Authentic Worship & Faithful Music Making

"Presenter:Dr. Harold Best, Former Dean of Wheaton Conservatory of Music and

Author of Music Through the Eyes of Faith. Harold addresses a diverse audience of
professional musicians at the American Choral Directors Association.

Location: Music & Worship Interest Session, ACDA National Convention, Chicago,
Illinois, February 27, 1999

Introduction

This assignment differs from others I have had on similar subjects, in that today I shall be
speaking — I assume — both to Jewish and Christian people of faith, and within these
two vast, connected practices, to Conservative and Reform Jews, Roman Catholics,
Protestants, and Orthodox Christians; then in further subdivision, to conservatives,
liberals, charismatics, traditionalists, contemporists, populists, classicists, practitional
eclectics — some say blenders — liturgical and free worshipers; and on the side of
mammon, to those who are paid, paid less, paid less than they think they should be, or
paid nothing.

I am assuming that we are spiritual and musical relatives of each other, even in the face
of the profound difference that we commonly acknowledge: the centrality of Christ for
the Christians, the continued longing into the future by the Jews for Messiah; and other
differences that Christians have with each other — significant but far less profound; and
last but not least, the debates that, perhaps as never before, swirl around all of us: the
relation of style to worship, worship to witness, cultural relevance to scriptural integrity,
quality to usefulness, and sociologized theology to theologized sociology. The
assignment has not been easy but it has been immensely rewarding, and I hope I do not
fail you or the Lord.

I have been driven to search out what I truly believe about this topic, what I believe to be
irreducible, and how I might relate to each of you without relativizing either your
passions and faith, or mine, and above all, without playing ecclesiastically cute and
correct games with Scripture. I have been freshened to discover a place of meeting
regarding authentic worship and faithful music making that I believe is as foundational
for those who await the Messiah as for those who know that they have found Him; a
foundational place for those whose meeting ground is anything from praise and worship
bands to choirs, organs, and hymnals. We are the worse when we forget that just as Jesus
is, for Christians, the Yes and the Amen to everything found in the Law and the Prophets,
there is still the primordial force of Law and Prophets that constitutes the dayspring for
the Yes and Amen. Thus, there is no emptiness or prettified ecumenism in speaking to
Jew and Christian alike of like things to which each must go with hungry heart and
unfailing passion. To this Judeo-Christian audience, I speak gladly of Judeo-Christian
magnificences. We are drawn together in profound ways, even as we may profoundly
disagree, for beneath these harmonies and disharmonies, there is a grandly eloquent deep
structure that urges us into further thought about worship and music. This meeting place,
this deep structure, goes something like this.

There is one God, who is the one Lord, the one Redeemer, the one Spirit, the one Creator
of heaven and earth. In his unimaginable holiness and majesty, He is Love itself, Love
incarnate, and Love unto an infinity of more love. He has not kept the good news about
Himself to Himself, but has graciously chosen to reveal it to our race, clearly,
unequivocally, and mercifully. This self-revealing Word contains all that we shall ever
need in this temporal frame for faith, for salvation, and for instruction in righteousness,
for worship, humble service, and personal loveliness.

This God, this Lord, is the uncreated Creator, the unimagined Imaginer, not just back
then, but now and always, for right now, everything inheres and coheres by the word of
His power. Everything that He creates, He calls good, and in His goodness He has gone
so far as to create an entire race of beings in His image. We are thus created creators and
imagined imaginers and have been bequeathed a magnificent sovereignty and
stewardship over the many things that God Himself has made. And from these we have
been gifted to imagine and give shape to a dazzlement of arts, craft, and idea. Even so,
we can not out-imagine or out-work the One who is at once our Creator, our Redeemer,
and our Rest.

Nonetheless, in a horrible moment, our race heard a lie about Him, chose to believe it,
and fell away from the glories that it was intended to enjoy. There is thus something
profoundly wrong with us. We have all fallen short of the glory of God and are helpless
to fix this wrong, our futile attempts notwithstanding. But just as God is the Author and
Finisher of all of His work, He has become the Author and Finisher of our salvation,
taking upon Himself the burden of atoning for that for which we cannot atone, if we but
trust Him to do so. Isaiah 53 makes this just as clear as the Epistle to the Romans does.
Both Testaments swear to this unassailable fact: God is our salvation. Our participation in
this great salvation, both Testaments likewise aver, is by faith from which lovingly
shaped work and continuing worship issue.

