We Sing a New Song

Transcript

If you will turn now to Psalm 96 for our sermon text this evening, Psalm 96, you will read the entire psalm. Psalm 96, "Oh, sing to the Lord a new song, sing to the Lord all the earth. Sing to the Lord, bless his name, tell of his salvation from day to day, declare his glory among the nations, his marvelous works among all the peoples. For great is the Lord and greatly to be praised. He is to be feared above all gods.

For all the gods of the peoples are worthless idols, but the Lord made the heavens. Splendor and majesty are before him, strength and beauty are in his sanctuary. Ascribe to the Lord, oh families of the peoples, ascribe to the Lord glory and strength, ascribe to the Lord the glory due his name, bring an offering and come into his courts, worship the Lord and the splendor of holiness, tremble before him all the earth. Say among the nations, the Lord reigns. Yes, the world is established.

It shall never be moved. He will judge the peoples with equity. Let the heavens be glad and let the earth rejoice. Let the sea roar and all that fills it. Let the field exalt and everything in it.

Then shall all the trees of the forest sing for joy before the Lord, for he comes. For he comes to judge the earth. He will judge the world in righteousness and the peoples in his faithfulness. This is the word of the Lord. Let's be to God, let's pray together.

Lord our God, as we bow before you this evening, we do indeed declare that your works are marvelous and you are worthy to be praised. Your name is to be feared above all gods because all the gods of the peoples are worthless idols. Help us, oh Lord, now as we come to this text and as we come specifically to the topic of singing. We praise you that we get to sing a new song as your redeemed people. Help us to understand what this means tonight and we pray this in Christ's name, amen.

You may be seated. Well, when Israel finally made it out of Egypt, imagine the horror and disbelief they felt when they saw Pharaoh's army coming up right behind them. Yet once again, God miraculously displayed his complete sovereignty and grace. Moses parted the Red Sea with his staff and Israel walked through on dry ground. But Pharaoh's army pursued them through the parted sea.

As every one of them walked safely on dry ground, the Lord unleashed his fury on the Egyptian army. And we read in Exodus 14 that the waters returned and covered the chariots and the horsemen of all the host of Pharaoh that had followed them into the sea, not one of them remained. But the people of Israel walked on dry ground through the sea, the waters being a wall to them on their right hand and on their left hand. Thus, the Lord saved Israel that day from the hand of the Egyptians and Israel saw the Egyptians dead on the seashore. Israel saw the great power that the Lord used against the Egyptians so the people feared the Lord and they believed in the Lord and in his servant, Moses.

No, I am not confused. I do not think this is a sermon on Exodus that I forgot and started preaching during the worship series. No, I remind you of this story because I want to show you something relevant to tonight's sermon topic. What was it that Israel did as soon as they finished crossing the Red Sea and they saw the great power of God on display? Before going into the Red Sea, Moses told the people, "Fear not, stand firm and see the salvation of the Lord, which he will work for you today.

For the Egyptians whom you see today, you shall never see again. The Lord will fight for you and you have only to be silent." Now they had seen it. Now they were filled with wonder, awe, and amazement at their sovereign God. So what was the only appropriate response? Well, they sang.

They sang praise to God. What follows in chapter 15 of Exodus is one of the most important songs in all of scripture, the so-called song of Moses. And this song will be so important that it's referenced all through the rest of salvation history and even, as we see in the book of Revelation, into eternity. Singing is one of the most powerful and important ways that we as His people respond to God. We've talked a lot about singing around here over the last several years and maybe you're even tired of hearing about it.

But here's the thing. If we are in Christ, if we have seen the great salvation of the Lord, then we can never tire of singing praises to Him. From Genesis to Revelation, the Bible is literally filled with God's people responding to Him through singing. And beyond that, as you've heard us say on numerous occasions, we are directly commanded in scripture more than 50 times to sing to the Lord and/or sing to one another. If God tells us to do something 50 times or more, do you think it's important?

