Created to Sing!
We Are Designed To Sing
A Desire To Sing
We have three young daughters, and it has surprised us with each of them how early they could sing. Simple melodies with mumbled words grew into phrases like “O sing happylujah,” or a bizarre mixture of “Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God Almighty” and “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.” To sing is written into our human DNA; it is part of God’s design.
A Desire to Make Instruments
The Physical Ability to Sing
The Psyche to Sing
. When singing praise to God, so much more than just the vocal box is engaged. God has created our minds to judge pitch and lyric; to think through the concepts we sing; to engage the intellect, imagination, and memory; and to remember what is set to a tune (we are confident that, right now, 99 percent of this book’s readers can remember more lyrics set to music than can recite Scripture by rote). God has formed our hearts to be moved with depth of feeling and a whole range of emotion as the melody-carried truths of who God is and whose we are sink in.
We Are Designed To Sing Uniquely
If You Can Speak, You Can Sing
Sometimes we meet people who say, “I can’t sing”—as in, “The sound that comes out of my mouth when I try to sing is not what I was hoping for.”
God Cares Whether and What You Sing More Than How Tunefully You Sing.
Practice Makes Better
To learn to walk takes time, and we first must learn to press down on our feet. To learn to speak takes time, and we must first open our mouths and make sounds. To praise God in tuneful song takes time, and we grow better at singing by singing. And once we’ve reached our peak, if it is still some way short of the tuneful heights, a sense of humor is a useful ally. Some people do have a special gift of singing absolutely every note slightly off pitch (which is, ironically, very hard to do). Since we sing to encourage and praise, not to impress and earn praise, we can smile about that and sing anyway.
We Are Designed To Sing In God’s Image
Created to Enjoy Beauty and Creativity
We can tell the difference between an orchestra tuning up and them then playing a coherent piece of music—suddenly, there is a “rightness” in how the notes sit together. We know that sense of throwing back your head or raising your hands to sing a great hymn with every ounce of your being and the feeling of losing interest in a mediocre one. This is why for a songwriter, it’s worth striving day after day for months (or years) to compose that one melodic idea that is fresh, compelling, and might touch another person’s soul.
Created To Benefit From Beauty in Creativity
Created to Communicate To Each Other and To God Through Beauty.
We show our God-inspired creative spirit when we make music—not just in the songs themselves, but in the many different creative ways we arrange and express the songs together. Whether it is the rhythmic vibrancy of sung worship led by the African Children’s Choir, or the pristine beauty of a chorale echoing within the ancient walls of a European cathedral, or the blended accents in the increasing number of international churches in cities around the world, we seek to create beauty because that’s how we’re designed.
And as we create, we communicate—just as God does through His creation:
When His Church sings together, voice upon voice like arms linked across a room, and indeed across all the gathering places of His followers around the globe, across history, we are doing what we were designed to enjoy—using our God-given voices to sing praises together to the One who gave us those voices. It expresses what unites us, and it reminds us of our interdependence.