A Church that Sings

Ephesians 5:18-19

Envision a group of people who gather once a week or more and come from all walks of life. White collar/blue collar, men/women, wealthy/working class/lower class, all kinds of cultures, it makes no difference. They drop their façade and talk to each other, welcoming each other with open arms. They laugh, listen, share their sorrows, talk some more, and even sing sometimes. They don’t watch the clock very well, but when they eventually go home, they look forward to coming back again soon to do it all over again next week.

What sort of group is this and where do they gather? Perhaps you think I’m describing a church. This wouldn’t be a wrong answer, but neither would be a pub since there’s a sense in which both these scenarios have common features. Both are venues for people from all walks of life to gather on a regular basis, and they share thoughts and feelings openly, at least in theory.

Yet, there’s a major difference between them. One relies on the influence of intoxicating drinks and the other depends on the Holy Spirit. One is motivated by fleshly impulses and the other is motivated by godly desires. One gathers around the pursuit of temporal pleasures and the other around shared spiritual values

Believers should gather together as a church.

First, Paul is speaking here about walking in a wise, skillful way, living with our eyes wide open to God’s truth, making good decisions that use our time well. What he describes here is the first way that he mentions for using our time in a way that pleases the Lord.

Second, he refers to how nonbelievers who are living in moral darkness make choices, wasting time and acting foolishly. He contrasts their behavior with how we as believers should make choices that are motivated by Christ, and which make good use of our time.

Third, he speaks to believers in a corporate, group sense. He not only encourages u to gather together, but he tells us what should do when we gather together.

This is the theme of the entire letter of Ephesians – the glory of God through the church. Chapter 4 shows us how the church is like many different body parts assembled working together as one healthy body.

He speaks to the church with collective plurals; so, when you see ‘you,’ think of the Southern word ya’ll for “you all.”

Furthermore, he twice uses the reciprocal pronoun ἀλλήλων, which means “one another” or “each other.”

So, he is describing how we should behave when we gather together as a church.

So, we see that in Eph 5:18-21, Paul explains how gathering together as a church is a wise and good use of time that pleases the Lord – it’s what God expects us to do in a world where we so easily waste days doing evil and useless things.

Gathering together as a church is far more important than we realize. It’s not just something we do when it’s convenient. It’s what we do to be wise, to use our time in a spiritually, eternally skillful way to please our Lord. If we understood and believed this more deeply, we’d participate with our church more regularly and wholeheartedly.

Let’s also notice that Paul refers to what unsaved people do together – they drink lots of alcohol. It’s how they socialize. It’s what they do when they hang out together. When they finish the work week, they gather at bars and drink. They drink at parties, reunions, weddings, ballgames, at every chance they get when they gather together. They count on drinking to make their gatherings meaningful and enjoyable. What’s more, they do what followers of Christ should never do – they drink until they’re drunk.

As God’s children, the church, not the bar, should be the center of our social lives. Nonbelievers hang out at the pub (or choose another preferred place to hang out), but believers hang out with their church. Fools hang out with drinking buddies; wise people hang out with the members of their church family. In fact, nonbelievers who knew us before we came to Christ will think it’s strange that we don’t go out partying with them anymore (1 Pet 4:2-4).

Paul is also pushing back at the ways drunkenness permeated pagan religious practices. For instance, the worship of the god Dionysus (or Bacchus, the god of wine) was known for prolific drunkenness. Once intoxicated, worshipers would engage in all sorts of degrading, immoral behavior, dancing and singing in wild revelry. Some even believed that increased drunkenness brought greater spiritual enlightenment, though it exposed them to ecstatic delusions and demonic intrusion instead.

Even today, alcohol features prominently in gatherings of other religions, from Catholicism to Buddhism. Many of the Ephesian believers had been saved from such a background, so Paul warned that intoxication (or getting drunk) was not the Lord’s will for the church. With this backdrop, we can make two important observations before moving on:

First, the church is our new place of belonging, acceptance, confession, and open conversation. This idea of “I don’t need to go to church, I can be a Christian at home,” is severely shortsighted for we can’t live a healthy, obedient, God-glorifying life without regularly attending, worshipping, fellowshipping, and serving together as a church. If we attempt to do so, we’ll live as amputated body parts and orphaned children.