It is. What's even greater is that not only does God command us to sing and show us examples, He actually gives us hundreds of ways. That is, He further explains, illustrates through the examples that He gives us in showing us how to do it. Indeed, right in the center of our Bibles, we have, as it were, a song book, the book of Psalms. So tonight, I want to hopefully help strengthen your resolve to sing to the Lord a new song.

And to do this, I want to really just give you two major points. I want to first provide you with four simple reasons for why we sing. And then this will be followed by a more practical application on what and how we should sing. So first and foundational, why do we sing? As we think about the reason we sing, we return again to Psalm 96 that we read at the beginning.

I want to provide you with four reasons that we must sing that we can see all right here in this one psalm, Psalm 96. First, we sing very simply because God commands us to sing. From the very beginning of this psalm, we have a sort of crescendoing three-fold command. Oh, sing to the Lord a new song. Sing to the Lord, blesses all the earth rather.

Sing to the Lord, bless His name. It's almost as if we can hear the psalm as getting more emphatic with each progressive command. What makes this psalm particularly wonderful is that it's a song about the joy of singing. And it begins with these repeated commands to sing. Again, this is an obvious point.

If God tells us to do something, even one time in Scripture, then we should obey His commands. But here's the thing. There are many times that we don't sing simply because we really just don't feel like it. But there's something uniquely profound about music and singing. Singing is not mystical or magical, but it is transformative.

Yet in our fallen state, we often find excuses for why we shouldn't or why we can't do something that God tells us to do. We even begin to excuse ourselves. I just don't feel like it today. I'm not a very good singer. What if all the people around me hear my terrible voice?

What will they think of me? Singing is for those who are more musically inclined, and that's not me. I'll pray, I'll listen to the sermon, I'll say amen even, but just don't ask me to sing. I'll just join my heart and my mind with everyone else as they sing, and I'll just listen. Or I really don't like this hymn, so I'm not going to sing it.

And on and on we go making excuses. But God has commanded us to sing to Him and also to sing to one another. So when we don't, when we refuse to sing, it can often be the sign of a serious heart condition. As Christians, it is our responsibility to sing. As we know so well, we read in Colossians 3, 16, and then also the parallel command in Ephesians 5, 18, we see this, "First let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns in spiritual songs with thankfulness in your hearts to God." And then the parallel passage in Ephesians, "And do not get drunk with wine, for that is debauchery, but be filled with the Spirit addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with your heart." So singing is not optional for Christians.

But as Christians, even though it's not optional, we should also never obey God's commands begrudgingly. We can never in this life, of course, obey perfectly or even from a completely pure heart. All of our obedience then should rather flow from faith and from hearts that are filled with thankfulness. And that's exactly what we see in the Ephesians and Colossians passages. In other words, we should think less about singing as a duty and more about singing as a delight and a privilege.

And that brings us to the second reason that we sing. Singing allows us to express our affections to God for both who He is and for what He has done. Part two, singing allows us to express our affections to God for who He is and for what He has done. In Psalm 96, we read, "Bless His name, declare His glory among the nations. For great is the Lord and greatly to be praised.

He is to be feared above all gods." And verse six, "Splendor and majesty are before Him. Strength and beauty are in His sanctuary. Each of these are reasons to sing based on God's character. That is on who God is. God's name is great.

He is great. He is glorious. He is the creator of all things. He is holy and righteous and just. He is filled with splendor and majesty, with strength and beauty." But of course, we cannot separate God's character, who He is, from His works, from what He has done.

So we also read that we are to declare His marvelous works among all the peoples. We are to know that He made the heavens. We are to remember that He is reigning now and that also He will reign for all eternity. He will judge the peoples with equity and we are to praise Him because He is the coming judge, or rather He's coming to judge all the earth in righteousness. But we also have another crescendoing effect in this psalm, not only in the first three commands to sing, but through the entire psalm itself.

