The Gift of Congregational Singing

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Article: The Encouragement of Congregational Singing by Dustin J Coleman (original source here)

One of the great gifts that God has given His church is the gift of congregational singing. I often come to our worship gathering discouraged – discouraged with my failures, my anxieties, and my weakness. What a gift the gathered church is to a discouraged soul! Every week we come in from our different lives and gather to, among other things, sing the glory and power of the gospel.

This hit home for me at a recent worship gathering of our church. As I sang the songs and thought about the people who were singing around me, my heart was invigorated with the joy of the victory of the gospel.

I saw a woman many of us affectionately call “Grandma Kay.” Kay is in her 90s and suffers from several debilitating weaknesses that come along with being of advanced age. She seems weaker with each passing week and I know the day of her passing is not far away. And yet here she is, sitting (because she can’t stand) and singing with us:

And on that day when my strength is failing

The end draws near and my time has come

Still my soul will sing Your praise unending

Ten thousand years and then forevermore!

This is a victory cry! Throughout the winding years of decades, neither old age nor the pains of impending death have been able to rob Grandma Kay of her joy. Neither life nor death has been able to separate her from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

And then I see Mary, a single, divorced woman in her mid-50s. She often jokes that Christ had to wear gloves when He reached out to save her, so deep was the filth of her debauchery. Her voice joins all of ours as we sing:

O perfect redemption! The purchase of blood

To every believer the promise of God

The vilest offender who truly believes

That moment from Jesus a pardon receives.

This is a victory cry! Her voice joins the chorus that proclaims that there is no depth of muck and sin that the depth of Christ’s grace and mercy is not deeper still. Sin’s grip is no match when God decides to wrest His children free.

And then I see Ryan, a young single man in our congregation. Ryan is coming out of a very difficult past, a past of drug addiction, alcohol, and sexual sin. But, praise God, he is fighting! He is fighting but there are days of failure. But here he is, standing in the row behind me, as we sing these words:

Christ the sure and steady anchor

While the tempest rages on

When temptation claims the battle

And it seems the night has won

Deeper still then goes the anchor

Though I justly stand accused

I will hold fast to the anchor

It shall never be removed.

This is a victory cry! Sin has won so long in his life and it drove him deeper and deeper into despair. But now he meets those failures with faith, clinging to Christ, trusting in His justifying death, and longing for the light of day to conquer the night.

And I see Eva. Eva immigrated to the United States from India, where her daughters still live. She works the third shift at 7 Eleven so that she can send money back home. Even amidst the spiritual darkness of India, gospel light found her. I see her standing, with eyes closed and hands open toward the sky singing:

Let every kindred, every tribe

On this terrestrial ball

To Him all majesty ascribe

And crown Him Lord of all!

This is a victory cry! Satan is bound and he no longer holds the nations captive in ignorance and sin. The gospel is going forward and Christ is ransoming people for God from every tribe and tongue and people and nation. Eva is a ringing cry that Satan is beaten and Christ’s great kingdom shall reign on earth.

I hear these people singing and I am reminded of the victory and power of the gospel. There is no weakness, no stain of sin, no power of temptation, no spiritual darkness that can ever conquer the power of God working in the lives of His people. Their voices remind me of the freedom and victory and joy of God’s people. The melody of their hearts tunes my troubled soul to the song of God’s triumph.

And in their singing, I am helped and my soul is lifted to God. May we remember the treasured gift of singing that God has given His people!

The Holy Spirit’s Ministry

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Article by Dr. Sinclair Ferguson (original source here)

The Reformers placed tremendous stress on the gifts of the Spirit to the whole body of Christ. John Calvin himself has rightly been described as “the theologian of the Holy Spirit” (B.B. Warfield). Yet Reformed Christians always have been given a “bad press” for their views on the gifts of the Holy Spirit.

Our conviction is that God purposefully gave some gifts (specifically the ability to work miracles, the gift of revelatory prophecy, and speaking in tongues) only for a limited period. We have solid biblical reasons for believing this:

1. A temporary manifestation of these gifts is characteristic of God’s pattern of working. Contrary to popular opinion, such gifts as these were given spasmodically in biblical history. Their occurrence is generally contained within a handful of time periods lasting around a generation each.

2. The function of these gifts, namely to convey and to confirm revelation (now ceased until Christ’s return), is underlined in the New Testament itself (Acts 2:22, 14:3; cf. 2 Cor. 12:12; Heb. 2:3–4).

3. The history of the New Testament suggests that by the close of the apostolic age the role of these gifts was being superseded by the completion of the New Testament. Thus, there is no reference to their presence—or, more significantly, their future regulation—in the Pastoral Letters.

