Made to Worship: Paul Johnson, Music Assistant
Just as in our last newsletter I borrowed my title "Mission's Flame" from a worship song, so this time around I'd like to explore the idea of our being "Made to Worship." I think that for most people, musician or not, Christian or not, music is a very powerful thing. I'd have a hard time thinking of any teenager who wasn't adamant about his or her music of choice. Music has been at the center of much social change in America, especially in the 20th Century. I think that music has this power for a reason. Whether or not we realize it individually, we were all made to worship.
What is the most common subject of pop music? It seems that by far the most common theme of popular music is love. This could also be described as adoration, or ascribing worth to someone. That's just one step away from worship. All that is lacking is to unite that latent longing for loving relationship with its ultimate object: God.
A few years ago, my wife Libby and I experienced just how far that step from music to worship is. We were at the Winnipeg Folk Festival and one of the bands performing was playing Southern charismatic gospel music. Not only did they sing old songs about Jesus, they also encouraged the crowd to do things like raise their hands and mimic the experience of worship. In outward appearance it looked like worship, but Libby and I both had the impression that the whole thing felt "dead." The crowd sang the right words and had the right motions, but were generally not intending to praise God. They honored God with their lips, but their hearts were far from him. There seemed to be something almost grotesque to us in this pantomime of worship.
The idea of music having a power that comes from its original God-directed purpose even when we find it divorced from worship has been very important to me personally. At the time when I became a Christian late in high school I was an accomplished musician, at least by the standards of my small hometown. Before I met Jesus, music was probably the most important thing in my life and perhaps the closest thing I had to a god. Just as peoples of the ancient world had to abandon anything remotely related to idolatry when becoming Christian, there was a period of time after my conversion that I didn't do much worship music because of its connection to my former idol. Realizing the true nature and ultimate purpose of music helped me to redeem music in my life and gave me an understanding of why it is so easy to idolize and how to be free from that idolatry.
Just to be clear, I'd like to say that I'm not against secular music. I listen to a wide variety of music myself, all of it holding at least some shadow or remnant of music's original purpose: to glorify and ascribe worth to God. Music was made for worship, and we were made to worship. "Oh come, let us sing to the LORD! Let us shout joyfully to the rock of our salvation."
