Heartbeat: Congregational Singing & Corporate Prayer

Reminder: Booklets are available, My personal doctrinal statement is available on request, and I’d love to meet with you for coffee or a meal and answer any questions you might have or just get to know you better. My email is on the front of the booklet, and my phone number is on the back of the bulletin, shoot me a text. I’ll be down at the front of the church after the service, I’d love to talk to you.

Last week, I told you about my upbringing, my conversion and baptism, some key moments in my spiritual growth, and my call to ministry and the way God worked in my life to use the Gospel to change my trajectory

I told you about Gospel centrality and Expositional Preaching, which are my two core ministry priorities.

I want to expand on that by giving you a bit more of my journey, and why expositional preaching, congregational singing, and corporate prayer are numbers 2, 3, and 4 on my list.

Before we do that, let’s pray.

Bio (College years, internship, liturgy)

College Years

When I went to Liberty, and God used Jerry Bridges’ book and other people to help me see the centrality of the Gospel, that started to shape me in all kinds of ways, specifically, in the way that the Gospel shapes even the church’s gathering.

Church Gathered

In the Gospel, God has announced that Jesus did something in history to save me from my sin. He lived a perfect life, died on the cross in my place, and rose again on the third day. And by grace through faith, I have become a child of God. I’ve been adopted into God’s family.

But the more I learned, the more I saw that the Bible spends a lot of time talking not just to individual Christians, but to churches— congregations or gatherings of Christians in particular places.

The Christian life is not a solo sport. It’s a team sport. Individuals are inextricably linked to communities of faith in particular places. Churches.

The Gospel has a community shape.

Since God has adopted me into his family, and since God has adopted other individuals into his family, now I have brothers and sisters, spiritual siblings who belong to the same family.

And the Bible teaches two levels of Christian family.

The first level is all Christians in general in the Universal Church, all believers of all time

The second level is the specific group of Christians where I am at, the brothers and sisters of my particular assembly. The Local Church.

The entire Universal Church — all believers of all time — will never be all together until heaven.

So God has authorized local churches — particular expressions of the universal church — to gather together in his name to worship Him, to rightly proclaim and celebrate the Gospel, to observe the ordinances, and to guard the testimony of the Gospel in our intentional and godly life together as we mutually build each other up in our Christian lives.

This is why we meet together on the Lord’s Day for church.

Hebrews 10:24–25 (ESV)

24 And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works,

25 not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near.

When we meet, what should we do? How should we organize our church service?

This might be a new question for you that you’ve never thought of.

It’s one that going to a new place and a new church when I was in college forced me to think about in a way that I never had to before. When you grow up with something, you assume that the way you do things is just the only way people do things.

“If you’re a fish, you don’t know you’re wet”

My classmates in college came from different backgrounds, and I realized there were lots of different traditions that sometimes I wrongly fell into the trap that said that just because I grew up doing it this way must mean that its the only faithful way to do it, and that everyone else must be doing it wrong.

I’ll fast forward a bit and jump to my conclusion.

The New Testament lays out the elements of corporate worship that we need to follow, but there is a tremendous amount of flexibility that individual churches can use to express those elements.

But I’m convinced the basic elements of the gathering of the church include: Expositional Preaching, Congregational Singing, Corporate Prayer, Mutual Encouragement, and the Observation of the Ordinances (Baptism and the Lord’s Table).

I didn’t include Mutual Encouragement in this section of my Core Ministry Priorities because I’m going to talk about that a lot under the category “Culture of Discipleship” in a couple of weeks.

And I didn’t include the Ordinances as a separate category because I’ll say this here now: if a church doesn’t observe the ordinances of Baptism and the Lord’s Table, its not a church!

And if we are committed to Gospel Centrality and Expositional Preaching, we will faithfully proclaim the Gospel when we observe the ordinances of Baptism and the Lord’s Table.

I covered Expositional Preaching last week, and today I want to talk about why I believe Congregational Singing and Corporate Prayer are so vital for the health of the church.

Congregational Singing

Musical Upbringing

For those who haven’t learned this about me yet, we have a musical family!

(My mom has used her music gifts to lead us in singing by playing piano for a quarter of a century)

Music lessons was one of the many ways my parents invested in us.

Taking piano lessons wasn’t really an option, it was just a given.

