Maturity
Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already arrived at my goal, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus. All of us, then, who are mature should take such a view of things. (Philippians 3:12-15, TNIV)
I’ve been carrying on with Mike Cain’s talks on Philippians that I’ve written about before, and something struck me from his second one that hadn’t before. Paul is writing as one of the spiritual heavyweights of his day – one of Christ’s apostles, an authoritative teacher. If anyone was to be considered mature in the faith, it would be Paul. From the passage above, what does he say characterises such Christian maturity?
I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind, and straining toward what is ahead, I press on…
We don’t mature as Christians and then plateau. There’s no point in the Christian life where we think “aah, we’ve made it!” this side of the new creation. Christian maturity is shown by an attitude that says “we’re not there yet”. We always keep growing; we are continually striving towards our goal. Christian maturity isn’t a passive state we reach – not the maturity we obtain in this life, anyway. True maturity in this life is shown by striving for… what? What is the goal Paul is striving towards? It’s in the verses just beforehand.
I want to know Christ – yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, attaining to the resurrection from the dead. (Philippians 3:10-11, TNIV)
What he’s striving for is to know Christ. This is what Christian maturity looks like in this life: a desire to know more of Christ. We shouldn’t be stagnant in our desire to know him better; in fact, if we think we’ve arrived in the Christian life, that only goes to show we’ve missed the point of the Christian life. We are saved for a relationship with the God who made us, and if we stop building our relationship with him, we’ve missed the point of our salvation.
Paul wants to know Christ. It’s the one thing he does – pressing on to know him (3:8), gain him (3:8), and be found in him (3:9). If I ask myself “how much does this describe me?” the answer is “worryingly little”. I find it very easy to settle into a rut and go through the motions. I can very easily think of myself as mature, because I know more about God, about the Bible, about theology than other people. If I’m not wanting to know God more and more, and not just about him, then I’m showing that I’m not mature. I need to press on to know Christ more. He died so that I could know him; knowing him is what we were made for.
Let us strive to know the Lord. His appearance is as sure as the dawn. He will come to us like the rain, like the spring showers that water the land. (Hosea 6:3, HCSB)
Matthew @ 18:52, March 27, 2008 to Discussions | Permalink | Comments (0)
Reading the manual
Thought it was probably time for something slightly less serious. I’ve recently been reading my way through the manual for Logic Pro. Yes, this doesn’t sound like the most interesting thing to be doing, or indeed the best way to learn how to use the program. The idea behind it is that this way I get to figure out exactly what Logic can do (as a newcomer to the program, I don’t know the extent of its features), so that when I’m using it and want to figure out how to do it, I know it’s possible and even where to look for help. So far, it’s been very useful. Occasionally, though, you get little comic interludes in the text which help lighten things up.
In the section on time-stretching:
You can make an audio region play at half-speed by stretching it to twice the original
length, or at double-speed by shortening it to half the original length. Great for Darth
Vader or Munchkin impressions.
In the project management chapter:
If you have made some really serious blunders (as unlikely as that may be), or you
decide that in the 15 minutes since you last saved, your creative efforts have resulted in
material too unpleasant to describe politely, you may find the Revert to Saved
function very helpful.
Talking of the problems with having only one MIDI output:
Each MIDI tone generator will play the incoming data with the sound assigned to channel 1, which may be:
- Bagpipes on module 1
- A drumkit on module 2
- A helicopter effect on module 3 and so on
While this would be colorful, it would hardly be musical, unless your tastes lean
towards the avante-garde.
Almost as good as the stuff you get reading a dictionary, and it takes a lot less time. (Third of the way through now!)
(Okay, maybe I’ve just got a music tech geek’s sense of humour…)
Matthew @ 22:45, March 25, 2008 to Miscellaneous | Permalink | Comments (0)
Music and emotions
…singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God (Colossians 3:16).