There is a sort of building joy and praise in this psalm. Hopefully you heard it as we read it. And in that building of joy, the chief focus there is God's work. We get a clue in how the psalm begins. The opening statement again says, "Sing to the Lord a new psalm." This new psalm is an important concept all throughout Scripture.

And understanding what it means is foundational in giving us the greatest reason that we are to sing to the Lord. It's a concept that was repeated all throughout the Old Testament, especially throughout the psalms. What we saw in Moses' song of deliverance is an example of a new psalm. What we read about in Deborah and Berwick's song in Judges chapter 5 is another example. But this psalm, and others like it in the Psalter, gives us the full explanation for the new psalm.

And when we then turn to the New Testament, we particularly find examples of the new psalm in the book of Revelation. And there, that new psalm is sung in the consummation of God's eternal redemptive kingdom. What is the new psalm? No, this is not an exhortation to sing psalms relevant to our day. In fact, we're told explicitly in Ephesians 5, before we're given the command to address one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual psalms, we're told this, that we should make the best use of the time because the days are evil.

We're also told in Romans 12 too that we must not be conformed to this world or to this present age. And in Galatians 1.4, Paul reminds the church that Christ gave himself for our sins to deliver us from this present evil age. No, singing the new psalm transcends our time and our cultural moments, and it leads us into eternity. And that's exactly what we see in the crescendo of this psalm, Psalm 96. Singing a new psalm is a response to the redemptive work of God.

God redeemed Israel from slavery in Egypt, but that deliverance was pointing, as we've said often in our Exodus series, to a greater deliverance. And Israel never fully grasped that, we'll see that throughout the rest of the Old Testament. The Old Testament repeatedly emphasizes the need for deliverance from a greater and more substantial bondage than that of Pharaoh and Egypt. And that deliverance goes all the way back in time. It doesn't just go back to the promise to Abraham, it goes all the way back to the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve.

It's a promise to deliver all God's people from the slavery and the bondage of sin. The serpent deceived Adam and Eve, but a serpent crusher was promised, and he was coming. We know that he has now come, and we know that he has defeated sin on the cross. He has accomplished the work of redemption, as Jesus said, "It is finished." But that work of redemption is not yet complete. You're thinking, "Wait a second, what do you mean, Pastor Matt?" Well, it's not yet complete because Jesus hasn't just saved us from our sins so that we can go about doing whatever we want.

No, he saved us, as we read in Luke, so that we can be freed from our enemies to serve him, to worship him without fear. He has saved us so that we can be fully alive in him. And that fullness of life, joy, and pleasure, it won't be complete until Christ comes to judge the earth. And that is the crescendoing emphasis of Psalm 96. We sing a new song to the Lord because he has redeemed his people from the curse of the law and from the penalty of sin.

And he's also promised that we will walk with him uninhibited by the presence of sin. He will be our God, and we will be his people. So that is why we sing now. And that takes us now to the third reason for why we sing. That's this.

Singing plays a major role in our spiritual formation or our discipleship. When we sing Psalm 96, we're reminded that there are no gods but one, that God alone is creator and redeemer. And we remember that all the gods of the peoples are what? They are worthless idols. They are nothing.

We remember that he has accomplished our redemption and that he is coming again to judge the earth and equity and righteousness. But like we've said all throughout this series about corporate worship, there's even more here than simply remembering through recalling in our minds a sort of cognitive recognition. When we sing a new song to the Lord, we are actually embodying these realities in real and tangible ways. We are in essence picturing and imagining the Lord's return as if it is happening in real time, even as we sing. I think this is particularly vivid not only when we sing a psalm like Psalm 96, but when we sing a hymn like, "Lo, he comes with clouds descending." When we sing, we are reshaping our hearts' affections to believe truly that all the gods of the peoples are worthless idols and that God has, in fact, redeemed us and that he really is coming again.