Surrounded and nourished by these enormities, we are authentically to worship and

faithfully to make music. For all of us, authenticity and faithfulness are of the essence.
There are no two ways about it, and in this agitated, stirred up, divisive, less-than-creative
present-day pottage we call sacred music, we must rediscover something that has very
little to do with music. But once discovered, music — good music, bad music, music of
diversity — finds its place, falls under judgement, and makes its way into the halls of
praise. A thousand tongues, to paraphrase the Wesleys, who never dreamed of the world
of music that we know—a thousand tongues will never be enough.

As to all of our music, we cannot afford to forget that the whole of all musical
undertaking in temple, church, and basilica, is based on a three-in-one commandment,
one sentence long, from the Psalms: "Sing (play) to the Lord a new song." We can also
not afford to forget that it is the commandment, God's commandment, that is of prime
importance. We must understand that when God commands, He means what He says, and
that it is the commandment that makes music important and not the reverse. When we
attempt to empower God's commands with something even as wonderful as music we
have stepped over a forbidden line, for there is such a thing as musicolatry. We must
recognize that as wonderful as music is, and as much as we lovingly strive for excellence
in its practices, there are no such ephemera as a theological Mozart effect, or expose-
yourself-to-the-masterpieces talk, or what-will-music-do-for-me talk. When music
becomes of prime importance and God's work is conditioned upon, or made subject to it,
we have already paid the entrance fee into the darkened complexities of religion posing
as godliness, of Truth conditioned by beauty, and music taking on the qualities of
sacrament, if not Transubstantiation.

So, we have this command; really, a three-in-one command: 1) Sing (play). There is no
debate, no option. 2) Be sure this song goes in this direction first: to the Lord, and only
then, to each other. We are thus to overhear each other singing to God. 3) Make a new
song. Don't fake newness with borrowedness, but let those from whom you might be
tempted to borrow be so dislodged that they will borrow from you. Also, sing old songs
newly, as if for the first time, thus avoiding what Christ called vain repetition. Singing
new songs and singing old ones newly are inevitably a part of faithful music making.
Each is bereft without the other.

We are talking more about worship today than possibly ever before in Church history,
certainly more than the Scriptures do. We need to remember that when we make worship
too much the subject, we risk destroying the very thing for which it is intended. The
subject can never be worship until the subject is first of all the Lord. To the extent that
attention is overly drawn to worship, to the extent that it becomes the primary object of
our work, the overriding protocol, within which the Lord and His work are subjects, we
can only assume that we have begun to worship worship, or at least, to worship about
worship, therefore to worship about God. Visit the typical seminar or conference and you
will discover that the attention is on tools for worship (whatever they are), on worship
enhancement, ideas, options, and worship leading, in effect, as a spin-off of management
technique. And as to the ideas about worship teams, let me say that, theologically
speaking, the only worship team that is worthy of the name is the congregation, the
people of God who, as a corporate body raise their voices in response to a command, not
in acoustical competition with (or surrender to) a select group of miked-in folks. I repeat,
the attention is, first and last, to be on the Lord, so much so that worship ceases to be the
primary subject, the focus, the action in itself. But when we keep ourselves steadied upon
the Lord, worship gains its rightful place as the full articulation, but not the substance, of
this steadiness. Left to itself, worship is a dangerous thing, for it needs an object, a
preposition. For it is not how or when or with what degree of quality, variety, and
imagination that we worship. It is whom we worship. It is a passion about God that finds
its voice. It is the "of-God" worship that begins the separation of authentic worship from
inauthentic worship. We may not be idolaters in the sense that we have consciously
trampled God underfoot and replaced His entirety with our chosen and crafted
interpretation of entirety. But we can, in very subtle ways, include our harvest of idols
within the Judeo-Christian fundament. If we make too much of worship without making
too much of God; if our attention is on how to make people worship, we have lost from
the start, even though we may have developed a dazzling musical, liturgical and
methodological arsenal that would make the typical worship-techniques gurus grin like a
donkey eating thistles.

