Aug
21
From depths of woe I raise to thee the voice of lamentation…[Psalm 130]
My God, O my God, have you left me alone? Why have you forsaken me, deaf to my groan? [Psalm 22]
If you have worshipped at FPC Kosciusko during the 2006, you may have sung those words. Have you ever sung like that in public, gathered worship? Have you ever sung or prayed that way in your own prayers? Dr. Carl Trueman wrote an article in Themelios 25.2 entitled, ‘What Do Miserable Christians Sing?’. He gives a profound answer (though not the only answer) to the question of why we include Psalm-singing in our worship services. A large percentage of the Psalms deal with feeling bad–heart-break, sadness, anger, torment, brokenness, and the like. But contemporary Christianity and its traditional Southern Protestant grandmother has little room for these; after all, when I love Jesus, ‘Now I am happy all the day,’ right? “Every day with Jesus is sweeter than the day before,’ right? What do the saints sing when they are broken-hearted, depressed, lonely or despairing? Frankly, the standard diet of hymns and contemporary worship music has no language of lament–and this is not a good thing!
Dr. Trueman writes, ‘In the psalms, God has given the church a language which allows it to express even the deepest agonies of the human soul in the context of worship. Does the absence of such cries from contemporary worship indicate that the comfortable values of consumerism have silently infiltrated the church, making us consider them irrelevant, embarrassing, and signs of abject failure?’
Worship brings us into the presence of God, to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering. It is indeed something glorious and triumphant. But it is also the gathering of the church militant–those who fight on against the world, the flesh and the devil. The focal point of our worship is the Lord Jesus Christ, the Suffering Servant, who had nowhere to lay his head, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, and who was obedient to death–a death foretold and expressed beforehand in the Psalms. We need God’s resources to cope with periods of suffering, despair and heartbreak. We need to learn the biblical language of lamentation. Learning to lament also helps speak credibly and compassionately to shattered and broken people to whom we may be called as witnesses of God’s mercy and grace. Many of them have already written Christianity off as shallow and unrealistic. Have we given them reason to think so?
It’s OK not to be ‘OK’. We strip our worship of its honesty and its gospel beauty and power when we take the minor key of lament out of our worship.
Why do I mourn and toil within when it is mine to hope in God? I shall again sing praise to him; he is my help, he is my God. [Psalm 42]
Comments
Leave a Reply