Living Stones – Saturday, November 4, 2017
Speaking in songs
Ephesians 5:19
“… speaking to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord, …”
The church described in the pages of the New Testament is a very strange and unfamiliar place. The people in it were encouraged by their leaders to do some unusual things. One of the things that they were told was to speak to each other in psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs.
I am trying to imagine the fellowship. I am trying to imagine the tone-deaf brothers at the back walking around looking for someone to sing to because everyone flees when they see them coming. No one wanted to be subjected to their off key and out of rhythm performances.
Fortunately, I don’t believe that this is what the Apostle Paul meant in the passage, Ephesians 5:17-21. He could not mean that the members of the church stopped having conversations and just sang to each other as they bumped into each other in the pews or around the water dispenser. We don’t have the musicians and vocal cords to support that.
Rather, I believe that the Apostle was urging the saints to live lives and have relationships and engagements that reflect constant worship.
Constant worship? There is a tendency to see worship as that Sunday activity (previously seen as a Sabbath activity) with our own pursuits and activities filling all the time and days in between.
Worship, in the time between the Sundays, is seen as personal activity if it exists. We call it “devotions” or “quiet time” or just “sayin’ my prayers.” However, worship should dominate not just the personal and private time, but also the community life among God’s people. Everything we do, work, recreation, education, and everything else should demonstrate our reverence for God and His centrality to our lives.
David, who was the great worship innovator and set up lasting arrangements for how worship was to be conducted in the temple, also demonstrated in his psalms that worship was not just for the temple on the Sabbath. For example, in Psalm 113:3 he says, “From the rising of the sun unto the going down of the same the Lord’s name is to be praised.”
We see the same thing again in the prophet Malachi “For from the rising of the sun, even to its going down, My name shall be great among the Gentiles; In every place incense shall be offered to My name,
And a pure offering; For My name shall be great among the nations,” says the Lord of hosts.
Twice in the epistles, here in Ephesians 5:18-21 and then in Colossians 3:14-17, Paul writes about how we should speak to each other, suggesting that such communication be characterised in terms of method and content.
So the question becomes, what are those things that we talk about and say to each other when we are together that demonstrate that we are a community constantly at worship? In other words, how do we engage each other in ways that demonstrate the shared joy we have as children of God, and the understanding that our God is constantly with us and we are in him. How do we work in ways that show that everything that we do we do as unto the Lord?
There are very good examples of this in this very chapter of Ephesians. In verse 4 Paul didn’t say that we shouldn’t enjoy jokes, however, he does advise us against coarse joking. In verse 3 he didn’t say that we should not have and enjoy sex, however, he does admonish against sexual immorality.
Worship, then, is a lifestyle for us individually, and a characteristic of the household of faith. We must ask ourselves, what dominates the conversation in our homes, and meetings and other engagements with each other? How are our conversations with Christians different from our conversations with others?
The answer to these questions get to the heart, I believe, of what the Apostle was getting at when he challenged how we speak and what we say to each other.
Think on these things:
- Do you have a daily private devotional time?
- Do you spend time, apart from the Sunday morning church service, with the people from your community of faith?
- What are the things that you talk about the most when you are together with other Christians?
Prayer focus:
Let us pray today that we would build stronger relationship in our community of faith.
In His Grace
Pastor Alex