What am I saying? That worship, in its diversity and variegated fullness, is unimportant?
That we need to forget worship and sanctimoniously get on with the things of God and
the practice of our musical craft? Not at all. Rather, I'm saying that the things of God and
the practice of our craft can go in one of two directions, but not both at the same time.
We can worship authentically and we can make music faithfully, or the reverse. It is well
to consider that authentic and faithful participate in each other and could just as easily
apply to today's topic in reverse order: faithful worship and authentic music making, for
in the biblical sense, faithfulness is authenticity and authenticity is impossible without
faithfulness. What then is authentic worship?

Authentic Worship

While, interestingly enough, there are no definitions of worship in the Bible, there are
innumerable ones in just as many books and tracts, many of them sheer poetry. Useful
and rich as they are, and with due respect, virtually all of are limited, to put it bluntly, to
what goes on in church. This misses, or at most pays lip service, to a fundamental law of
worship, which is the beginning of the secret to the difference between authentic and
inauthentic worship. It is this: Worship is not a special event or any sequence of them.
Worship is fundamental to humankind itself, so much so, that we must assume that it
goes on all the time, all around us, inside of us, and, in a paradoxical way, in spite of us.
So before we talk about the specificities of worship, we must first of all understand that
there is no one in this world who is not, at this moment, at worship in one way or another:
consciously or unconsciously, formally or informally, passively or passionately. For in a
most comprehensive way, we are always giving our lives over to something or someone
that we consider to be worth the most. Worship does not just apply to specific religious
activities and to the deeply religious people who have strong feelings about a nameable
god (Judeo-Christian or otherwise), and how that god is to be occasionally encountered,
pleased, placated, served, and worshiped. In a way that goes beyond nameable liturgical
activities, it applies to our deepest expressions — many of them left unseen or unsaid —
of our worldview.

Furthermore, this law of worship cannot be fully understood without taking two realities
into account. The first is that God originally created us to worship Him continuously. The
second is about how the darkness of our departure from God cut into the splendor of this
original truth. We were created to live worshipfully — not just worshiping at certain
times, but continually — to be in adoring submission, serving the One whom we cannot
help but adore and being adored by the One to whom we cannot help but submit. The
depth and extent of this relationship is based on the uniqueness of God creating us in His
image and in the indescribable intimacy that this singular act of creation made possible.

I wish there were but one indivisible word that would at once include both living and
worshiping as synergies of each other, because that's what God always intended. This is
certainly what any number of Old Testament passages imply and this is certainly how
Jesus lived — thirty three years a living sacrifice — no moment spent not worshiping.
We were created as naturally to honor, to adore, to submit to, to depend on, to fellowship
with our Maker as we were to breathe in and out; not once in seven days, but
continuously; not in self-conscious God-consciousness, but in the all-encompassing
wealth and quiet of the eternal moment: breath after breath; in speechless quiet, in
ecstasy, in words, in deed, in art and craft, work and Sabbath, in supplication, in praise, in
laughter, in sleep and in waking, in the simple things and the imponderable things, at
table, and in thanksgiving. It is in this fullness of life that God intended worship to be
simple, normal, all-encompassing, ongoing, and above all, simple. When I think of this
kind of worship, I think of these words from Psalm 131: "O Lord, my heart is not lifted
up, my eyes are not raised too high; I do not occupy myself with things too great and too
marvelous for me. But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its
mother; my soul is like the weaned child within me."

Worship and Our Estrangement

But as we know, this fullness was profoundly wrenched from us. As suggested earlier,
something is wrong that needs righting, otherwise worship would not necessitate
repentance, confession, and forgiveness. This interruption, for which God's saving works
are the only answer, contains an imponderable irony: Somehow in the mystery and chaos
of our fall, the urge to worship was kept alive and active. We can thus be dead to God but
kept alive as worshipers. We simply exchange gods, but persist in our bowing down
before them, and it is God alone who can take this ponderous contradiction, sort it out,
and, through His own grace and renewing, turn us back again to the continuous, therefore
authentic, worship of Himself.

