Thoughts on Music

For some unknown reason, lately, I’ve been getting my music fix in an odd way: Some old tune will come into my head and, if I’m lucky, I’ll also get a few lines from the song. In the middle of humming over it, I’ll google my phrase and see if I can learn the song. And that’ll be my song for the next week or so. Invariably it’ll be something relatively obscure. Here are my current favorites:

Be Thou my Vision

Be Thou my vision, O Lord of my heart;
Naught be all else to me save that Thou art.
Thou my best thought by day or by night,
Waking or sleeping, Thy presence my light.

Be Thou my Wisdom, and Thou my true Word;
I ever with Thee and Thou with me, Lord;
Thou my great father, I thy true son;
Thou in me dwelling, and I with Thee one.

Be Thou my battle-shield, sword for my fight
Be though my dignity, Thou my delight
Thou my soul’s shelter, and Thou my high tower
Raise Thou me heav’nward, O Power of my power

Riches I heed not, nor man’s empty praise,
Thou my inheritance, now and always;
Thou and Thou only, Thou first in my heart
High King of Heaven, my Treasure Thou art.

High King of Heaven, my victory won,
May I reach heaven’s joys, O bright heaven’s son
Heart of my own heart, whatever befall,
Still be my vision, O ruler of all.

And…

Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing

Come, Thou Fount of every blessing, tune my heart to sing Thy grace;
Streams of mercy, never ceasing, call for songs of loudest praise.
Teach me some melodious sonnet, sung my flaming tongues above.
Praise the mount! I’m fixed upon it, mount of Thy redeeming love.

Here I raise my Ebenezer; here by Thy great help I’ve come;
And I hope, by Thy good pleasure, Safely to arrive at home.
Jesus sought me when a stranger, wandering from the fold of God;
He, to rescue me from danger, interposed his precious blood.

O to grace how great a debtor daily I’m constrained to be!
Let thy goodness, like a fetter, bind my wandering heart to Thee.
Prone to wander, Lord I feel it, prone to leave the God I love,
Here’s my heart, O take and seal it, seal it for Thy courts above.

O that day when freed from sinning, I shall see Thy lovely face;
Clothed then in blood washéd linen, how I’ll sing Thy sovereign grace;
Come my Lord, no longer tarry, take my ransomed soul away;
Send Thy angels now to carry me to realms of endless day!

The interesting thing about both of these songs is that they’re both full blown hymns. They’re not even the century-old mini-hymns with cute little choruses. They’re just hymns. You get to sing them once through and then you stop, because it sounds really dorky to go back over the whole thing. Fortunately, they’re both of them long enough that, by the time you get done singing the whole thing, you’re satisfied enough with singing it that you don’t feel the need to repeat. If you want to sing some more, you need to go ahead and move on to the next song.

I’ve heard it said in several places (and it’s not exactly a new complaint) that these older songs are somehow better – usually because they’re deeper, more doctrinal, have more content, or something of that sort – than the new songs that seem to consist entirely of a chorus. The argument seems to be short songs = bad, long songs = good. The irony is that most of these people have their categories backward: the choruses are actually the longer songs because you can repeat them ad infinitum. I’ve been in services where we sang the same chorus for 20 minutes or more. Ideally, a good worship service should have both: the hymns provide a thrilling survey of a set of ideas about God, and then the chorus comes up behind it and digs deep into a single thought.

The real culprit in our services, as far as I’m concerned, isn’t that we sing one kind of song over another, but that the whole service is too short. Even if you have a hymn that has five stanzas, it does you little good when you sing only the first two and then the last one. In the same light, it doesn’t do a lot of good to sing a song designed to repeat if you only sing it through three times. So many times we’re like Joash, only striking the ground three times with our arrows. If the purpose of the worship service is to meet with God, we need to “hit the ground” a few more than three times with our worship. We can’t just follow a form of what we randomly think might be “enough.” We need to pursue this thing until we actually do have an encounter with God, or at least until we’re pretty tired.

Author: KB French

Formerly many things, including theology student, mime, jr. high Latin teacher, and Army logistics officer. Currently in the National Guard, and employed as a civilian... somewhere View all posts by KB French