Part 7-What may happen...musical tastes

 

Part 7-What may happen if we try to cater to everyone’s musical tastes.  

       No musician that I know ever thinks, "I’m going to sing this song just to annoy the congregation.”  Every sensitive ministering musician desires that the congregation will enjoy and appreciate his or her music ministry.  However, the Bible is very clear about whom we should please.  Galatians’ 1:10 states, “For do I now persuade men, or God? Or do I speak [sing] to please men? For if I yet pleased men, I should not be a servant of Christ.” (The word in the brackets is mine.) 

       I contend that any music praxis that is based on pleasing the “seeker” or the believer is a faulty praxis.  There is nothing inherently wrong with saint or sinner being pleased with our musical offerings, but our praxis must be built on pleasing God.  In our posts on worship we discussed the fact that the unregenerate cannot truly worship God.  We also discussed that the Holy Spirit can use worship music to convict the sinner. 

       When the Holy Ghost is doing His “office work” of locating and convicting the unregenerate man or woman, they will probably be anything but pleased by music that is convicting them of the awfulness of their sins.  Just like the pastor’s preaching of “Christ crucified” does not make the sinner joyful, the effectual fervent singing of “Christ crucified” will not make the unregenerate comfortable in the presence of a just God who will not overlook sin and rebellion against Him!

       So, a music philosophy that is developed to make the sinner feel OK is just not OK.  Man outside of the forgiveness of sins is far from OK.  Effectual anointed musicing should never be psychologically designed to connote that “I’m OK and you’re OK.  The philosophical notion that worship music should be about “us”, “me”, “my”, and “mine” is nothing less than religious humanism which is no better than secular humanism.  As we have pointed out many times, worship music is about God and our response to Him.  The notion that the church should cater to my likes and dislikes is essentially humanistic music philosophy because under this praxis, music begins and ends with me. Under this type of thinking, man receives the preeminence.
        So to sum this all up philosophically, we should worship God through our musicing in a manner that will be pleasing unto God.  Furthermore, being seeker sensitive is not about singing music that un-regenerated man will like.  It is totally different to sing music that a sinner will understand than it is to build a music worship praxis on music that he or she will like.