But the problem is not just replacing God with crafted gods, but mixing our crafted gods
in with our God-talk in a curious kind of spiritualized syncretism. If idolatry is the act of
shaping something that we then allow to shape us, we need to look for the ways we
persist in depending on things, or acts, or buildings, or people, or music, or art, or any
other thing to cause or even facilitate a state of worship, to determine the worth of our
worship, or enlarge the extent of God's presence with us. And how often have we heard
worship leaders talk about the power of music, of music as a tool, of creating a sequence
of events that "lead up" to worship, to empower it, or even culminate it. We must not
forget that we can contrive innumerably religious ways to hide these idols and to baptize
them into our communion. This is why the Scriptures, especially the Old Testament, and
most particularly Isaiah, spend so much conceptual thought on idolatry, not just the
carving of things from wood, but confusing God's handiwork and our handiwork with
God Himself. While I shall return to this again, let me say it here: Depending on music to
aid, induce, or enhance worship is idolatry dressed up in psycho-aesthetic finery. It
confuses the power of music with the presence of God. In this culture of broken down
speech and precisionless morality, where, in the words of George Steiner, music is the
new literacy, we can bring ourselves to believe that without music, waves of it, gobs of it,
there is no worship. How often have we heard these careless words from our so-called
worship leaders: "We'll have some worship (meaning, we'll sing), then we'll pray, read
the Scripture and hear from God's servant."? This is worship-think at its worst, yet we
hear it all around us. Put as simply as possible: We do not sing in order to worship, nor
do we sing as if this were all worship is. We must of necessity sing because we are at
worship, because God is now here, irrespective of our contrivances to get Him here.

Worship and Our Redemption

Now we come to the nub of the matter. If the urge to worship is created in each of us and
if all of us are somehow at worship all the time, how do we talk about authentic worship?
We cannot assume that if we can just come up with yet another creative definition, add
just one more twist to our arsenal of liturgies, think good thoughts about God, push the
soul's worship buzzer, repeat a call to worship, turn on the organ, strap on a guitar, fire up
a synthesizer, or hire the best worship team, biblical worship will take place.

Instead, we have to return to the very root of the Truth, for this root is the root of
authentic worship. It is found in both Testaments and drives the entirety of our
relationship with God. Here it is, so familiar that we can lose sight of its profound
significance: The righteous one shall live (therefore worship) by her faith. Let's put this
another way: Faith is the only thing the righteous man shall live (therefore worship) by.
Not worship times, not music, not liturgy, but faith. Whatever we do, it must be by faith.
It is in the midst of completely and continuously living by faith that true worship takes
place. It is living by faith that distinguishes between the mere activities of worship, and
the faithful, that is, the full-of-faith condition, that turns each of them into a pleasant
aroma. Living by faith means worshiping by faith, and worshiping by faith encompasses
the whole of living by faith. There is simply no other option or condition for a confessing
believer.

But we cannot stop here. If, among that resounding triad of faith, hope and love, love is
considered the greatest of all, then love raises the whole of faithful living and continuing
worship into a gracious, celebrative, unfussed, uncontrived, unmanipulated offering to the
Lord. In Galatians 5:6b Paul puts it this way: ". . . the only thing that counts is faith
working through (or, made effective by) love." This is the way of the Law and the
Prophets and of Christ, whose ways are the ways of continued worship. This had to be
what St. Paul further had in mind when he said that we are living epistles (II Corinthians
3:2,3), and it is only this kind of living that allows us to say that the best witness is
overheard and overseen worship, and no amount of in-church activity will ever replace
this. We must bear in mind that the Scriptures include or allude to every approach to
worship there is: organized, spontaneous, public, private, simple, complex, loud, quiet,
silent, brief, or extended. It is sheer presumption for us to think that, under the guise of
being "contemporary" — whatever that word now means — or creative — how empty
this word has become — we can come up with new ways to worship. There simply are
none. The Holy Spirit saw to that millennia ago.

But of the many passages that lie at the heart of authentic worship, four in particular
stand out. I want to spend a bit more time on the first one, with the idea that the
remaining three add further weight. The first is Romans 12:1 where St. Paul literally begs
us to present ourselves as living sacrifices. The message is unequivocal: Whatever we do
as people of faith, we do in the paradoxical condition of sacrificing ourselves as the only
way of remaining alive. This verse further makes it clear that this continued act is, as
most translations say, our "spiritual worship:" a life-long, faith-wide condition. This is a
continuum; there is no other word for it. To use an oft-quoted phrase from one of Eric
Routley's hymns, this continuum is both "duty and delight." And it means nothing other
than a return to the kind of continued worship that God originally intended for us. And it
can only further mean that there is now but one call to authentic worship that replaces the
call that came of our estrangement. It comes when we turn away from the gods of
estrangement and turn back to the God of our salvation. Since this call back to true
worship comes but once (not every week, as our church bulletins erroneously suggest),
we are free to understand that the carpenter, the surgeon, the garbage collector, the
engineer, the artist, and the public servant are to continue their worship of God, making
faithful offerings of the crafts, the constructs, and sequences of their daily work. It is a
wonderful thing to know that the word liturgy was originally a secular term signifying an
agreement to perform and complete some kind of ordinary service: tile setting, carpentry,
and the like. Being a sacrifice for as long as we are alive constitutes our agreement to be
worshiping workers, as the people of God, in all circumstances and places.