And the poetic and musical forms of psalms and hymns not only lodge themselves and our memories, but they also shape our imaginations and our hearts' affections. In other words, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual psalms disciple our emotions to help us to know how to feel rightly toward God. But we don't simply do this on our own. There's a greater reason that we sing than simply isolated enjoyment. We have the great privilege of singing in the company of God's people, and that takes us to the fourth reason for why we sing.

It is a way that we experience and demonstrate the community that we enjoy as God's people. In our culture, we've largely lost the experience of what I like to think of as communal singing. What has historically been considered folk singing? Probably the best example that we have of this maybe that remains is singing happy birthday together at someone's party or singing take me out to the ballgame when we go to the baseball game. But even that has lost its value and lost its importance.

Singing in communal ways was a part of the fabric of most cultures throughout human history up until the last couple hundred years. Interestingly, we now live in a time and society where music is actually pervasive. It is everywhere, yet ironically as a society, we are largely musically illiterate. We are accustomed to music as something that is done for us. It's a consumer activity rather than something that we work together to make and to enjoy.

We hear professional studio recorded, polished albums that we can plug in our ears and put on our playlist on Amazon or iTunes or whatever your choice of service is. But unfortunately, this same mindset is so often carried over into the church, into Christ's church. When we gather on Sunday for worship and when we unite our hearts and our minds and our voices and singing around the Word of God, we are actually demonstrating the community that we enjoy as a people who have been reconciled to God and to one another through the gospel of Jesus Christ. Perhaps nothing that we do in worship better pictures that we are one in Christ than singing. Many people coming together in unison and harmony.

And this is what we read in Paul's wonderful benediction, this beautiful musical language that is on display there in Romans 15, 5 through 6. Here's what he says. "May the God of endurance and encouragement grant you to live in such harmony with one another in accord with Christ Jesus that together you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ." So as we sing together in community, we are embodying this reality that we are one in Christ but we're not a bunch of same people that look and sound and talk and act exactly the same ways. We are a diverse group of people and when we join together, it makes this beautiful harmony when we are operating in the unity that Christ has gifted to us. And so singing helps us in real time to experience that reality.

And singing is not only a way for us to experience the community we enjoy. It's also an essential part of our discipleship. Colossians 3 and Ephesians 5 again make it clear that through singing psalms, hymns and spiritual songs to one another, we have an essential way that the church builds itself up in love. In other words, through singing, and I've said this before, we are responsible for one another's spiritual formation. We are responsible for one another's spiritual formation but it gets even better than that.

As we said in this worship series, when we come together to worship, Jesus is in our midst spiritually. And we know that we are collectively the body of Christ. We come to church, to the church, gathered together to experience the benefits of grace in Christ Jesus. And when we worship by faith in spirit and truth, Jesus really is in our midst. Just stop and think about that again for a moment and think about how profound that truth really is.

So that means that when we sing together in community, that Jesus himself actually is in our midst doing what? Singing. In a way, we hear Christ's voice among our own as we join together. And this is exactly the sentiment of what we read in Hebrews chapter 2 verses 11 through 12. Jesus says, "For he who sanctifies and those who are sanctified all have one source.

That is why he is not ashamed to call them brothers, saying, 'I will tell of your name to my brothers. In the midst of the congregation, I will sing your praise.'" Jesus sings in our midst when we sing by faith in community to one another and to the Lord. Knowing this reality makes it all the more urgent and important that we give every effort to sing to one another when we come together for worship, and we must do this with all our hearts. So I've given you four reasons for why we should sing. Now I want to take the rest of the time to make some practical application for you to be confident in what you are singing, and then give you ways to prepare and improve your singing.

First, what should we sing? There are some debates about what exactly constitutes hymns and spiritual songs in Ephesians 5 and Colossians 3. Well, what there's no debate about is psalms. We all know what psalms are, and when we're commanded to sing psalms, guess what it means? We should sing the psalms, that's right.

