Part One     Part Two

Attraction of Musical Style

I compare biblical analysis, uncovering, of musical style, to taking away your dog’s food bowl.  He’s man’s best friend, but he will growl and maybe bite if you try to take away his chow.  It is a lust issue.  People react with emotion, very often anger, when someone criticizes their favored musical style.  You’ve seen it here in the comment section, and I’ve been relatively tame about this in this series.

For decades, I’ve said that people’s understanding of God changes more from their music than if you swapped their doctrinal statement.  Someone must imagine God and music shapes that imagination of God.  This occurs in more than just the sentimental and superficial contemporary Christian music churches.  It also happens in other various evangelical, Baptist, independent Baptist, and unaffiliated Baptist churches.  They strongly affect the church’s view of true spirituality, giving spiritual impressions through the feelings they manipulate with their music.

Becoming How You Worship

Someone’s god becomes how he worships, whether individually or corporately.  Everything for the believer is an offering to God, because his worship is perpetual.  The musical style shapes someone’s imagination of God.  God then conforms to what he allows or accepts.  How important is this musical style?  It takes ahold of someone and he can’t give it up.  He tries to keep both, God and the musical style.

For someone to present his body a living sacrifice (Romans 12:1), which he will if he is a brother who experienced the mercies of God as described in Romans 1-11, he will obey the command, “Be not conformed to this world.”  For true and perpetual individual worship to occur, someone will obey that command.  No man can serve two masters.  You know who his master is, based upon his unwillingness to give up his pet music style that feeds his lust and very often pride.

Not Out of Preference

As you read this piece, you might consider that this position arises from a strong preference for sober, reverent musical style.  I just like it better and I want everyone else to follow my preferences.  I have a view of the world that comes from personal taste and since that’s the world I want to live in, I want to conform everyone else to that preference.  You would be totally wrong.

I grew up with worldly music of a particular style.  This musical style matches with the culture my parents raised me.  My family didn’t listen much to music on the radio, but we watched the television show, Hee-Haw, and had records of Eddie Arnold, Glenn Campbell, and Henry Mancini.  If music did play on the radio, this was it.  I remember staying up all night with a friend to hear Ray Stevens’s number one song play on the radio, The Streak, in 1974.  This changed and it wasn’t because I heard preaching or teaching on the subject.  The Lord transformed my heart.

In what we called middle school, fifth and sixth grade, the high school in my town put on Jesus Christ Superstar  andthe school required us to go.  When I saw and heard it, I knew it was wrong.  I would call it “blasphemous.”  My parents said nothing about it to me, but I didn’t like it.  I sat in my seat for the entire performance with my fingers in my ears, looking down at the floor.  No one told me to do that.  It was a choice I made on my own, obviously with the work of the Lord with and on me, and because of what I thought about Jesus as guided by the Bible.

Carried Along by Musical Style

Musical style relates to a person’s understanding of true spirituality.  The Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 12:1-2 writes to the Corinthian church:

1 Now concerning spiritual gifts, brethren, I would not have you ignorant.  2 Ye know that ye were Gentiles, carried away unto these dumb idols, even as ye were led.

Verse one is literally, “concerning spirituals.”  You could say, “concerning spirituality.”  The Corinthians were carried away and led by something other than the Holy Spirit.  What does that?  Many different influences or factors carry someone away unto something that is not of God.  These Corinthians, however, said it was the Holy Spirit, even though it wasn’t.  What is of the Holy Spirit must match with what scripture says about the Holy Spirit.  It won’t be worldly or fleshly if it is the Holy Spirit.

At the same time, people will give credit to a feeling produced by musical style to be the moving of the Holy Spirit.  They say they are borne along by the Holy Spirit, when it is the fleshly moving of the musical style that gives this feeling.  That is not how the Holy Spirit works.  It also is not a true manifestation of the Holy Spirit.  The attraction to the worldly or fleshly musical style does not conform to characteristics or attributes of the Holy Spirit.

The Pride of Musical Style

I’ve been in settings where someone used his abilities with musical instruments and voice to produce a feeling with musical style.  It moved people.  They liked it.  All the time he says it’s the Lord.  This confuses true spirituality with this feeling.  It’s not fruit of the Holy Spirit, just given credit as the Holy Spirit, like what occurred in Corinth.  People very often hunger for some validation or vindication of spirituality and the feeling arising from musical style gives it to them.  It easily replaces true spirituality and also promotes the person who uses it to produce the feeling.

Musical style easily exalts the one who causes it, especially when it is a popular style that moves someone along by a feeling.  It’s easier than true spirituality, something that a man can do.  It is a natural thing that stands in the wisdom of men, which Paul enunciates earlier in 1 Corinthians 1-3.  To prepare people for this experience that counterfeits true spirituality, they accommodate and accept popular, fleshly musical styles of the world.  Those styles fabricate feelings, that very often make the listeners happy.  This happiness is a cheap imitation or replacement for joy.

How serious is confusing professing Christians about true spirituality?  It causes great damage with the way that it fools people.  Those leading in it are hurting their audience, not helping, while receiving credit for help.  This affects scriptural discernment, harming it or removing it.  Musical style is also a gateway to counterfeit, idolatrous religious experiences.  Some call it, and truly, “strange fire,” after the idolatry of Nadab and Abihu.

More to Come