The duty of singing praises to God seems to be appointed wholly to excite and express religious affections. No other reason can be assigned why we should express ourselves to God in verse, rather than in prose, and do it with music but only, that such is our nature and frame, that these things have a tendency to move our affections. (Jonathan Edwards, The Religious Affections.)
In some parts of the church, people can give the impression that emotions while singing are bad. Given the hyper-emotionalism of some sections of the church, where music takes over completely from the words and gives a buzz completely separate from any spiritual convictions, one can perhaps sympathise with putting forward this view. To do so, however, is to go too far to the other extreme and to become unbiblical in another way. The Bible says we should emotionally respond to singing. Singing should be an emotional experience.
Think about it this way. When something good happens to us, we respond emotionally. When I got my A level results, I thought that meant I hadn’t got into Bristol, so when I checked online and they’d let me in anyway, I was ecstatic! If I’d just shrugged my shoulders and said “nyeh”, that would have been slightly strange. You would have to conclude that either I didn’t care about the outcome, or perhaps that I didn’t understand what had just happened.
The gospel is such good news that an uninterested response is evidence that we don’t understand it, don’t believe it, or aren’t listening. When we sing about God and his gospel as believers, an uninterested response is going to mean we’re not listening, or we’re not wanting to engage with it. If we’re listening, understanding and engaging with the words we’re singing, we should be responding emotionally to the truth we’re singing. The job of music is to help us do this. When we need reminding of the joy of the gospel, the music helps us respond to the words we’re singing so that we can respond rightly.
Music helps us to grasp the truths of the gospel better, but music also helps us express our emotions – we sing with “thankfulness in our hearts to God”. God’s gospel is a good gospel, and it’s worth singing about – not with dry formalism, but with joy and thankfulness!
And they sang a new song, saying,
“Worthy are you to take the scroll
and to open its seals,
for you were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God
from every tribe and language and people and nation,
and you have made them a kingdom and priests to our God,
and they shall reign on the earth.” (Revelation 5:9-10)
How is it possible to sing words like that and not experience emotion?
So where’s the issue? The issue is what is exciting our emotions primarily. We have to find the line between music helping the words, and music eclipsing the words. Is it primarily the truth of the gospel that we’re responding to, or have we missed the truths we’re singing about and are reacting to the music more? Dave Bish writes: “Experience is essential but like faith the issue is what’s the object of it.” I’ll try and flesh out a little what the wrong focus might look like with the following questions.
Firstly, when are we most emotionally moved? Is it when we see the implications the gospel has for our lives? Is it when we sing “of the blood that never fails, of sins forgiven, of conscience cleansed, of death defeated and life without end”? Is it, perhaps, when we sing of an unspecific love (“your arms are the arms that surround me in a warm embrace”), speculation (“surrounded by your glory, what will my heart feel?”), or in vague truth with no depth (“it’s all about you, Jesus”). Is it in between songs when the guitar strums on, and we’re not thinking about anything much but it feels good?
I don’t mean to criticise individual songs here, but where the focus is not on gospel truth in all its fullness, and simply focused on subjective issues or vague niceties, it becomes very easy to become emotionally moved by the music not the words. I can sing “Awesome God” and respond to the truths of the gospel, but the words don’t remind me of specifics and my mind’s like a sieve – I forget stuff easily, so I can slip into focusing on the music more. That’s more of a tangent into song selection though – the issue here is whether we’re being more emotionally moved by the music or by the truth, and sometimes being aware of when we’re most emotionally engaged helps us to see this.
Secondly, is the music more important to us than the talk? When we sing, we’re singing truth to each other, but when we hear God’s word taught, it should be deeper, richer, more satisfying and more applied than our songs. You can’t encapsulate the wonder of the glory of the Father, or Christ’s substitutionary death, or the indwelling of the Spirit, in a few lines of song – though of course songwriters do their best! The songs should reinforce the detailed truth of the talk. Talks should also challenge us to live lives more like Christ. If we think the songs are more important, it seems to me we could be saying we want “lighter” truth and fewer challenges.