Second, church gatherings should have a distinctly different feel than a night at the pub. This difference is more profound than a change of venue or location. It has to do with the underlying basis for the gathering in the first place. When nonbelievers gather, they rely on in the influence of impersonal, controlling substances like alcohol, drugs, and so on to relax their minds and get them talking. As believers, we rely on the divine person of the Holy Spirit. We should be aware of his presence and submit to his influence with a clear, and Scripture-saturated mind.

When we drink too much alcohol, it controls our minds.

Technically speaking, Paul is not banning all consumption of alcohol here. If he were, then he would be contradicting himself what he would later tell Timothy, who was a pastor of this very church. In 1 Tim 5:23, he told him to “drink a little wine” to help improve some stomach ailments and other chronic health issues that he suffered from. So, the issue here is not whether or not alcohol is inherently wrong. The issue is drinking too much.

Scientific studies show how alcohol passes into our brain cells. If we drink too much, this dynamic eventually leads to slurred speech, poor decisions, delayed reflexes, decreased brain activity, mindless talk, reduced memory, blurry vision, confusion, dehydration, and more. Not to mention, the morning afterwards becomes much more difficult.

Debauchery (dissipation) describes behavior that’s wasteful and wicked – the reckless, immoral behavior of people who are drunk. It also describes how drunk people waste time and money. They stay out later than they planned, spend more money than they intended, do things that are worse than they realized at the moment of their drunken state.

This wasteful, wicked living is a normal part of how nonbelievers socialize, and even how they worship in some religions. Yet Paul is clear that when we gather as believers for fellowship and worship, drunkenness and its bad effects should have no part in what we do. We should remain in full control of our minds, walking in the light with our eyes wide open and our hearts in full submission to the Jesus Christ our Lord.

We should be filled with the Spirit instead of being drunk with wine.

Contrary to some false and popular teachings, being “filled with the Spirit” is not an ecstatic experience like a “spiritual high,” or something like that. It does not involve rolling on the floor, babbling in a strange language, crying like a baby, or having a cold shiver go through your spine. These kinds of experience have more in common with being drunk than being filled with the Spirit.

To understand what it means to be filled with the Spirit, we must remind ourselves that the Holy Spirit is a divine person, the third person of the Godhead. He is God, not just a force from God. So, unlike nonbelievers who submit to a lifeless, controlling substance like alcohol, we submit to a perfect, personal being who is God himself.

We have already learned some things about the Holy Spirit in this letter. He seals us permanently and indwells us personally until the day we enter God’s eternal kingdom (Eph 1:13). Also, we may grieve him (Eph 4:30). The Holy Spirit has divine and personal feelings, so when we say or do things contrary to God’s holy, righteous nature, the Holy Spirit experiences sorrow, grief, and distress – he winces, you might say.

To “be filled with the Spirit” is to acknowledge that the Spirit is God, that he is a personal God, that he is present within and among us as followers of Christ, and then to yield to his influence in our lives. To “be filled” is a passive idea, something we allow to happen to us, not something we do to ourselves.

So, the Spirit fills us as we yield ourselves to him – and he fills us as a group of believers who have gathered together. The emphasis here is not on individuals being filled (like a cup being filled with water), but rather as a group of gathered believers being filled (like the entire kitchen being filled with water). The focus here is on a shared experience in which we gather together to worship God in mutual dependence upon the Holy Spirit.

This should be more than a communal, shared experience, it should also be a continual one. “Be filled” (present tense, linear) indicates an ongoing activity, not a one-time event. So, this is not something we hope happens to us one time. It’s not a special experience we hope will happen, as when lighting strikes a barn or an ecstatic feeling overtakes our body. We should experience it (or allow it to happen) every time we gather for worship and fellowship. It should happen every Sunday (or Wednesday, etc.) we gather as a church. It should be our regular experience as a church, not occasional or rare.

Paul gives three results of being filled with the Spirit.

Here are three things that should occur when we gather together and submit to the Holy Spirit as a church: we should (1) sing, (2) say thank you, and (3) submit to one another. In a future sermon, we’ll focus on what it means to “submit to one another” as members of the church, but for now we’ll focus on what it means to sing.

We should all sing to one another.

What is this singing like? The word speaking shows that we sing with our lips in a verbal, audible way. This means we should be able to both see and hear each other singing. This is why we sing when we gather together as a church and also why we keep the lights on.