Now what about corporate worship? Does being a living sacrifice excuse us from
Sunday's rounds? Not at all. Corporate worship is the necessary and sacramental
widening of the everyday, all-the-day moment-by-moment walk of faith, of belief and of
stewardship. Put as simply as possible, we do not go to synagogue, temple, cathedral,
basilica, or church to worship. We go to these good places to continue our worship, but
now corporately (that is, as a body, in a doubled communion with the Lord and with each
other). We go to these places to give synergized expression to what we should have been
doing all week long: praying, singing, listening, offering to the Lord, speaking, being
silent, confessing, growing, and being broken. To think of church time as worship time
without connecting it to the seven-day-a-week liturgy of being living sacrifices is to miss
the entire biblical point of worship and to concoct an artificial parenthesis for an hour or
so once a week or so. Corporate worship is irrelevant, however beautiful its protocols
may be and however nourishing its sacraments are, unless it participates in the seamless
life of continuous worship, and unless it is seen as a symptom of how we live and act all
week long.

The second scripture is John 4:23-24, taken from Jesus' conversation with the Samaritan
woman: "Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship
the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshipers that the Father seeks.
God is a spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and truth." Jesus said this,
interestingly enough, in response to the woman's attempt to switch the subject from how
she was living to where she worshiped, something we do all the time. She essentially
reduced the issue of worship to one of location, place, time, and tradition, which is what a
great deal of today's "worship talk" is about. But Jesus would have none of this. In a brief
and powerful statement, He subsumed — without doing away with — the entire worship-
history of time, place, tradition, and protocol under a new law: that of worship in spirit
and in truth. Thus, authentic worship is a peculiar condition of life while location and
circumstance are incidental. We are not be in and out of the Spirit, or in and out of Truth.
We are summoned, rather, to a continuum of spirituality and Truth-fullness.

The third scripture, Psalm 29:2, is brief and pungent: "Worship the Lord in the beauty of
holiness." Once again we are brought face to face with the reality of worship as an
ongoing state, simply because holiness itself is a condition to which each of us is
permanently called. The beauty of holiness is not an aesthetic beauty — the holiness of
beauty, neatly platonic, but sloppily scriptural. Neither is it a pinched-face, perfectionist
and forbidding piety, but a state of hilarious loveliness and exemplary goodness. It is a
condition brought on–mind you, these are not my words–brought on by cleansing,
hungering, thirsting, wrestling, warring against, panting after, and seeking out the things
of God. This is the worshipful holiness of the twenty-four hour day, the state of being
redeemed, of continuing as a living sacrifice, and being led by the Spirit so as to live
completely in the truth.

These three passages can now be summarized with a fourth, again from the Old
Testament: Deuteronomy 10:12-15; 20-21. Verses 12-15 state in detail what St. Paul in
Romans 12:1 says in principle, and I shall not quote them here. Verses 20-21 add further
voice and summation: "You shall fear the Lord your God; him alone you shall worship;
to him you shall hold fast, and by his name you shall swear. He is your praise; he is your
God, who has done for you these great and awesome things that your own eyes have
seen."

Let's put all of the preceding together: Authentic worship is to be undertaken as an act of
love, driven by faith, architectured by hope, and saturated with Truth, whatever the
content, context, time, place, style, or circumstance. Our corporate worship is acceptable
and effective only to the extent that we are moment-by-moment living sacrifices, doing
everything in the Spirit and according to truth, seeking out the beauty of holiness as our
only path and our only walk, holding fast to God, who alone is our praise and our
worship. If these conditions and actions mark our entire way of living, then they will
mark the entirety of our corporate worship. There is simply no exception to this principle.
It is simple, uncluttered and within reach of each of us erring, estranged, but hungry and
forgiven believers who by faith follow hard after the Lord of Hosts.