As we've argued all through the series, biblical worship is word-centered worship, and our services should be governed by the authority and the sufficiency of God's word, so that means that our singing should be always word-centered, and there's no better way to ensure that our singing is word-centered than to sing the actual word of God. So the psalms are crucial for our spiritual formation. The gamut of human emotion is expressed in the psalter, but here's the thing. The psalter not only shows us the range of human emotion. It also shows us how to rightly feel and how to rightly express those emotions.

When we are weighed down by the heaviness of sin, we can go to the psalter to learn how to confess. When we feel the sorrow of grief, we learn how to lament. When we need to be reminded to give thanks to the Lord, which we always need to be reminded to do, we turn to the psalter, which gives voice to our thanksgiving. When we see God's enemies seeming to prevail, we turn to the psalter, and particularly in precatory psalms, to be reminded that the Lord will avenge, and on and on we could go. The psalter doesn't just help us to express what's already in our hearts.

Rather, it teaches us how and what and when we should feel it. The psalter is one of the chief means of grace that the Lord uses to sanctify our emotions. But this doesn't just mean that we should only sing the psalms. We believe hymns in spiritual songs include things other than just the psalms. For we have many wonderful hymns that do the very same thing.

They are biblically faithful responses to the Word of God. But in a real sense, these great and timeless hymns, they actually take their cues from the psalms themselves. Because the psalms are the foundational model for all of our Christian worship. So this brings us to an important question. How do we evaluate what we should sing outside the psalter?

We do tend to have a flawed way of thinking about singing in worship as part of our human nature. We think that what we sing should be based on our own personal preferences or opinions. That it's just a matter of taste. We should remember that singing is essential to our spiritual formation and discipleship. And we should remember that singing is one of the most important ways, again, that our affections are sanctified.

With that in mind, then we know that what we sing in worship should be held in really the highest regard. So utmost care must be taken in choosing what we sing and how we sing it. There's a well-known quote you probably heard before that goes like this. "Let me write the songs of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws." We can apply that to Christ's church. Music and singing are powerful.

The songs that we sing lodge themselves in our hearts and minds so that we actually carry them with us as we go. You've all experienced this in your own lives. You know the way that hymns and psalms that you sing stick in your memory, and they go with you. And this is true no matter what songs we sing. So it's all the more important when we consider the songs of our responses to God in worship that we are careful in how we choose them.

So with that in mind, I want to talk about three areas that we must consider. Just briefly, I could have a sermon or a discussion on each one of these, but we'll be very brief here. Three areas that we consider when we evaluate songs for worship. First, and most obviously, we must ask this question. Is it true and theologically accurate?

This is the first level we evaluate the text, and that is just simply the doctrinal content. If a hymn does not accurately reflect and portray God's Word, then guess what? We should never sing it. It's very simple. Some of the greatest ways that heretics throughout church history spread their heresy is, you guessed it, through hymn writing and hymn singing.

So we must take very great care. Those heretics knew the power of singing and the power of music to shape belief, to shape belief. But there's another way we must evaluate texts besides just the doctrinal content, and that is at the level of poetic communication. This is where we might get a little more fuzzy. Poetic speech, first of all, is essential in shaping our affections and our imaginations.

Poetic communication is intentionally not like the speech that we use in everyday language. That is on purpose. Any of you who even studied poetry a little bit understand that it's not supposed to be like we speak. If you read Shakespeare thinking that's how you're supposed to speak, then you'll be very confused. It's not how we speak on a regular basis.

It does something different. It is meant to be heightened speech. Psalm 96.6 says, "Splendor and majesty are before God; strength and beauty are in his sanctuary." And verse 9 calls the families of the earth to worship the Lord and the splendor of holiness. Poetic language aids us in doing just that. Psalm 96 itself, just like all the other psalms, demonstrates this heightened poetic beauty in a simple, understandable way.