If there’s a series of songs just before the talk, and they finish, and we’re disappointed and want to carry on singing, we might be saying that the emotions from the music are more important to us than the emotions from the words. We’re moving on to look at God’s word! We should be as excited to hear God speak through the preacher as to hear our friends (and God) speak to us through the singing!
Thirdly, how long do the emotions last? Are we fired up emotionally on a Sunday night only to forget entirely about God Monday morning? Bish continues:
They don’t last any longer than the breath coming out of your mouth on a cold winter’s day. And affections that don’t last don’t change lives. The more conferences I’ve been too the more suspicious I’ve become of radical claims to change, by myself or others. It’s easy in the buzz of a conference, festival or meeting to feel deeply moved. Even with the very best of intentions. But, it’s only if this desire if rooted in the gospel of Jesus Christ, and consequently the transforming one-degree at a time work of the Holy Spirit that the change is going to last.
Is our emotional response to the singing a gospel-rooted, life-changing response, or is it a temporary buzz? Does the joy carry on beyond the meeting, or is it only there when we’re singing?
Fourthly, what happens if the music is bad? Maybe there’s only four people singing. Maybe you’re used to longer times of singing and there’s only one song. Maybe you’re used to traditional hymns and the songs are more contemporary in style – or vice versa. Maybe the singer can’t sing! What happens then? Do we give up all hope of engaging with God?
It’s possible that the music is now distracting us from the words in another way. If the singer is out of tune, it’s understandable for a sensitive ear to be distracted. If it’s just a style issue, though, are we letting that distract us from the things we’re singing? Are we making style the essential issue rather than the words?
Bad music isn’t good, but it’s not an insurmountable obstacle.
In all of this I don’t want to be misheard. The questions above are just things to get us thinking. There might be a perfectly good reason why the talk isn’t something you look forward to – the speaker might be rubbish, for example. I’m also not saying that there isn’t a place for the less specific truth of songs such as “Awesome God”, just that it’s easier to fall into the traps I’ve mentioned with them. Hopefully this will help us all get a right perspective on the place of emotion in our songs. (Please feel free to come back at me if you think I’ve got the balance wrong! I’m trying to work these things out myself, and input and correction is always welcomed.)
This is an area that I’ve got a bit of experience in, from both sides of the equation. In my church youth group, I was involved in leading music, and without thinking could end up doing it in an emotionally manipulative way, separate from the words we were singing. When I was being led in song, I would often work up an emotional high separate from the truths we were singing. Towards the end of my time in the youth group I saw the problems with what I was doing, and swung to the other extreme. Words were all that mattered; let’s cut back all the extra instruments and arrangements and just have piano, in case the music has an effect on anyone. I’m still naturally suspicious of people showing too much emotion when singing, particularly at musical high points where the words don’t suggest anything. But I’ve realised that both extremes are wrong. As Bish puts it:
I’m not sure whether cold-intellectualism or fluffy-emotionalism is the big issue of our day. Probably depends where you’re sitting and who you’re mixing with. Genuine deep-rooted gospel-driven affections would seem to be a way to avoid either extreme. The New Testament seems to talk a lot about the gospel and a lot about us having joy. Perhaps those things are connected…
Perhaps they are.
Matthew @ 22:18, March 25, 2008 to Discussions | Permalink | Comments (0)
Music in the CU
Last weekend I was away with UCCF on a new leaders’ training conference, looking at the distinctives of Christian Unions (CUs), with wonderful teaching on leadership, Christian growth, joy, and more practical issues alongside. Our main sessions were looking at Philippians, and at the start of his talk on chapter 2 (which includes what is probably an early hymn), John Risbridger addressed the musicians in the group, as an experienced musician himself.
