Let the word of Christ richly dwell within you, with all wisdom teaching and admonishing one another with psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with thankfulness in your hearts to God. – Colossians 3:16 (NASB)
Colossians 3:16 instructs us about congregational singing in at least 7 ways.
- The CAUSE and COROLLARY of our singing is God’s Word
- » God’s Word should be the CONTENT of our singing
- Singing is a COMMUNITY activity
- Singing is a COMMAND
- There are a variety of CATEGORIES of congregational songs
- The CORE of singing is the heart attitude behind it
- The CULMINATION of singing must be God’s glory
God’s Word Should Be the Content of our Singing
“Let the word of Christ richly dwell within you with all wisdom teaching and admonishing one another with psalms and hymns and spiritual songs”
Singing is one way to allow God’s Word to richly dwell within us. While there are non-musical ways to allow God’s Word to richly dwell within us such as memorization and meditation, singing is a uniquely powerful mechanism that helps us engage our hearts as we memorize and meditate on lyrics. God’s Word can richly dwell within us through singing only if the lyrics we sing contain propositional truth that is in harmony with Scripture. While we are certainly free (and commanded) to praise God with purely instrumental music, there is nothing intrinsic to music that will help us to engage with and focus on the true God. Music can be used to praise any god, including ourselves, but music set to lyrics which are biblical point to the true and living God of Scripture.
This passage also instructs us that our minds are to be engaged with the lyrics as we sing. This stands in contrast to many of the ways in which music is used in our media saturated culture today. Music is often piped into restaurants, elevators, malls, and even bathrooms, and we become trained to “tune it out.” What’s more, the mixing of many types of music make it almost impossible to understand what’s being said (which actually might be beneficial). We need to sing songs full of Scripture and train our people to pay close attention to their lyrics, that they might feed their hearts with what will lead them to respond in true worship. Paul instructs the Corinthians to sing not only with their spirits, but also with their minds: “I will sing praise with my spirit, but I will sing with my mind also.” (1 Corinthians 14:15)
Colossians 3:16 is not teaching that we can only sing lyrics which are verbatim quotations from Scripture. We’ll see in a later article that psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs point to various types of songs, and even in the New Testament we see what appear to be hymns included in some of the Epistles (such as 1 Tim 6:15-16). At the time of the writing of Scripture, writers were far less concerned with verbatim quotations than we are. We see examples of this in how the Apostles use the Old Testament – they often restate passages in their own words to reflect a slightly different application or simply to express the idea in their own unique way. Modern songs can do much the same thing. While it is good to sing so-called “Scripture songs,” songs which are, more or less, direct quotations from Scripture, other songs can be full of biblical truth without quoting specific Scripture passages. It is the essence of what we sing that is important, not the specific word order.
While we are to sing songs that are rich with Scripture truth, our lyrics should also be accessible to those singing them. When a congregation gathers, it will typically consist of people from all walks of life, including education and mental capacity. If we were to sing only five stanza hymns with complex grammar and large vocabularies, we would probably be making it more difficult for some to obey the command to allow God’s Word to dwell richly within them. Let the whole of Scripture be our guide for how complex or theologically deep our songs should be – the Bible is amazingly varied in its depth. It contains everything from simple, repetitive Psalms to short parables to intensely theological epistles. Let’s do everything we can to make sure our people can understand the lyrics we sing, including explaining difficult lines or editing hymns that were written several centuries ago and contain words or phrases that are unclear today.
Next time we’ll explore the fact that singing is to be a community activity.