After starting piano lessons to lay a good foundation, I started violin lessons in the second grade.

Right away — well, at least after my first year of violin, which is always at nightmare, no matter how good you are — my mom made sure we were put in situations where we would have to sing as a family, or play a prelude for church, or play along with the hymns on Sunday morning.

In addition to the generally positive impacts of learning how to play musical instruments and read music and sing, there was always another purpose my parents had in mind: that we would be able to use music to serve in whatever church we might one day end up in.

So music in the church has always been in the background.

In junior high and high school I pursued different avenues musically, playing in a youth orchestra, string quartets, other ensembles, playing piano for church services, jumping into choral music and directing and arranging and the smallest bit of music composition. In my private violin lessons, my teacher, who was the fiddler for an Irish rock band, taught me the basics of Celtic fiddle, which was a blast.

When I was in high school, our music director, Melissa, and I found ourselves as the only two students who participating in the All-Regional orchestra. Shout out to you, Melissa!

I fell in love with film scores from John Williams, Howard Shore, John Powell, and Hans Zimmer. I started to listen to and appreciate different styles and genre of music, from ancient Gregorian chant to Folk to Baroque orchestral to Mongolian throat singing to Bluegrass and everything in between.

I loved modern choral arrangers and composers like Morten Lauridsen and Eric Whitaker and Dan Forrest.

Before too long, my tastes expanded outward even more, so that the same guy who liked listening to the Bach cello suite in C and Handel’s Messiah also loved Indie folk, acoustic singer-songwriter ballads, jazz, and of course, the untouchable Johnny Cash

I pretty much never went for pop, though. Sorry (not sorry).

The point is, I love music in so many different shapes and expressions and textures!

But when I was in college, one conviction about music in the church rose the surface: there is no instrument more important than the human voice; specifically, the congregational voice.

Listen as I read these two passages

Colossians 3:16–17 (ESV)

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.

17 And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.

Ephesians 5:18–20 (ESV)

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,

20 giving thanks always and for everything to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ,

When many people start talking about music in the church, there is a tendency to make moral judgments on style.

So, some might say: “We are faithful Christians because our style of music is traditional, which means we are faithfully resisting the downward pull of worldliness.”

Or: “We are faithful Christians because our style of music is contemporary, which means we are communicating in the heart language of our community.”

Or: “We are faithful Christians because our style of music is a blend of traditional and contemporary, which means we make everyone angry!”

I’m not saying there’s no place for that conversation, but what I think is far more important is this fundamental question: “Are the people singing?”

Sure: You might have a traditional music style, but are the people singing?

You might have a contemporary style, but are the people singing?

You might have a blended style, but are the people singing?

Story of My Internship

Several years ago, I had the privilege of doing an internship at a large megachurch on the East coast.

And the people at this church were lovely, godly, wonderful people and I learned a ton from them and I was amazed they were willing to actually pay me to be an intern there.

This church had several different services. One service was a traditional service, with a full choir and orchestra. Another service was a full contemporary service, complete with a full band and lights and even some lasers. And then they had another service that was an acoustic-based contemporary service, which was a bit less than the full blast contemporary service and included quite a few more hymns and older songs.

And as a music ministry intern, I got to sing in the choir for the traditional service, run down to play in the mixed, acoustic-based service, and then evaluate the contemporary service a few times.

And I’ll never forget just how struck I was.

In the traditional service, I saw a full choir and orchestra that was playing beautiful, full, traditional hymns and Southern-gospel-style songs and I looked out at the congregation and so many people were just standing there or sitting there and either just barely muttering along some words or not even bothering to sing! They were just listening as the choir and orchestra did the music performance for them.

And then in the full contemporary service, where the music was on full blast and the lights were down and the lasers were on, I looked around and noticed the same exact thing happened. The band sounded great! The musical quality was on point. The technology was dialed in. It was a really high quality production value, but most of the people were standing with their hands in their pockets or their arms raised up, but most weren’t singing. They were just kinda muttering along or just standing there listening to the worship band.

What I noticed was that even though both services were billed as services to cater to certain musical style preferences, in the end, the very people whose preferences were supposed to be catered to weren’t there to participate. They were there to be placated. Or entertained. Or performed for. And it was the exact same problem in the Traditional Service as it was in the Contemporary Service. The people coming to church were not coming to contribute. They were coming to consume.