So we find all kinds of poetic devices that help shape our affections toward right responses to God. Repetition, rhyme scheme, poetic meter, metaphor, personification, and on and on the list could go. All of these things aid us in rightly thinking about who God is and, most importantly, what he is like. When used rightly, they teach us to respond with reverence and awe before our holy and glorious King. And that leads us then to a third and final way that we must evaluate hymns for singing, and that is in the music that accompanies the words we sing.

The same things, the same criteria that we used about poetic communication, are true about music. Many people believe wrongly that music itself, apart from texts, is neutral, that it doesn't have any meaning. They believe it doesn't really matter how we sing as long as the words are good. However, we have to understand that music itself is a language. And as a language, that means it has certain modes of communication.

It is a form of communication. And all the principles of communication found in Scripture, then, must be applied as we evaluate music itself. But in order for us to do that, we must know something about music as a language and how music actually communicates. Ephesians 4.29 says, "Let no corrupting talk or communication come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up as fits the occasion that it may give grace to those who hear." We can easily apply these words to the ways that we speak, but we should also apply them to music. Again, music is a form of communication.

It has rules and logic just like other forms of communication. But here's the thing that's unique about music and how it communicates. One of the chief ways that music communicates is through imitating emotion, emotional expression. And it is often an often present reality that music forms that are used in worship services all around the world today actually contradict the textual meaning for the hymns that they accompany. The emotional meaning expressed in music must fit the words that it accompanies.

Let me say that again. The emotional meaning expressed in music must fit the words that that music accompanies. So we must look again to biblical principles about worship and communication that we find in scripture and then apply them directly to music. For example, one of the verses we brought up over and over again in this series is Hebrews 12.29. "Therefore, let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom," or this is verse 28 rather, "let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, and thus let us offer to God acceptable worship with reverence and awe." How does the music that we use in singing evoke and represent reverence and awe?

And then Philippians 4.8 is another crucial passage. Paul says, "They are finally brothers. Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things." We must ask if the music itself that accompanies our singing fits this criteria. So often when we think about music and singing, we ask the question, "What's wrong with it?" But a better question that we should be asking ourselves, especially as it comes to what we sing in worship, is what's right with it, or what's right about it. What we sing in worship should be held in highest regard because of its crucial role in our spiritual formation and discipleship.

In an earlier sermon, I argued that we become like what we worship. This is a principle that we see all throughout scripture. But with that in mind, we can apply that same principle to singing as a specific element in worship. We become like what we sing. Let's take that principle to heart and let it drive the care with which we consider what we sing in worship.

Finally, how to prepare for and improve your singing. I've given you the foundation for why, and I've provided you basic criteria for what. Now, how to prepare and improve your singing. The first area is in how you prepare for singing in worship in a general sense. That's the first area I want to address.

We often say that it's critical to grasp that what we do and sing in worship is distinct and highly protected compared to what we do in the rest of our lives. But at the same time, we need to understand this principle. How we spend the rest of our lives will greatly affect the way that we prepare for and engage in worship. This is very obvious if we think about it. If you go away from this service and you don't read your Bible or pray at all throughout the week, you're not really doing a very good job preparing yourself for the next Lord's Day.

Jesus and singing are not just shaping our affections in worship. What we listen to the other six days of the week is also shaping our affections. This doesn't mean that you should only listen to Psalms and hymns in your spare time. That's not what I'm saying. But it does mean that your musical choices will always affect you and your expectations for worship.

The Philippians 4-8 principle should govern everything that we do in our lives, not just what we do in worship. Next, how we actually prepare for and engage in singing and worship. Many of you have taken great advantage of the Sing Your Part or the Classic Hymns that Pastor Scott at ClassicHymns.org, that app that he has set up. You've used this to help you, it gives you musical accompaniments with piano, it gives you vocal parts that you can move around so you can actually learn to sing harmony. It gives you the words, it gives you the hymn sheets.

