would imagine that everyone who knows the biblical reference where “Psalms and Hymns” comes from asks the same question.

Let the message of Christ dwell among you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom through psalms, hymns and songs from the Spirit, singing to God with gratitude in your hearts.
Colossians 3:16 (TNIV) 

“What about the third category? What about the spiritual songs?”

That’s a great question.

The short answer is that I think that there are enough spiritual songs out there and that the other two categories are neglected (especially the psalms). There are also side issues of simply wanting to write music and not spend hours fine-tuning lyrics when there are perfectly good lyrics out there.

The long answer is that I started writing when I was in college. Every week, I was learning new music. (Or, to put it more accurately, I was playing along with unknown music and figuring it out as I went along. That was a pretty harrowing experience! Thankfully, all of the music was fairly predictable.) There was such a drive for the latest expression of worship, the freshest tune, the newest lyric, that I got burnt out on it all. This isn’t to say that I wasn’t involved with some fine people who were doing a great job leading several hundred college students each week. It was just that the continual drive for what’s new forced me to stop and take a look at what’s old.

What I discovered was a treasury of incredible lyrics that my peers had all but forgotten. Here were words that were not captive to the latest pop metaphors for God but were rich and full of meaning. I found lyrics that had withstood the test of time and were rightfully called “the great hymns of the faith”. (Of course, there are some truly wretched old hymns, just like there are some fantastic spiritual songs being written today. One isn’t better than the other based upon its genre, necessarily. The content is the standard by which it should be judged.)

I found great hymns with some great tunes but also some great hymns with lesser tunes. Different musical settings of the same text can be wonderful counterparts to each other, as long as they both faithfully represent the content of the text. It’s like looking at a diamond from many different perspectives or like reading the bible in several different translations. They all add to each other. “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross” is a fabulous hymn whether it’s sung to “Hamburg” or “Gift of Love” (but not when it’s sung to the tune of “Green Acres”). So I began trying to compose tunes that would accurately reflect the content of hymn texts with a musical vocabulary that was more common to my peers.

For centuries, Christians not only sang hymns, but they also had settings of the Psalms to sing (the Psalter). I can’t possibly write everything there is to write on the use of the Psalms right now, but I’ll leave with an observation that we have all but forgotten the Psalms in public worship and it’s to our detriment.

God has given us the gift of music and he has given us a song to sing. Psalms and hymns allow us to sing the same song as the saints of old - the prophets, the apostles, the martyrs and all who have gone before us. We sing along with the “living faith of the dead” (as Jaroslav Pelikan has written) and join in the thunderous chorus praising:

“Glory to God in the highest heaven,
and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests.”
Luke 2:14 (TNIV)

Note: This was a post that I originally wrote on January 28, 2006 but haven’t posted until now. My thoughts on the subject have changed a little but I still agree with the main thrust of what I wrote. Today, I would only qualify that we be vigilant in rejecting any romanticization of the past, thinking that older lyrics (and older theology) must necessarily be better than more modern expressions. We must always be returning to the scriptures as our source for life and our vocabulary for worshiping the living God.

his Sunday, one of the major themes of our service is the Christian’s love for God. Psalm 116 immediately came to mind as one of the seminal passages in the Bible regarding loving God. I scoured my psalters for a suitable setting of the text and ended up with Isaac Watts’ version.

I love the Lord; he heard my cries, and pitied every groan:
Long as I live, when troubles rise, I’ll hasten to his throne.

I love the Lord; he bowed his ear, and chased my griefs away;
O let my heart no more despair, while I have breath to pray!

The text is in CM (Common Meter), which means that each verse contains four lines - 8 syllables - six syllables - 8 - 6. I searched the Metrical Index and tried to find a suitable tune. None of the CM tunes seemed to work, but a CMD tune stuck out. (CMD stands for Common Meter Doubled. Instead of 8.6.8.6., the melody is 8.6.8.6.8.6.8.6.) I set the text to Laura Taylor’s tune for “To Christ the Lord”. I find it works rather well. After raising the key a minor third and setting Watts’ lyrics, it looks like this:

I’m pleased with the pairing.

I’ll be continually updating the metrical index on this site as a reference tool. Feel free to use it to use my tunes or others’ tunes. (If you have any suggestions on how to make it more useful, please email me and let me know.)

I go to three churches. It’s not because I think I’m holier than other people and I need three spaces to contain my glory. In fact, sometimes I worry that I help out at all three churches because I’m so unholy that I need to do things to salve my conscience. I don’t think that’s really why I go all three places but, rather, it’s because I have the freedom and opportunity to help at all three places and so I do.

On Wednesday nights, I lead the music for the high school group at River of Life Presbyterian Church. I’ve been helping there since January and had a chance to get to know several of the students. One of the students is a Brazilian boy who speaks very little English. One of his friends must translate everything into Portuguese for him. Despite the obvious language barriers, he’s been coming for about 3 months now.

A lot of Christians, and especially Christians in the Reformed heritage, disparage songs that have a lot of repetition. You know, repetition. Like in Psalm 136 with “for his steadfast love endures forever.” Like in Psalm 150 with its echoing “Hallelujah”s. Like in Psalm 67, when we say twice

Let the peoples praise you, O God;
let all the peoples praise you!

