“I will sing unto the Lord as long as I live: 

I will sing praise to my God while I have my being.” Psalm 104:33

 

It’s time to prepare our hearts!

 

Worshiping with music… it’s a wonderful way to connect with God and feel His presence! Whether you’re singing or listening, whether you’re alone or in a congregation, there is something stirring about music.

What is it about those old hymns or the newer worship songs that grips us? What makes us want to sing them? What makes us want to hear them? The tune captures our ears, and the lyrics—the lyrics!—they capture our hearts. I’m so thankful for people with the God-given gift of being able to so beautifully express words of worship through lyrics in a song. 

Looking back through history, we see that music has always been a part of worship. Look at the Book of Psalms in the Bible. It’s filled with hymns and prayers, a lot of which were written by David who lived hundreds of years before Jesus was born. The “lyrics” he wrote are still put to music, today. 

When reading from the Psalms, don’t we quite often realize that we know the verse we’re reading? These words are familiar to most of us: “This is the day that the Lord has made; I will rejoice and be glad in it.” We sing those words often thinking of them as a nice little chorus, but because of them we have “hidden God’s Word in our hearts.” To be exact, we've hidden Psalm 118:24 in our hearts!

Worshiping through song not only ministers to us when we sing, but it ministers to those around us. Augustine wrote these words regarding a corporate worship service about 1600 years ago: “How much I wept at your hymns and canticles, deeply moved by the voices of your sweetly singing church. Those voices flowed into my ears, and the truth was poured out in my heart, whence a feeling of piety surged up and my tears ran down. And these things were good for me.” What a wonderful testimony to the effect of our singing praises. 

Today’s worship songs are just as dynamic, bringing us to a place of openness before God, a place in which God can minister to us as we raise those songs to Him from a heart of worship. We, like the Psalmist, should “sing unto the Lord as long as [we] live.”
 

 

Reminder: God has given us this gift in that while we lift our songs of worship to Him, He in turn ministers to us.