They were there to be takers, not givers.

But in the mixed service, which was still generally contemporary but tried to cultivate an acoustic set of excellent hymns of the past and the present, the volume was turned down a bit and the house lights were a bit brighter so the people could see each other, there was a much higher degree of participation. The people were singing.

Psalm 96:1 (ESV)

1 Oh sing to the Lord a new song; sing to the Lord, all the earth!

The consistent message throughout the Bible is that when God reveals Himself, people respond.

And one of the most mysterious and wonderful things about living in God’s world is sometimes the only proper response is to sing!

God’s people are a singing people.

In the Old Testament, God’s people burst out into song after being redeemed from slavery in Egypt in Exodus 15, and after God conquers their enemies in Judges 5. God commands Moses to write a hymn for God’s people to sing before they enter the Land of Promise in Deut 32, a hymn that contains God’s promises and warnings and becomes something of a national anthem. In Chronicles we read about the extensive musical preparations for temple worship, accompanied by choirs of hundreds of singers. And of course, the Book of Psalms was the hymnal of God’s people, containing songs for public worship in every emotional tone and register.

And all throughout the Old Testament, the songs that God’s people sing are consistently saturated with biblical truth.

Its no surprise, then, that when the Apostle Paul provides clear instructions for the music of the gathered church in the New Testament, he doesn’t give any instructions for the kind of accompaniment or instruments that should or should not be used.

Its almost like Paul doesn’t really care.

But what he does care about is the content of what they are singing and why they are singing.

Colossians 3:16 (ESV)

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.

That phrase “word of Christ” means the Message about Jesus. The Gospel. Let the Gospel message dwell among you, church. And then he explains one way that that can happen: through singing!

Singing Psalms, and hymns, and spiritual songs.

Sing different kinds of songs! Variety is OK. It’s even good. Sing all kinds of songs that are saturated with Gospel truth.

Sing it to one another, because you can use these songs as sung lessons, designed to help your heart connect with spiritual realities in a way that just “saying” words never could.

Illustrate

Let me illustrate this.

Say this: “It is well. With my soul. It is well, it is well with my soul.”

Sing this: “It is well (it is well), with my soul (with my soul), It is well, it is well with my soul”:

Feel the Truth

Bob Kauflin points out that when we sing, we are combining truth (in words) with emotion (in music). And when we combine truth and emotion in Gospel-saturated songs, we are doing something that enables us to not just say the truth or confess the truth, but actually feel the truth.

That’s why Paul ends by saying that when we sing Gospel-saturated songs to one another to help encourage and teach one another, we need to do that “with thankfulness in our hearts to God.”

Singing Gospel-saturated songs with our church should stir up something inside us. We should feel appropriate emotions that correspond to the truths that we are singing about.

And ultimately, we are not singing for an audience in the church. We aren’t singing to entertain one another. Our ultimate aim is to sing for the glory and pleasure of God.

Interestingly, the passage in Ephesians that we read says almost the same thing, but instead of saying “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly,” it says “Be filled with the Spirit”!

By comparing those two verses, we see that being filled with the truth of the Gospel, found in God’s Word, and being filled with the Holy Spirit, are actually two sides of the same coin.

As we sing to one another, we should seek to sing in such a way that our songs are saturated with Gospel truth, that our singing is aimed at encouraging and teaching one another, that our primary aim is glorifying God, as we respond to the truths that we are singing about with Spirit-guided emotions.

Application

Practically speaking, what this means is that while we love having a music team that puts in a lot of hard work to serve us, the primary goal for our music team is not excellence for its own sake.

Our goal is “undistracting excellence,” and all of our music in our church should be played in such a way that facilitates and encourages and supports the singing of the church.

The musicians are not performers. They are facilitators who come alongside us as we all lift our voices together in song.

Also, this means that the songs we sing should be (1) Biblical, (2) Christological, (3) Singable, and (4) Memorable.

(1) Biblical: it should be based on the Bible. It should emphasize what the Bible emphasizes, and help believers renew their minds by being saturated with Biblical truth.

(2) Christological: We want to sing songs that are distinctively Christian. We want to sing songs about the Gospel, about Jesus Christ and him crucified, not about a generic God that false religions could be perfectly fine singing.