Like the four living creatures in Revelation 4 [bibleblock]Revelation 4:8[/bibleblock]or the cry of the twenty-four elders [bibleblock]Revelation 4:11[/bibleblock]

(Note: I really hate that I have to put a disclaimer here. “You can’t say everything when you say anything,” as Richard Pratt [incompletely] states but I feel I’ve got to say something so that I won’t get a bunch of hate mail. Since some people read statements like “repetition can be good” or “repetition is in the Bible” and immediately assume that I’ve drifted into apostasy, I must clarify. I don’t mean repetition in the sense of saying a mantra, seeking to go into a trance or repeating a phrase so many times that the words lose their meaning.)

At youth group, we’ve started to sing May the Peoples Praise You. The best thing about singing the song is, first of all, hearing the kids sing the words of scripture and internalize the Psalm. But there are also smaller victories about the song. Whenever we sing Psalm 67, I can look out and see one student singing “May the peoples praise you, O God; May all the peoples praise you,” and know that those might be the only words he speaks in English all day. I don’t know if his friends have translated the words into Portuguese for him yet, I hope they have, but seeing him sing the refrain is a picture of what the song says - all the peoples of the Earth praising God.

Often times, when we don’t know something, repetition is how we learn. It’s how my friend learned the refrain of Psalm 67; it’s how I learned the alphabet when I was a toddler; it’s why I practiced my scales when I was a freshman in high school; it’s why my band classes started the day the same way every single day with our daily drill. Repetition is one way that we both worship God corporately, “tune our hearts to sing his praise” and train our minds to think Biblically. I can imagine small Hebrew children singing Psalm 150 and not knowing any of the words except “hallelujah” (or “praise the name of the Lord”) but singing loudly on the words they do know. “Let everything that has breath praise the Lord!” Everything, whether it knows the language or not. “Praise the Lord!”

Last summer, I read Worship by the Book, a collection of essays on Christian worship edited by D.A. Carson. The four chapters are written by Carson, Mark Ashton, R. Kent Hughes and Tim Keller.

While I would have supposed that the Keller chapter would have resonated with me more than the others due to our common theological commitments as Presbyterians, it was a quote by Ashton, an Anglican, that was itself worth the price of the book. In fact, I’ve even remembered that the quotation is on page 83 though I hadn’t looked at the book again before this morning.

Mark Ashton writes about three questions that should be used as guidelines for planning a service. In asking the first question, “Is it biblical?”, Ashton writes:

If it is no longer appropriate to chant psalms, we must find other ways to incorporate them into our services. Psalms are the main biblical medium for the expression of human emotion. (Expressions of sorrow and joy, confidence and despair, anger and elation, abound in the Psalter.) As the psalms have disappeared from our church services, so other expressions of human emotion have welled up, some of which are much less healthy than the psalms, and almost all of which are less biblical. But the psalms can still be used — as frameworks for prayer, as antiphonal readings, for meditation.

From trouble deep I cry to thee,
Lord God, hear thou my crying;
Thy gracious ear, oh, turn to me,
Open it to my sighing.
For if thou mean’st to look upon
The wrong and evil that is done,
Who, Lord, can stand before thee?

Martin Luther (after [bible]Psalm 130[/bible])
Translation by George MacDonald

There’s no reason to think that what was true for the Psalmist, true for the people of Israel ascending to Jerusalem annually, true for the Prophets, true for the Apostles, true for the martyrs of the early church, and true for Martin Luther won’t be true for us today. Crying from “out of the depths” means that the one who cries is actually in the depths. That may sound rather simplistic but it’s a key part of the Psalm. These aren’t imaginary depths, pretend floods, phantom boogeymen or fantasy villains; they are real, they are deep and they are hard. Think of the picture used in [bible]Psalm 69[/bible]: being overcome by deep waters, gasping for breath, going under, drowning. The singer is pleading for mercy out of a very real sense of impending doom.

If a singer doesn’t cry out from the depths, the rescue seems a bit tarnished. If a friend picks me up from the airport in Houston, it’s not really a rescue in the truest sense of the word; I wasn’t really in severe need. On the other hand, if I am hiding in an airport locker in Baghdad or Beirut, whoever rescues me from that situation deserves great praise! The Psalm and Luther’s hymn after it are a confession of faith in and trust for deliverance from the Lord. Not just deliverance from oppression from outside of ourselves - we sing for deliverance from the world, the devil and the flesh. We sing out of hope not only for temporal deliverance, but also for final and ultimate deliverance from sin. The hope is great because the need is great. Even in the depths of woe, we wait and hope for the Lord (as the Psalm says twice so we won’t forget), “more than watchmen for the morning, more than watchmen for the morning.”

Johann Sebastian Bach is not just one of the most brilliant and talented men to ever compose music, he was also a faithful Christian and devoted Church musician. His St. Matthew Passion serves not only as a masterful setting of the account of Matthew’s Gospel but also as a theological commentary on sin and our need for a savior. In his compositions of church music, Bach frequently used Lutheran chorales as the basis for cantatas. “Aus tiefer Not schrei ich zu dir” (BWV 38) is one of these. Not only did Bach use Luther’s Psalm 130 setting and melody as the basis for his cantata but he chose complimentary texts to further illumine the hymn for his listeners. Sandwiched in between choral and small ensemble cries for help and confessions of hope, Bach includes this aria for tenor:

I hear, in the midst of my sorrows,
a word of comfort spoken by my Jesus.

Therefore, o troubled conscience,
Trust in Your God’s goodness,
His word lasts and does not fail,
His comfort will never depart from you!

That’s why we can sing with Luther and the Psalmist and generations of believers who have gone before us:

“His promised mercy is my fort,
My comfort and my sweet support;
I wait for it with patience.
…
Our Shepherd, good and true is he,
Who will at last his Israel free
From all their sin and sorrow.”