More could be said here in terms of biblical Christology, for the outpouring of the gifts of tongues, prophecy, and miracles at Pentecost was specifically intended to mark the coronation of Christ. It was, therefore, inherently intended to be a non-permanent feature of the life of the church. But in this context, it probably is more important to emphasize another, often-ignored facet of Reformed teaching. It is well-expressed in some words of the great Puritan John Owen:

Although all these gifts and operations ceased in some respect, some of them absolutely, and some of them as to the immediate manner of communication and degree of excellency; yet so far as the edification of the church was concerned in them, something that is analogous unto them was and is continued.

What does this mean? Simply this: It is the same Spirit who gives both temporary and continuing gifts to the church. We should not be surprised, therefore, to discover common threads in both.

Perhaps the most important common thread is the Spirit’s ministry in illumination—He enlightens our minds to enable us to know, see, grasp, and apply the will and purposes of God. There was an immediacy to illumination in the temporary gifts. The Spirit taught the apostles “all things” (John 14:26) and led them into “all truth” (John 16:13). Now, however, He continues this work in us through the Scriptures He enabled the apostles to write for us.

Indeed, during the Farewell Discourse (John 14–16), our Lord made it clear to the apostles that this would be one of the central ministries of the Spirit in their lives: He would remind them of what Jesus had said (the gospels), lead them into the truth (the epistles), and show them the things to come (e.g. Revelation).

Why, then, are Christians today—in contrast to their fathers—so thirsty to experience immediate revelation from God, when His desire for us is the ongoing work of the Spirit opening up our understanding through the mediated revelation of the New Testament? There seem to be three reasons:

1. It is more exciting to have direct revelation rather than Bible revelation. It seems more “spiritual,” more “divine.”

2. For many people, it feels much more authoritative to be able to say, “God has revealed this to me” than to say, “The Bible tells me so.”

3. Direct revelation relieves us of the need for painstaking Bible study and careful consideration of Christian doctrine in order to know the will of God. In comparison to immediate revelation, Bible study seems—to be frank—boring.

Lest we be brow-beaten and develop a kind of siege mentality as Reformed Christians, here are some things we should bear in mind about the work of illumination:

1. Jesus experienced it. Yes, our Lord prophesied; yes, He worked miracles. But we would be guilty of Docetism (the view that Jesus’ humanity only seemed to be like ours) and untrue to Scripture if we failed to recognize that Jesus Himself grew in wisdom and favor with God (Luke 2:52) by patiently meditating on the Old Testament Scriptures. (I suspect He probably knew them by heart.) The third Servant Song of Isaiah (Isa. 50:4–11) gives us an extraordinarily moving picture of the Lord Jesus waking up each day, dependent on His Father to illumine His understanding of His Word that He might think, feel, act, and live as the Man full of the Spirit of wisdom and understanding (Isa. 11:2ff).

2. This is the divine method that produces authentic Christian growth, because it involves the renewal (not the abeyance) of the mind (Rom. 12:2) and it is progressive (it takes time and demands the obedience of our wills). Sometimes God does things quickly. But His ordinary way is to work slowly and surely to make us progressively more like our Lord Jesus.

3. The result of the Spirit working with the Word of God to illumine and transform our thinking is the development of a godly instinct that operates in sometimes surprising ways. The revelation of Scripture becomes, in a well-taught, Spirit-illumined believer, so much a part of his or her mindset that the will of God frequently seems to become instinctively and even immediately clear—just as whether a piece of music is well or badly played is immediately obvious to a well-disciplined musician. It is this kind of spiritual exercise that creates discernment (see Heb. 5:11–14).

Well-meaning Christians sometimes mistake the Spirit’s work of illumination for revelation, which, unhappily, can lead to serious theological confusion and potentially unhappy practical consequences. But the doctrine of illumination also helps us explain some of the more mysterious elements in our experience without having to resort to the claim that we have the gift of revelation and prophecy. Here the late John Murray spoke with great wisdom: “As we are the subjects of this illumination and are responsive to it, and as the Holy Spirit is operative in us to the doing of God’s will, we shall have feelings, impressions, convictions, urges, inhibitions, impulses, burdens, resolutions. Illumination and direction by the Spirit through the Word of God will focus themselves in our consciousness in these ways. We are not automata.… We must not think [these things] are … necessarily irrational or fanatically mystical.”

God’s Word, illumined by God’s Spirit, is, as Psalm 119 so magnificently shows, the pathway to spiritual stability and liberty. It leads us unwaveringly to knowing, loving, and doing God’s will on a daily basis. It brings joy through light.