(3) Singable: We want to sing songs that have melodies that a group of people can sing. Granted, we all have different backgrounds and skill levels, but we want to sing songs that most of our church family can sing.

That means lots of songs that you might love listening to on your commute or that you hear on the radio probably just aren’t going to be very well suited for singing in a group setting.

Also, choosing songs that are singable means that we try to sing songs in keys that the majority of the congregation can sing. If the melody is super high or super low, that makes singing along difficult.

And to support this goal of having our songs singable, we have a weekly Spotify playlist so you can listen to the songs we are going to sing in advance so you can come to church prepared to sing along.

And then we have a master playlist that has a broad sampling of lots of different songs in our song collection, so you can learn to sing along with some of the songs we sing.

(4) Memorable: We want to sing songs that will last a long time. Practically, that means we sing lots of songs that already have lasted a long time, but as we are singing new songs, we want to sing songs that we will be able to sing for many years to come, songs that will become the new old hymns that future generations might sing in the future, if the Lord doesn’t return before then.

That’s my third core ministry priority: congregational singing.

And it’s directly connected to my fourth: corporate prayer.

Corporate Prayer

Someone once said, “Nothing of eternal significance ever happened apart from prayer.”

And yet, in the 1500s, an Augustinian monk named Martin Luther grew increasingly concerned about the spiritual state of the church.

He noticed, among many other things, that many churchgoers came to church to be a passive recipient of the ministry of the priests.

The service was in Latin, which no one but the clergy and the highly educated spoke.

And in the day to day life of the congregants, confession needed to be made through the mediation of the priests.

Luther, for his part, in his early adult life, found himself crippled with guilt for his sin and spent hours and hours confessing his sin to a priest, hoping to find forgiveness.

Martin Luther is widely regarded as a key figure of what we now call the Protestant Reformation. It was in his despair over his constant confession of sin that Luther eventually discovered that being declared right before God was not through obeying the Law, but through faith alone.

And it was understanding the doctrine of justification by faith alone in Jesus Christ that revolutionized Luther’s understand of how God’s people relate to God.

1 Peter 2:5

5 you yourselves like living stones are being built up as a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.

Because of what Jesus has done for us in his life and death and resurrection and ascension, Jesus is now at this very moment ruling and interceding for us as our ultimate Prophet, Priest, and King.

And now, because of the Holy Spirit, who has been given to believers, we have instant and immediate access to God.

This is what Jesus said would happen in John 4, when he talks with a woman at the well outside of Samaria.

John 4:21, 23 (ESV)

21 …The hour is coming when neither on this mountain [Gerazim] nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father...

23 But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship him.

Jesus was saying that the days of Temple worship would soon end, when a new age would dawn, a New Covenant, in which the Holy Spirit would be poured out on all of Jesus’ disciples, and they would have immediate access to God wherever they were, because of their great high priest.

And sure enough, when Jesus was on the cross, the veil in the temple dividing the Holiest place from the holy place was torn in two from top to bottom, signifying that God’s temple presence would no longer be connected to a building, but would now be seen in Jesus, and in those united to Jesus by faith.

And that temple presence would be seen in two ways.

The first is individually.

1 Corinthians 6:19 (ESV)

19 Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own,

But then, in 2 Corinthians, Paul says about the church:

2 Corinthians 6:16 (ESV)

16 … we are the temple of the living God; as God said, “I will make my dwelling among them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.

Explanation and Application

So what’s the big deal? Why does this matter?

I think there can be a tendency for us as modern day believers to fall into what I’ll call the “Medieval Peasant Trap” when we come to church.

We can unwittingly think and act like Medieval Peasants.

We come to church, the pastors are there, or the music team or the preacher or whoever. And they say the Jesus words. They sing. They pray. They might be speaking in English, but it might as well be Latin. And we go through the motions but we’re disconnected from the action in our minds and our hearts.

But if we’re growing in Christ and living into our intimate and real connection with God through our great high priest, that should impact our attitude about what it means to come to church.

Think about it this way.

Think about the presence of the Holy Spirit as a light. Like a warm glow of fire.

