Sing Loud, Die Happy: An Exploration of How God’s Gift of Song Is Meant to Change Us

By Jim Thompson

Singing is one of the most repeated commands in Holy Scripture. It's right up there with "believe" and "do not fear." But commands like these can feel vaguely spiritual, intangible, or esoteric. You might not know if you're doing them right. Not so with singing. You just open your mouth and make it happen. And when we do, we often get the sense that God is up to something, that he has designed singing to change us. But how?

How does singing do its transformative work? Why has God hard-wired singing with such power? What does Scripture teach us about the gift of song? What did the songs of Scripture feel like and sound like? Why does singing awaken something so visceral and emotional within us? And what are the results of being changed by the power of song? Behind all of these questions lies a creative, songful God. He delights in singing. He extends to us a melodic mission. He invites us into intimacy with himself and with his people, and singing is more essential to the journey than we have yet to believe.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Release date: Aug 11, 2022
• ISBN: 9781666740899

Jim Thompson

Jim Thompson is the teaching and equipping pastor at Fellowship Greenville in Greenville, South Carolina. He lectures widely on biblical theology, is an armchair musician and songwriter, and the author of A King and a Kingdom: A Narrative Theology of Grace and Truth (2011).

Book preview

Preface

I walked into the coffee shop, took off my bookbag, and set it down gently. Before it was still, a pastor-friend two tables away unplugged his earphones and said hey. We exchanged pastoral pleasantries, and then he asked, What are you working on? Actually, I replied, I’m working on a book. He was intrigued. Oh cool! What’s it about? Well, I paused. And I’ll be clear here at the outset. I love the ideas in this book. They have given me life. But I also know how odd it can sound. Well, I said, I’m kind of writing a biblical theology of singing. He gave a single-breath chuckle. I could tell he wasn’t expecting that answer. Then he half-seriously asked, There’s enough for that?

Oh yeah, there’s enough.

In fact, this project has shown me that you could fill twenty volumes with pertinent details about the Bible’s vision for singing. My meager efforts here are just scratching the surface. Also, I don’t want to deceive you. This isn’t just a book about singing. It’s a theology book. I’m using singing as a front to retell the story of the Bible that leads to Jesus. And because the reality and metaphor of song serve as a perfect window into life with God and each other, this is likewise a book about what it means to live as God’s people in the shadow of the Jesus story. In short, this is a book about what singing is, what singing does, and what God wants to do with singing.

Throughout the history of Christianity, billions of Christians for thousands of years in hundreds of countries have done three things together as an expression of their faith: prayer, Scripture, and song. But if you press on these three, you will soon realize that song, more often than not, has been the place where prayer and Scripture meet together. Beyond this, we pray together. We talk about how to pray. We encourage people to pray. Additionally, we read Scripture together. We talk about how to read Scripture. We encourage people to read Scripture. However, when it comes to singing, we just do it and don’t really talk about it. Every week for centuries upon centuries, God’s people have gathered to sing with minimal consideration as to why, how, and what they’re doing. This is negligence. Somebody should write a book about it.

And who knows, maybe this book is more of a projection of my own needs than I’m willing to admit. I wrote this book in the middle of a global pandemic. You were there. You remember. Singing wasn’t the wisest of options at the time. Singing at home with my family in our pajamas was great. Singing was still powerful when we spread out to do it. Song was still a gift when we wore masks. But all of it made me miss the intimacy, fun, emotionality, nearness, and joy of singing together pre-pandemic. I like to think my being compelled to write this was driven by my love for song and my love for Scripture. I believe that’s true, but life in a pandemic certainly accented the poignancy of this study for me.

Also, I’m grateful to feel that I haven’t written alone. There’s nothing new under the sun, and I’m indebted to many. Whether the erudition of Jeremy Begbie, the pathos of Reggie Kidd, the ingenuity of Clara Rogers, the chutzpah of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the shepherding of Keith and Kristyn Getty, the poetry of Aaron Weiss, or the unction of Martin Luther—it’s an honor to stand on the shoulders of other thinkers and singers. And just as important as these are those who have personally encouraged me along the way.

To Robert Wolgemuth, thank you for your constant support. Having a veteran writer as a cheerleader has been a blessing beyond words. To the Wipf & Stock team, your patience and attention to detail have been invaluable. To Carissa, mountains of gratitude for the cover design. Hooray for local art! To my dearest of friends, Jonny Brush. You’ve read almost this entire manuscript out loud, and your feedback on it has been so helpful. I love singing with you. To anyone I’ve ever been able to sing hymns with in Greenville, every note has been a dream. May our tribe increase. To one of the worst bands ever, Saint Cecilia and the Melody Makers, you guys are family, and may our family reunions know no end. I love y’all. To James and Anna Jubilee, thanks so much for your patience while I worked on this. Singing with you guys is such a gift. I love being your dad. And lastly, to my beautiful Sara. This paragraph is a great excuse to say thank you for bringing grace, balance, thoughtfulness, and creativity to bear on every part of my life, including this book. You are my song.