I know this seems simple and rather obvious, but it’s easy to misunderstand and miss the mark here. When we gather together for a worship service as a church, we don’t gather to be entertained – or rather to have someone sing to us as we quietly, passively listen. We gather together to sing. In this sense, the entire church should be like a choir.

We should all sing – every one of us, not because we’ve been gifted to sing but because we’ve been gifted salvation. “Speaking to one another” through song is what the Holy Spirit enables all of us to do, expressing the truth about God and the glory of the gospel to one another in a musical way. Such singing is not a privilege reserved only for those who are talented musicians – it is the opportunity and obligation of every member.

About congregational singing, Keith and Kristyn Getty say this: “ Don’t sing primarily because you love singing, or keep quiet because you do not. Sing because you love who made you, and formed you, and enables you to sing.”

If you are a follower of Christ and you can speak, then you are not excluded. Unless you are physically unable to sing, you not only may sing but you must sing. To refuse to sing indicates that you are not meditating upon biblical truth, in awe of God, and savoring the gospel. Of course, it’s possible for a person to sing for any number of other reasons and not all singing is genuinely pleasing to God, but those who are inspired by these things are eager to sing.

We should be careful not to view congregational singing as a way to pass time, a time for “soak in” the singing of more talented people, or some kind of “filler” and “prelude” to the preaching. We should avoid hanging out in the lobby, scrolling through our feeds on our phone, or carrying on disconnected conversations with the person sitting next to us when we our church is singing. We should participate in the congregational singing as attentively and faithfully as we can because we take this form of worshiping God seriously.

Do you regularly submit to the Holy Spirit by gathering together with your church to sing?

We should sing songs with understandable lyrics.

“Speaking to one another” also means that we sing words – that our songs have lyrics. I know this sounds rather obvious but let me suggest that our music as a church should be predominantly vocal. Our singing should focus on words that exalt and explain God’s truth rather than sounds that merely achieve a certain mood.

We know that instruments are important in worship because many of the psalms from Scripture give clear instructions to use instruments, and the word “making melody” used in this passage also refer to plucking strings and using instrumental accompaniment. Details like this help us avoid the mistaken but well-meaning conclusion that churches should not use instruments in congregational singing.

Yet instrumental worship alone (without lyrics of any kind) has limited value because it doesn’t express any biblical truth and unless paired with and supporting biblical lyrics.

When we worship together as a church, we should focus on the words by singing the words and thinking carefully and thoughtfully about them. This is why we have chosen to place the song lyrics on the overhead screens in a high-contrast format, so we can focus on the lyrics clearly without distraction.

This is also why, when we do feature an instrumental song in worship, we try to provide the lyrics for the song on the screen as well because we need the music to speak to us with words because it is the words which edify and encourage our faith in God.

This is also why we should endeavor to sing to one another in such a way that we can actually think about the words and meditate on them well enough to understand. For this reason, we should be careful not to sing songs too quickly, especially those which feature dense theological lyrics and do not have a chorus.

One goal of good worship music is to help the songs we sing get “stuck inside our heads.” Both in the OT and NT, music was a crucial method for God’s people to remember God’s words and God’s truth since they had no printed books or ways to write down what they heard or learned at church.

It’s also helpful to realize that a chorus which repeats after each verse of a song helps us think about the words we sing. Songs which are choruses that we repeat, and which repeat various phrases, etc. are also valuable in this regard. OT psalms often use this technique to help emphasize and memorize important truths about God, so we should be careful to avoid criticizing this method today.

I’ve heard people criticize repetition in worship songs using Christ’s words from the Sermon on the Mount to do so, which say, “when you pray, do not use vain repetitions as the heathen do” (Matt 6:7). But the problem Christ was teaching against was not repeating phrases but repeating phrases vainly or for wrong and mistaken reasons. The problem was not their method but their motive: “for they thing that they will be heard for their many words.” They thought that God (or their gods) would take them more seriously because they kept repeating certain phrases and mantras over and over again.

But repeating biblical phrases and Christ-centered truths is definitely appropriate because sometimes it takes us a while to actually think about and be impacted by the truths we sing. I’d rather sing one phrase of biblical truth fifty times and be truly understand what I’m singing than sing fifty words one time through in a dense theological song without truly being impacted by what I’ve sung.