Once we get the faith/love/worship issue straightened out; once we submit to the
scriptural principles stated above; once we truly understand that authentic worship can
only lead to more and more of itself, then we may have to rethink our Church-going, as it
is typically perceived and practiced, because of the ways we have separated it from the
biblical concept of worship unto continuing worship, coupled to our mistaken concepts
that worship can be gradually awakened with a prelude, officially announced with an
introit, continued in a liturgy, culminated in a benediction and shouted into cozy memory
during the postlude.

We will also come to realize that what we do in church says less about who our God is
and how faithfully we serve him (or them), than what we do the rest of the week. But if
we understand worship as a seamless garment, comprising all of faithful living, made
startlingly new by the Lord Himself and brought to full strength by the Spirit, then 11:00
Sunday morning, or whatever "worship time" we choose, will be something splendidly
different. We shall no doubt further understand how wrong we are for working so hard at
unlocking the "secret" of worship with just one more alternative, one more attraction, one
more tune or texture, for those who show up in the sanctuary looking only for the secret.
We shall also certainly want to keep the lines of communication between ourselves and
the senior pastor as theologically clear as possible. We shall want to understand together
how wrong it is to place the burden of proof so heavily on the music and musicians, on
the worship style and the worship leader, instead of the Spirit, whose sovereign purpose,
after all, can override or undergird any of our devices.

Now, here's the clincher. Here's where cake meets icing, and here's where we have our
cake and can eat it, too. Once we understand the underlying principles of authentic
worship , then we are free to come back to the plethora, the richness, the beauty, and
variegated delight of the works of worship. Now we are completely free; free of them,
now free to offer them; free to see them disappear as incense, immediately lost in the
overwhelming presence of the Lord himself; now free to study and draw from them, and,
I hope, free to thin them out, be more quiet, more at rest, less hurried, worried, and
liturgically hyper-active. Only then can we declare ourselves free of the technologically
steroided and often manipulative systems which substitute for, or attempt to enhance the
power and quietly loving presence of, the Lord. Only then are we free — this will sound
strange, I know — free to become small, powerless, and weak again, knowing that the
strength and power of the Lord are made perfect in our weakness. Only then are we free
to understand that true worship generates and welcomes true diversity, not because
diversity is so trendy and with it, but because our worship is so cosmically boundless, so
fundamentally simple, and so God-intoxicated that we have no choice but to reach for the
thousand tongues, knowing that no single tongue, no single style, no single order of
worship, no single anything, can begin to capture the glory and the grace.

And I respectfully insist that this magnificent diversity should be practiced in all
corporate worship instead of being divided up into alternative "experiences" for those
who want it just one way, for those who are simply too lazy and too self-seeking, too
provincial, to enter into the disciplined joy of seeking out God and wrestling in worship,
newly, diversely, and strangely. "Not in my style" or "Not in my language" or "It doesn't
meet my felt needs" is fallen worship through and through. It blasphemes the name, the
might, and the limitless imagination of the Uncreated Creator, and makes light of the
mandates of faith that cause the strange to become familiar and familiar once more to
become strange. These childish whims and whimpers miss the whole point of the life of
faith, that we, along with Abraham, the prophets, the saints, and the great cloud of
witnesses, are on a journey, being called out, and like our brother Abraham, not knowing
where we are going, but all the while trusting God. Once we get our structures and
artifacts out of the way only to regain them in the Light; once we take the burden off the
gifts and lay it on to the Giver; once we fully realize that the gift is not responsible for
our worship, but the Giver is; once we understand that God alone is both Means and End,
Author and Finisher, Alpha and Omega; once these things become gradually clearer; and
once we see and remain in the Light, we will find it shining on common ground, the
common ground of godly and authentic worship, a continuum of action upon action,
faithfully and knowingly made into offering after offering, straight through this life and
on into eternity.

Faithful Music Making

It is in this light that the call to faithful music making comes, laser-like, to us. Faithful
music making goes way beyond great music making and the making of great music. Not
that these are unimportant. But greatness, excellence, and innovation can never together
be considered the sine qua non. These are not what's first. These, rather, are the result of
what's first. If they were first, we would not be talking about the worship of God through
music, but the worship of Music through god: Music with a capital "M" and God, with a
little "g." The ideas of beauty as a sacrament, of beauty equaling Truth, are foreign to a
Judeo-Christian worldview. But the sacraments, taking on expressions of beauty,
homilies that breathe poetry while Truth is spoken, bring a smile, we can be most sure, to
the Uncreated Creator, the Unimagined Imaginer and the Author and Finisher of our
salvation.

