Ask · The Church & Christian Life

Why do Christians sing?

The short answer

Christians sing because God commands it, because singing teaches and fixes truth in the memory, and because it is one of the ways a congregation speaks to God and to one another together. Paul ties singing directly to the word of Christ dwelling richly in the church. From the Psalms to the song around the throne in Revelation, God's people have always been a singing people.

The fuller answer

The simplest reason is that God tells his people to sing and gives them a songbook to do it with. The Psalms are not background decoration to the Bible; they are its longest book, placed at its centre, full of commands to sing a new song and of laments, thanks and confessions set to be sung by a congregation. A faith with that book at its heart was never going to be silent. Singing in Scripture is not the warm up before the real business. For much of the Bible's own life, it was the real business.

Paul gives singing a teaching job. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, he writes, teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs. Address one another, he tells the Ephesians, and in the same breath, sing and make melody to the Lord. A congregation singing a true hymn is doing three things at once: telling God the truth about himself, telling each other the truth they most need to hear, and driving that truth into memory in the one form almost nobody forgets. Most believers can recite more sung theology than read theology, which is precisely the point.

Heaven, as Revelation pictures it, is loud with song, including the new song sung to the Lamb because he was slain and ransomed people for God. Christian singing is a rehearsal for that. Choose songs the way Paul directs: rich in the word of Christ, singable by the whole congregation rather than performed at it, and honest enough to carry grief as well as joy, since the Psalms carry both. And sing even when your feelings lag behind. In Scripture, singing is often how feelings are led, not merely how they are expressed.

The Psalms also explain why the singing is often new. Sing to the LORD a new song, the psalmist calls, and tell of his salvation from day to day, because God's deeds keep arriving and yesterday's words, however true, do not exhaust them. This is the charter for every generation's hymn writers, and the reason the church's songbook has never been closed. It is also a warning in the other direction: newness is prized for the sake of fresh gratitude, not novelty, and a church that can only sing this decade's songs has amputated most of its memory.

Sources

• Berean Standard Bible (BSB)

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