In fact, repeating phrases and truths and statements is no more wrong than praying out loud because Christ also taught in that same Sermon on the Mount that we should not pray out loud if we are doing so to be seen of men. Yet we certainly agree that we should pray out loud – just with the right motive of speaking genuinely and humbly to God.

Have you ever had a conversation with someone who talked too fast or sat in a class with a teacher who gave important information too quickly? We should avoid doing this when we sing to one another as a church.

George Bernard Shaw, an influential playwright, said this about communication: “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has actually taken place.” I’d kindly suggest that we may be far too content to march through songs as a church without truly understanding or recognizing the truth of which we are sing. As we sing, we should sing so that communication actually occurs not merely that singing happens.

The words singing and making melody refer to religious songs with a God-focused, worship-focused quality. This means that these songs are not the kind of music focused on artistic, cultural, or individualistic expression, nor are they focused on entertainment. They are focused on ordinary, simple, straightforward, everyday singing from a heart that loves and a life that serves God.

Paul goes on to list out three types of songs which are appropriate for congregational worship: psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs. We’ll focus on these different types and styles of songs in our next sermon in this Congregational Worship series, which will be called “The Beauty of Variety in Music.” But for now, we’ll look at one more phrase – “singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord.”

We should sing from our heart to the Lord.

This phrase “in your heart” reminds us that God is less interested in the professional musicality of our songs than he is in genuineness of them from our hearts. Whether we’re only mouthing words or providing a top-tier performance, neither reveals wholehearted worship. “From the heart” means the words, sounds, and expressions that we sing to one another truly reflect our innermost beliefs, thoughts, and feelings towards God.

“Making melody in your heart” refers to the genuineness of our songs. Just because we sing together as a church doesn’t mean we’re being filled with the Spirit. After all, it’s possible to mouth the words and go through the motions! Yet, God doesn’t want ritual singing, he wants genuine praise.

“Spirit filled” congregational singing happens when we sing from the overflow of our hearts, when what we’re singing on the outside really matters to us on the inside. Spirit-filled singing tunes in to the words of our songs with laser-like focus, treasures their meaning, and responds in heartfelt worship.

“To the Lord” reminds us that though we are singing to one another, we are also singing to the Lord. In other words, our singing should reveal that we actually believe that God is present among us and that we are indeed directing our songs towards him.

“To the Lord” reminds us that when we sing together as a church, we don’t sing for our personal enjoyment, nor should we sing mindlessly for the sheer experience of doing so. We have a twofold audience, even in congregational singing. We sing to one another, as I’ve already mentioned – that’s our visible, horizontal audience. Yet most importantly, we sing to the Lord – that’s our invisible, vertical audience.

For us, congregational singing should be just as though we are responding to the Shekinah glory of God filling the OT Temple or even more, to the awesome presence of God filling the heavenly Temple that’s above where the angels sing “holy, holy, holy.” When we sing together, we should sing with an acute awareness that God is there, listening to our songs and receiving our worship.

Again, Keith and Kristyn Getty say this: “Singing is one of the greatest ways we have to ‘complete the enjoyment’ of all that the Lord has done for us and even more for who he is.”

As churches, we can worry too much about whether a song leader or worship team is the best way to guide a church in worship and I’ll tell you that from my own experience, I’ve seen both work well and I’ve also seen both work poorly. At Brookdale, we have typically used a single leader and this approach has some benefits.

However, we now use a worship team for the majority of our congregational singing and a key reason for doing so is not because it is a more “right” way to sing, but a worship team does seem to diffuse the spotlight away from any one particular person since it involves multiple people – men and ladies, young and old – who encourage us all to sing.

In this way, a worship team reminds us that congregational singing is supposed to be a corporate expression of praise to God and not an individualistic one. This is why we want to encourage lyrics and singing as the primary focus rather than instrumentation. Whatever instruments we use should supplement and support our singing as a congregation.

We should treasure the opportunities we have to sing together.

In conclusion, I want to remind us all to treasure the opportunities we have to sing together as a church. May we deeply value coming together as a church, esp. on Sundays, not only to hear the teaching and preaching of God’s Word but to sing!

And when we do gather, let us treasure singing together, singing to one another, and singing to the Lord. May we truly think about and be impacted by the words that we sing and by the way that we sing from our hearts reveal that God is truly among us and has totally transformed our lives.

“Every time you sing, you are expressing something about what kind of a church you want to be, and what kind of church member you are going to be” (Keith and Kristyn Getty).