In reality, you guys will probably shape the theology – that is, the sort of understanding, the ethos, the spirituality – of your CU more than any individual speaker who comes to speak to you over the course of the year. The reason for this is that on the whole, people forget the words that they hear, but they remember the words that they sing. And those words that they sing sink down deep into their hearts and lives and minds, and actually form the whole way that they think about God, and about what being a Christian means. It’s a really huge responsibility … that you need to exercise with great care and humility and dependence on God. I’ve come to the conclusion that stringing together a few of my favourite songs that I just happened to listen to while getting dressed in the morning isn’t good enough. I want to do what Kenny was doing this morning – I want to harness the power of music, which is a God-given power, to help people grasp life-changing truth, and then to respond to it with love and adoration and praise. Don’t be ashamed of the power of music. Music is God’s gift to us; it has power because he gave it power – but we can use that power for good, or for ill, and I want to use that power well, to engage people with truth, and to give them the vocabulary to respond to God with love and worship. And you thought all you had to do was play the guitar. (Condensed from recording, available at Dave Bish’s blog)
Glad it’s not just me who thinks these things then.
The weekend was challenging on many fronts, but thinking more about music in the CU was a big one. I’m from a more conservative (as opposed to lively) background, so my natural inclination is towards shorter times of singing. Sometimes it feels to me like too many songs in a row can detract from the words of individual songs. The example I used to explain this to some people on the weekend was talks. Talks from the Bible are great, but in our meetings we only have one, because having two would be too much to take in. Similarly with songs, it can be hard to take in all the words (letting the words “dwell in (us) richly”) if we sing too many. So my initial feelings were fewer, better songs, like Braddon Upex calls for:
There is a mighty power in a song
And they can wreak great havoc when they’re wrong.
This is the reason why I join with him
Who called for fewer, better, shorter hymns:
For fewer, for we sing too many songs,
Reducing services to sing-a-longs;
For shorter, though for mine it would suffice
Were we to sing each once instead of thrice;
For better, for so much of what we sing
Is far from fit to set before our King.
However, while my initial inclination was therefore to limit the number of songs we sing in our CU team meetings, I came to the conclusion that this was over-reacting. We can sing lots of songs on a similar topic to help a particular truth sink in, and that can be helpful. Alternatively, we can sing just a few select songs, perhaps with more verses, to accomplish a different purpose. The example of only having one talk doesn’t quite hold, as in one talk a speaker can hammer home one point throughout, or make various points as he goes along. Similarly with songs, we can hammer home one point through multiple songs, or have a few select songs on (sometimes, but not always) distinct topics. What it comes down to is discernment as to what will best help the words sink in – and that will sometimes mean fewer songs, and sometimes more.
How many songs is too many? Well, it depends how long your meeting is! At Bristol our meeting is an hour and a half long, with just under half an hour for the talk. My feeling is that anything from three to six songs is good, depending on what else is to be included. At this point, it comes down to what best serves the words (as above), and how much else there is to fit in. Whereas singing is important, I don’t want to it to crowd out prayer, or testimonies, or practical training, or other important things.
Different people expect different things from the music. Some want an extended time of singing, allowing them to “get into it” so that they can focus more and more as more songs are sung. (I spoke to someone who equated this with a speaker starting with a joke or an anecdote to allow people time to concentrate.) Some prefer shorter times, as too many songs makes it hard for any particular words to sink in. Hopefully discernment on my part will enable people on both sides to benefit from the music. However, I have a slight issue with allowing time to “get into it”, because it seems to me that if we’re merely “getting into it” during the first song or two, we’re not letting the words “dwell in us richly”. (I’m not saying more extended times are therefore bad – note what I’ve already said about both long and short times of singing being appropriate.)
Here we’re touching on a much larger issue to do with emotions and what happens when we sing, which I’ll come onto another time. This is perhaps where I’m going to most strongly disagree with people on music, and is one of the areas of conflict I mentioned last time. Here there is a difference in theology to be explored, not just a difference in style (and just so people are clear, I think emotion when singing isn’t just good, but essential!).
Matthew @ 12:53, March 7, 2008 to Discussions | Permalink | Comments (6)