And to you, dear reader, if you are one-tenth as stirred by reading the following pages as I have been by writing them, then you’re in luck. As you venture further and consider God’s glorious gift of song, my prayer is that you would continually be impressed with Jesus. His earliest followers resolved, We can’t help but speak about what we have seen and heard. I hope you would be able to similarly testify, "We can’t help but sing about what we have seen and heard." And however it got here, thanks for holding this book in your hands.

Come, let us sing for joy to the Lord; let us shout aloud to the Rock of our salvation! Let us come before him with thanksgiving, and extol him with music and song.¹

1

. Ps

95

:

1–2

, NIV.

Why Singing?

As long as we live, there is never enough singing.

—Martin Luther²

Singing is, in and of itself, a sacred duty. Not just hearing the music play, not just being taken to a certain place emotionally, but the actual act of singing.

—Jonathan Aigner³

Intro

Singing is one of the most repeated commands in Holy Scripture. It’s right up there with believe and do not fear. But commands like these can feel vaguely spiritual, intangible, or esoteric. You might not know if you’re doing them right. Not so with singing. You just open your mouth and make it happen. As postmodern philosopher Buddy the Elf reminds us, It’s just like talking, except longer and louder, and you move your voice up and down. And in the Bible, we’re told to do this time and time again.⁴

Sing praises to God, sing praises! Sing praises to our King, sing praises! For God is the King of all the earth; sing praises with understanding!⁵

This might be one of the easiest lines in the Bible to interpret and apply: God is really great, so sing about it. And obedience here isn’t vague. It’s direct. Open your mouth and make it happen. Just do it. Long and loud. Move your voice up and down. God knows what’s best for us, so we should obey him. We’ll end up with an abbreviated experience of life with God if we neglect what he asks of us. So, if you’d like to be frustrated, annoyed, or disgruntled with God, his world, and others, just be dismissive of what he clearly says. If you’d like for your life to be less than awesome, just don’t sing.

Please don’t misunderstand me. This is not about a lifeless obedience. God doesn’t want singing robots. God wants us to inspect the details of this obedience. I’m also not talking about pinpointing some pure motive in the recesses of your heart. We can get to motives later, but sometimes that leads to what my dad calls paralysis by analysis. What I’m talking about is that singing never comes alone. It’s never in a vacuum. I want to know what else is attached to singing. And in the Bible, it’s often connected to worship, community, and emotionality, but especially to joy. This joy connection is not a free-floating biblical ideal. It’s also the case in psychology and other social sciences that people who sing are happier and less prone to depression. Or, in the famous words of C. S. Lewis, In commanding us to glorify him, God is inviting us to enjoy him.⁶

But my biggest question is why. Why does God make such a big deal of singing? Why doesn’t he command us to laugh as much as sing? Or eat, or jog, or dance, or some other physical activity? Why singing? What does it do? Why is it so important? How does it connect to joy? Don Saliers writes, The act of singing together is deeply and indelibly human,⁷ and if he’s right, then we have to explore the mechanics of singing. It won’t suffice to merely do it. We should contemplate the beauty, mystery, and euphoria of singing so that the act of singing will be all the more glorious.

So, yes, why singing? But also, how are we supposed to do it? How did they sing in the Bible? What if we don’t do it? And what should we sing? How should we do it as the church? How does singing relate to our emotional life? What does Saliers mean when he says that singing is indelibly human? Does that mean that there’s a way that singing makes us more fully or truly human? How does that work? And if you put all these questions in a blender, they come out like this: what’s behind the Bible’s repeated invitation to sing?

Personal Experience

Before we wade into what the Bible says, we have to be honest. Our personal experiences will make or break this whole thing before we get started. You already have an opinion on singing in general and churchy singing in particular. And I do too.

Being a Baptist preacher’s kid, everywhere I went, there was singing. Sunday morning? Singing. Sunday night? Singing. Wednesday night? Singing. Chapel at school? Singing. Youth group? Singing. Mission trip? Singing. Youth camp? Maybe too much singing. And then there’s my mom. My mom was always making up songs. She’s one of the most hopeful and joyful people I know, and her unending fountain of freestyle is proof. She would sing about God, about Bible verses, about what she was learning, about what she was cooking, and even about how my brother and I needed to chill when we were annoying each other. I have never not been inundated with song. Yet, somehow, I never grew tired of it.