If you’re trusting in Jesus alone for your salvation, when you are living your daily Christian life, you have the presence of the Holy Spirit with you,And because of Jesus, you have instant and immediate access to God. You don’t have to pray through a different mediator, like a priest. You can go directly to God because of Jesus, your Great High Priest.

But then, on Sunday, when God’s people gather together, think about that gathering as a hotspot of a hundred different glowing Christians. Each of whom enjoy equal access to God because of Jesus, but our lived experience of God’s presence is heightened when we come together as a church to worship God.

So when the Bible talks about prayer — talking to God — we need to understand that prayer functions as part and parcel of what it means to relate to God as our Father, to Jesus as our Savior, to the Holy Spirit as our Helper.

God speaks to us through His Word, and we speak back to God through prayer.

Prayer is not the work of the few; its the work of the whole church.

I want us to be known as a praying church.

Liturgy

Luther was so concerned that people understood this doctrine of the priesthood of all believers that he tried to take actionable steps to help foster that in actual worship services of the church.

So, He worked really hard to get the Bible translated into the heart language of the people, into German, so the people could read the Bible and understand the Bible for themselves for the first time in a long time.

He also worked hard to get the church service into German. He worked hard to get a hymnal translated into German so the people could sing the songs. Where before everything happened “up front” so to speak, by the clergy, Luther and others wanted to engage the whole church in different was.

And instead of just having a priest pray, the congregation was invited to pray responsively.

Protestant churches worked hard to make their orders of service flow together, structured around the shape of the Gospel, and involve the people.

In different churches that looked different.

But often it included standing. Sitting. Kneeling.

It involved reciting key passages of Scripture together, like the Ten Commandments or the Lord’s Prayer.

It involved memorizing and saying the Apostles Creed and the Nicene Creed, summaries of the Christian faith.

It involved catechisms, questions and answers to learn more about the Bible’s teaching.

Sometimes moments of silence for believers to pause and self reflect.

Other times, pre-written prayers were used as a way to help believers learn how to pray.

Different traditions did different things, but the point was that if God’s people had direct and immediate access to God, all of God’s people had a job to do.

That needed to take shape in clear, helpful, orderly ways, but the point was that when believers come to church, we’re not passive. We need to be active in prayer from beginning to the end.

Application

Again, it might seem obvious to you, but if the church is a kingdom of priests, then prayer and cultivating our connection with God should be a big priority, both in our individual lives and our life together as a church.

The Bible is full of commands and invitations to pray.

Pray at every opportunity.

Pray about everything.

Pray constantly.

It’s said that while Charles Spurgeon would preach on Sunday morning, down in the basement dozens of people would be praying for him as the word of God went forward in power and glorify God and transform lives.

Do you pray through the church service?

When we are singing songs that saturated with God’s Word, are you kinda muttering along or saying the words or singing the tune, but not actually praying those words to God?

When we read Scripture responsively, or when we recite creeds or catechisms or pray pre-written prayers, are you engaged with what we’re doing? Or are you just going through motions?

When you listen to someone share a testimony or a story of what they’ve learned from God’s Word, do you silently pray with them and for them and thank God for what He’s done?

When you listen to a sermon from a pastor, do you pray for your own heart to be sensitive to the work of the Holy Spirit? Do you pray for your church family? Do you pray for those who are really hurting spiritually? Do you pray that you would find ways to practically apply God’s Word to your life?

When you arrive early or stay a bit after the service, have you prayed for an opportunity to speak an encouraging word to someone who is struggling or discouraged?

“Pray without ceasing” applies just as much to church as it does your individual Christian life.

At every level of our life together, I want us to be a praying church.

Personal Application

If you don’t have a habit of praying individually, and you need help growing in that area, and I can’t imagine very many people don’t need to grow in that area, why don’t you open up with another trusted brother or sister in the church and ask for help?

Or if you need help getting to that step, reach out to me or one of the other pastors. I’d love to talk to you through that and pray about what a good next step can be.

Another great way to grow in this area is jump into a small group, where you can meet some people who will love you and walk with you as you grow.

Conclusion

We’re four core ministry priorities in: Gospel Centrality, Expositional Preaching, Congregational Singing, and Corporate Prayer.

For the next four weeks, we’ll take one per week. And I’m really excited to get into it.

Next week we’ll look at Number 5, Evangelism & Missions.

I hope you’ll be back.

Let’s pray.

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