Faithful music making is faith in God while for the sheer love of Him, we bring on our
song. Faithful music making is faith in God, not in music. Faithful music making is not
just what works or just what is good. It is working at goodness because faith demands it
and knowing that what works is not to be equated to His working through it. It is not the
seeking out of quality as if this, in isolated splendor, could impress God. The splattered
trumpet playing, sent straight on to Jesus, in Duval's The Apostle, is not that much worse
than the B Minor Mass, sent straight on to Yahweh, once we bring each up close to the
infinite depths of the glory and majesty of God. For whatever we do when we make
music, we just lisp. But lisp we must. And when this lisp is lisped by faith and in
complete adoration, the Lord himself enters into the tune and transforms it. What may be
flat, sharp, or cacophonous to us, is sweetness to the One to whom it is offered, to the
One whose eternal work is to transform.

Faithful music making is fidelity to a call to make music for the glory of God,
irrespective of talent, budget, resources, fame, or anonymity. Faithful music making is
meekness and humility, not hype, swagger, and gussied up balderdash, for it is the meek
who inherit and the humble who discover that God's strength is made perfect in their
weakness. In these days of church growth by style change; in these times of prolonged,
professionalized, and self-indulgent worship of worship, the near narcissism of big-time
Gospel, the strut, the hype and swagger of consumerist Christianity, mega-this and
media-that; what is it that finally counts: the size and scope of these things or the faith
that proceeds with integrity, quietness, and authority? Only in recognition of these
spiritual obesities and in repentance of them; only in a growing humility; only then, let
the music come. Let it come in its corrected and rightful newness. Let it come in waves
of excelling and bursts of newness and hilarity. Let it come, not to alert God to presence
Himself with us. No! Let it come because He is now here, eternities before we can ever
bring tune to our instruments or pitch to our song. Let it come because we authentically
worship and cannot wait to lift our tunes authentically and faithfully to the One who is
Author and Finisher, Sin-bearer and Redeemer, Servant and Lord.

I finish by asking this question based on a story from the Old Testament: What can we
learn from Jericho? The story of the defeat that contrary city cannot be fully understood
without reference to the music that was made as the people marched around its walls. The
story is so familiar that it need not be repeated here, except to say that music making was
among the things that God told Joshua and his people to do, and the walls did not fall
down until the trumpets were blown.

There are two ways to interpret the musical part of this story. One is biblical and the other
is not, and I'm afraid that the latter dominates the former in present day ecclesiastical
circles. The unbiblical interpretation goes this way: People blew their trumpets and
brought the walls down. Simple, isn't it? It was the music that did it, by golly. It was the
music that brought the culmination about and caused the crash. Isn't this what many of us
say, or at least hint at, about music in worship: Bring it on so that great things will be
done. Bring it on so that people will worship. Bring it on so that God will be brought on,
for without it, God will be hobbled and hamstrung.

The biblical interpretation goes this way: As people blew their trumpets to God in
obedience to Him, He knocked the walls down. For it is God and God alone who does the
work that He wants done as we make our music, not because we make our music. Our
task and our privilege is follow His commands and to bring our work and our music to
Him first. Then He can do whatever He pleases and we can take no credit for what He
has done. If He works mightily when music is made, let's be sure that we don't credit the
music and then build on that presupposition, for if we do, we are bound to expect music
to repeat the glory, when it is God's business alone never to repeat the glory, but bring an
even greater glory, music or no music.

So, let the music come! Let the thousand tongues break forth! Come! Come, let us
worship authentically and make music faithfully, for then we ourselves will not only sing
a new song, but in a doubled cosmic anthem, we shall hear the Lord Himself break into
melody, for these are the words of Zephaniah the prophet: "Sing aloud, O daughter Zion;
shout, O Israel! . . . The King of Israel is in your midst; . . . he will rejoice over you with
gladness, he will renew you in his love; he will exult over you with loud singing as on a
day of festival." AMEN!

Note: Church musicians are free to make copies of this article. We are grateful to Dr.
Best for his generosity in this matter.