Christians have sung since our faith’s beginning. In His final hours before the crucifixion, Jesus not only established the Lord’s Supper and taught, He also sang and prayed with His apostles (Matt. 26:26-44, John 13-17). We detect echoes of this in one of the earliest New Testament letters, when James told the suffering to pray and the cheerful to sing praise (Jam. 5:13). Paul practiced this late into the night while imprisoned with Silas in Philippi (Acts 16:26). As that episode showed, he knew how to sing and pray with the spirit and the mind – expressing yourself to God while simultaneously building up those around you (I Cor. 14:15).
Everyone recognizes the power of a song to express a heartache, soothe a baby, or help a child learn the alphabet. Christ wants us to use that power to be filled with God’s Holy Spirit, which Paul says happens when we sing – and especially when we sing psalms! “And do not get drunk with wine, for that is debauchery, but be filled with the Spirit, addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with your heart, giving thanks always and for everything to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ” (Eph. 5:18-21).
The Psalms were breathed out by God Himself, and there is one for practically all of human experience. Psalms 47 and 95 shout joyous praise, while Psalms 22, 42, and 88 express deep pain. Psalm 1 teaches righteous living, 106 recites Israel’s history, and 45 is even a romantic love song!
The Psalms provide us a way to not only express all those emotions but to allow God to shape them. Singing psalms helps God’s word “dwell in you richly” (Col. 3:16). Thus armed with His sword, the Spirit helps us put to death the deeds of the body with a perfectly timed reminder (Eph. 6:17, Rom. 8:13). Yet to tap into this power, we need to be people who sing psalms!
Are you ready to have your faith shaped by these powerful songs? Check out our sermon series, Climbing Higher: Songs of Ascents.