Not only Beautiful but also Suitable—part 9

Not only Beautiful but also Suitable—part 9

            The quality or lack of quality of our music is important but so is unholy association with the world and compatibality with our Savior who “is holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners, and made higher than the heavens.”   Music generas  ( the way the music part of the music is arranged into an artistic whole) may be so poorly put together that they are not supportive of the gospel of the Savior they are suppsed to represent, but they can also be flawed by the message and meaning that they convey to the hearer and the performer.

            It may seem to some Christian musicians that my discussion of keeping sacred music sacred by protecting it by keeping it unspotted by the world system of this age is wearisome.  James 1:21-27 speaks about a Christian’s “doing”.  It states, “Wherefore lay apart all filthiness and superfluity of naughtiness, and receive with meekness the engrafted word, which is able to save your souls.  But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves.  For if any be a hearer of the word, and not a doer, he is like unto a man beholding his natural face in a glass:  For he beholdeth himself, and goeth his way, and straightway forgetteth what manner of man he was.  But whoso looketh into the perfect law of liberty, and continueth therein, he being not a forgetful hearer, but a doer of the work, this man shall be blessed in his deed.  If any man among you seem to be religious, and bridleth not his tongue, but deceiveth his own heart, this man's religion is vain.  Pure religion and undefiled (amiantos 283) before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.” I am concerned not only about a Christian musician’s intent but also his or her musical “doing”.  A musician’s doing is the ultimate proof of what he or she actually believes.  What a musician says is, as 1 Corinthians 13:1 teaches, mere hollow  sounding brass or clanging symbol, if that Christian musician’s musicing is not “suitable to the subject”.