Singing has been there for some of the most memorable and worshipful times of my life. It has its own category of nostalgia in my heart and mind. I think of ten dollar punk shows with a hundred people sweating and singing together at the top of our lungs. I think of a dozen or so friends and two guitars taking our time to sing until we got tired. I think of over a thousand people gathered—Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Pentecostals, Anglicans, Roman Catholics, and those pesky nondenominationals—all to sing hymns of the faith together. Times like these in my life have been as transformative as they have been transcendent, and singing was central every time. It has not only been a huge part of my life, but I believe it’s been a huge part of changing my life. And I’m well aware this isn’t everybody’s story.

Maybe you didn’t grow up in church, and singing with other people always feels forced or awkward. You mouth along to make people think you’re singing, but it still feels weird. Or maybe you’re an introvert, and no matter how hard you try, it feels insincere, like you’re trying to be someone you’re not. You somehow have a valid reason for being nineteen minutes late on Sunday, and getting there right when the pastor starts the message. Or maybe you’re a musician, and you can’t get past judging whoever is leading the music or singing. You would do it differently—the song choice, the key, the arrangement, the whole thing. Or maybe you are more creative, and you have your own litany of reasons why you’re excused from singing, and some of them might be completely reasonable.

My wife and I have a friend who is apathetically agnostic. Some days she’ll say that God is probably out there and probably nice. She grew up in church, but experienced some spiritual abuse that really angered her. We sat with her the last time she ever attended a church service. Why was it her last Sunday of giving church a chance? Because the message included this very idea—the importance and value of singing, and why and how we better be doing it. And somehow, on that day, it was worded and phrased in such a way that she was done. In her ears, it sounded like the abuse that she had previously faced, and she couldn’t handle it.

Again, our distinct experiences will nuance the way we process these ideas. But here’s my request at the outset: Let’s humbly ask, What if Scripture has a different interpretation of my life than I do? Often our reflexive reaction is to judge reality based on our experience. This isn’t wrong. However, if we claim to be followers of Jesus, even if we have different understandings of what Scripture is and does, we shouldn’t want to read Scripture through the lens of our experience. Rather, we should want to read our experience through the lens of Scripture.

So, in many ways, this will be the dance of this entire book: How might Scripture be changing the story you’ve been telling yourself about yourself, especially when it comes to the gift of song? Or, how does Scripture’s teaching on singing inform your experience of singing, and what should you do about it? On this journey, I’m not out to elevate or belittle anyone’s experience, but I do believe that God wants to use the words of the Bible to give his people fresh perspective on their lives, particularly concerning the uniqueness and power of song.

The Language of Song

Assessing how the Bible talks about singing is no easy task. Even a brief tour of the terminology could be a book unto itself. The Old Testament has close to a dozen words that could be translated sing. When ancient Israel thought about the idea of song, it’s almost like they couldn’t contain themselves.

Some Hebrew words for singing are emotional. Some are musical. Some are about praise and adoration, and are regularly used in the context of singing. Israel had various song-related words for shouting, chanting, mourning, and rejoicing. They also had songs for specific occasions like military victory, crowning a king, or celebrating a feast. Theirs was undoubtedly a singing faith, and when we move into the New Testament, we find the exact same.

Jesus sang with his disciples. The early church sang in Acts. Paul and Silas even sang in prison! Paul encouraged his friends to sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs.⁸ Notice the different language for song because just one word can’t contain its significance. And finally, when we get to Revelation, John peers into the heavens and guess what he sees? He sees lively, Jesus-centered singing:

And they sing a new song, saying, ‘Worthy are you to take the scroll, and to open its seals, for you were slain and purchased people for God by your blood from every tribe and language and people and nation!’⁹

My present point is that the Bible gives us snapshots of singing in a variety of contexts for a variety of reasons employing a variety of terms. The implication is that there isn’t a season for which song isn’t suitable. The gift of song is meant to be received as a primary way for us to know, enjoy, and experience God. And our engagement with God is anything but static. Sometimes we are hopeful and worshipful. Sometimes we’re grieving and angry. Sometimes we’re filled with joy and trust. Sometimes we’re distracted by fear and doubt. So, to add to our list of questions, how should we utilize the gift of song in different ways as we navigate life with God?

As we’ll continue to see, the language of song is as diverse as the purpose of song. This demands a patient investigation of how the Bible portrays these ideas. And just like a song isn’t comprised of one sung note but includes movement, harmonies, lyrics, and instruments, so Scripture’s portrait of singing is not monophonic. It includes movement and melody, laments and lauds, beats and