of his pasture,

and the sheep of his hand.

Today, if you hear his voice,

8 do not harden your hearts, as at Meribah,

as on the day at Massah in the wilderness,

9 when your fathers put me to the test

and put me to the proof, though they had seen my work.

10 For forty years I loathed that generation

and said, “They are a people who go astray in their heart,

and they have not known my ways.”

This psalm is referencing the wilderness generation of Israel. This generation had seen the mighty hand of God reach out in power to save them from slavery in Egypt, only to reject him a short while later. And this psalm diagnosis their problem, and the problem area is where? It’s their heart. The problem lies in their hearts. Now, isn’t it interesting what the psalmist pairs this problem with…songs of praise.

The medicine for a hard heart, according to Psalm 95, is to sing about God’s goodness. What this psalm is highlighting is the fact that this wilderness generation was so consumed with themselves that they no longer remembered the goodness of the Lord who had saved them. They were saying things like, “Why have you brought us out here to die? At least back in Egypt we had water and food.” And they were speaking to the one who had just shook the pillars of creation to rescue them from slavery. As if their Father wouldn’t supply them with everything they needed. They were so turned inward on themselves that they couldn’t see his goodness and grace anymore.

And so the psalmist says that the remedy for a person who is turned in on themself is to sing! Sing about God’s glory. Sing about God’s mercy! Sing about his love and power! Come let us sing.

But it’s not just the Old Testament, we see it also in the new. Ephesians 5:18-19.

18 And do not get drunk with wine, for that is debauchery, but be filled with the Spirit, 19 addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with your heart,

Again, Colossians 3:16.

16 Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God.

All over the Bible we see a connection between singing our praises to God, and the Spirit moving in our hearts to fill us with love and delight in God. We sing, because we need our hearts moved. We need our affections drawn towards God. Worship is not just about our minds, but it is about our hearts. It’s about our loves and desires.

Even the Puritans understood this. Jonathan Edwards, in his work on religious affections put it this way:

“The duty of singing praises to God seems to be appointed wholly to excite and express religious affections. No other reason can be assigned why we should express ourselves to God in verse rather than prose, and do it with music. But only such as it is our nature and frame that these things have a tendency to move our affections.”

Redeemer, we need our hearts and affections to be moved. We need more than just a mind that is reoriented to the Lord, we need a heart that is moved and a love that is focused squarely on God. And throughout the Bible, a significant means by which the Holy Spirit inflames our desire for God and the things of God, is through songs of praise. Singing is a means of grace, because through it God draws us towards himself.

So when we sing, the Spirit reorients our minds. When we sing, the Spirit reorients our hearts. And third, when we sing, the Spirit reorients the way that we relate to God as our heavenly father. Look with me again at verse 7.

7 For he is our God,

and we are the people of his pasture,

and the sheep of his hand.

Today, if you hear his voice,

8 do not harden your hearts..

So why do we sing? Because he’s God? Because he’s king? Yes, but more than that. Because he is our God. Because he is our king. Our shepherd. Jesus uses this exact same metaphor to describe his relationship with his disciples. How does God want to relate to us? As a loving, caring shepherd who watches over his sheep. God wants a relationship with us, not just as a ruler of the world who is king over a bunch of servants, but as a Father with his children. As a shepherd with his sheep. He wants that kind of relationship. And the amazing thing is that God sings over us long before we sing to him.

17 The Lord your God is in your midst,

a mighty one who will save;

he will rejoice over you with gladness;

he will quiet you by his love;

he will exult over you with loud singing.

What a beautiful passage. When our children were first born, Peter a couple years ago, and Chloe just a few months ago, Melanie and I were head over heels for them both. We were immediately in love. We were taking thousands upon thousands of pictures and videos, sending Marco Polos to our family. We just couldn’t get enough of them. And we couldn’t help but sing over them. Parents, you know exactly what I a talking about. It doesn’t matter if you are musically inclined or not, when you hold your baby boy or baby girl, everything in you tells you that it is good and right to sing over them. Doesn’t matter what song. I used to make up songs, narrating whatever we were doing. Diaper changing songs. Bathing songs. Tummy time songs. Everything got a song. And this is still true today. I can’t help but exult over my children in love with song.

There are a million moments in my childhood that I do not remember, but I will never forget those times that my mom sang over me when I was a little boy. She’d sing, “You Are My Sunshine.” “You are my sunshine, my only sunshine. You’ll never know dear, how much I love you.” My mom never withheld telling me that she loved me, but it is her singing over me that has stuck with me the most.

Redeemer, this is the way that God sings over you. This parental, doting love is the kind of love that the Father has for you. He delights in you. His joy overflows for you like a parent who when looking into the eyes of their child, can’t help but sing. This is the love that the Father has for you.

And so we come here to sing, and we do not sing alone. We sing with the Father. By grace we have been invited to sing with the God of the Universe, because he wants to share his song with us, just as he wants to share his life with us.

We come together to sing, not only because it shapes our minds, not only because it shapes our hearts, but because it draws us into deeper community with our loving Father. Let’s pray.