It's a wonderful and effective tool. It's great to use in your family worship. It's great to use in your personal devotion time. So I want to commend those of you who have been using it, and I think you can testify, and hopefully you have been and you will to others who maybe aren't yet committed to it, how wonderful of a tool both of those things are. But they help us tremendously as we seek to improve our ability to sing.

We must practice singing. Singing is something that every Christian is, again, commanded to do. That means every Christian, no matter what your background is, is commanded to be a musician, to sing. Therefore, we must think of singing not just as a special talent that an elite few have, but rather as a skill that we must all work to improve just like any other skill. So we need to give ourselves to practicing singing.

But another way we can help prepare is to also use hymns devotionally. And I know that's what you're doing if you're doing what I just said in family worship, but I mean in a more specific and a different kind of way using hymns devotionally. Every time, I mean, excuse me, every family rather should have a hymnal. If you don't have a hymnal in your family, in your home, please come see me because we have hymnals that we got for every family in the church to have one. So if you didn't get one when we gave them out last year, we have more available and you can have one.

We'll give it to you. Okay. We want every family to have at least one copy of our Psalter hymnal in their home to use on a regular basis and family worship and personal devotion. I've heard from some of you that you don't always know the Psalms or the hymns that we sing, but we work very hard to try to help you to prepare to sing with understanding. We provide worship guides before the service every week.

We give you the list of hymns and Psalms that we're going to be singing and we encourage you to learn the hymns and Psalms that way. We also learn hymns and Psalms every Wednesday night so that we can grow in our ability to sing those things and know them well. But one of the most important ways that you can prepare to sing to the Lord a new song is by really knowing the Psalms and the hymns that we sing. What I mean is you carefully learn them and you internalize them. If you find yourself sitting in a service and you think, "I really don't know what I'm singing," then that should be a clue to you.

Not that there's something wrong with the Psalm or the hymn, but that you should go and spend more time learning that. Everything we're choosing here is chosen with very careful criteria because we believe it is critical for our spiritual formation. So we encourage you to go and learn these, and one of the best ways you can do this is to start out by actually not trying to sing it right away, but taking the text apart by itself and reading, and even reading aloud that text, thinking about the words, thinking about the doctrinal content, thinking about the poetic communication that's being used. And then once you feel like you have a good grasp on the text, now you add in the music and you learn to start singing with the music. So this is something I exhort you and encourage you all to do.

I do this regularly in my own devotional time, and I would encourage you to do the same. I believe you will see great benefits if you employ it. So in the end, I want to say this, that singing is a great joy and privilege. We should never view singing or any other part of worship as a chore. We should never sing thoughtlessly.

We should never sing begrudgingly. And most of all, as Christians, we should never refuse to sing. There's a wonderful Isaac Watts hymn, and the second stanza says this, "Let those refused to sing who never knew our God, but children of the heavenly King may speak or sing their joys abroad." That is the privilege that we have. For those who are in Christ, singing is a joyful act of worship. It is a privilege and delight to sing to the Lord a new song.

He has redeemed us from the curse of the law and the penalty of sin. He has rescued us from the domain of darkness, and he is preparing a place for us to go on singing the new song with him for all eternity. There he will be our God, and we will be his people, and we finally will be freed from the presence of sin. But until that day comes, let us joyfully sing to the Lord a new song as we wait with eager expectation. Let's pray together.

O Lord our God, as we consider these truths, we are humbled, we are reminded once again of the great joy and privilege it is to be called as your people out of darkness and into your marvelous light, so that we might proclaim your excellencies in one of the most joyful and fruitful ways that we can do that is through the gift of singing that you have given us. Let us all, with great humility, but also with great fervor, know the joy that singing is that is a gift from you, and help us to delight ourselves more and more every day as we long to see you face to face, help us too, with great joy and gladness, sing to the Lord a new song, and we pray these things in his name, amen.