But I had no answer. Why do we sing?  

If I were to judge only by what I observed in modern churches, I’d say the main point of singing together is to awaken the peoples’ affections so they are emotionally vulnerable before the preacher stands up to preach. If this is their inner posture, they are more likely to receive the truth of the message. But using music to lower a group’s inhibitions is manipulation, and what’s more important, I don’t see a biblical example of this anywhere. 

Someone may say that music stirs the heart while the preaching stirs the mind. If Jesus said that we need to love God with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength, then we must engage each one with a medium that suits it best. But again, I don’t know of a biblical precedent for such a division. In fact, when Peter preached at Pentecost, the people weren’t “cut to the mind”,  they were “cut to the heart” (Acts. 2:37).

We sat on the porch and thought about all this and realized that we had been singing in church all our lives without ever knowing why. There had to be an answer in scripture, so we started searching. We found plenty of commands to sing, but that didn’t satisfy us because we knew that God never commands us to do something without a compelling reason why.

Then we came to Colossians and it was as plain as it could be:

Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God. (3:16)

That was it. One imperative rules over this verse: Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly. So that explains what people in the new covenant community should do. Then Paul deals out two practical means to follow the command:

1. teach and admonish one another in all wisdom, and

2. sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs

We staggered at the weight of it. Paul explains that singing is a tool through which the word of Christ comes to dwell in the hearts of the people of God. If you play guitar and sing then you are wielding a tool designed by God to open the hearts of His people and deposit the word of Christ. The gravity of responsibility God has entrusted to worship leaders ought to make them tremble, and it ought to send them to their knees crying out to God for help in writing and singing songs that convey the full scope of His character and deeds.

Worship leaders are stewards of God’s glory and when they constrict the aperture on that glory by leading the congregation in vanilla, meaningless songs, they rob God of glory. So, worship leaders, we, the people of God, call out to you and beg that when you use the God-ordained tool of music to open our hearts, give us the word of Christ and nothing less.