Psalm 95:1 – Oh come, let us sing to the Lord; let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation.
While there are legitimately concerning pastors and false teachers, other times, people love to criticize other churches, pastors, and belief systems simply because they’re different than theirs. How do you discern whether the music coming from certain churches you may or may not agree with (for legitimate or illegitimate reasons) should be listened to by you or sung by your church?
Let’s take it back to the Bible. There’s an entire book with 150 chapters called Psalms which is, essentially, a collection of early worship songs. It’s a very real and very practical book as some focus on the holiness and greatness of God and others focus on the tough parts of life.
We don’t know who wrote every one of them but many of them were written by a guy named David. One of the moments probably most people know about his early life, likely from a flannelgraph in your Baptist church’s Sunday School classroom, is that he was a young shepherd who defeated a giant named Goliath with just a few stones.
Later in life, in a not-so-Instagrammable moment, we have the story of King David and Bathsheba, or as Veggie Tales calls it, King George and the Ducky. David sees this woman, Bathsheba, bathing while he’s hanging out on the rooftop of the palace. He has his servants bring her to him, commits adultery with her, and later has her husband Uriah killed to cover up this shameful act.
This guy wrote multiple Psalms, which are forever preserved in the perfect work of the Bible. So, at the end of the day, you could say we’re all sinners and works in progress and the issue is not who wrote the song but what is the song?
Are the lyrics good, truthful, and theologically sound? Do you like the music and is it pleasing to the ear? As long as it’s not teaching something false, I would say who cares who wrote it? Because if you only sing songs by people who agree with you, the songs probably aren’t that great anyway.
Lastly, there are also some great songs written by people who we think are godly. However, the truth is we do not know their personal life and, since there’s no way to verify the moral quality of all songwriters, we should focus on the art and let God deal with the artists.
What do you think about this – are there any songs you find truthful and that lead you to worship our God that may come from churches where you don’t 100% agree with their theology?
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