At THIS LINK you can listen to what is downloaded in audio at the Word of Truth Conference for 2018.  This is our fourth year and last on The Gospel.

When video arrives for the sessions, it will be at THIS LINK and music will be at THIS LINK.

How many “social scientists” do you think would be allowed in state schools who support spanking children as a form of child discipline?  The Bible without doubt teaches spanking as a method, a required one, for child discipline, so for successful child discipline.  Parents, who would obey God, are required to do it this way.

Elizabeth T. Gershoff is a professor of human development and family sciences at The University of Texas at Austin and CNN published just yesterday, November 6, 2018, an article she authored against spanking children, entitled, “The era of spanking is finally over.”  Gershoff gave her opinion, but was also reporting that the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended in a new policy statement published in the journal Pediatrics on Monday, November 1, 2018, that “parents not spank, hit or slap their children.”

I believe the Bible is the Word of God and what Gershoff wrote clashes with scripture.  It also contradicts what I see with my own eyes with years of experience.  As spanking has diminished good behavior in children and adults has also decreased.  She says, however, in her first line that “years of research have shown that spanking children is ineffective and potentially harmful,” and later that “spanking does not make children better behaved in the long run, and in fact makes their behavior worse.”  My instant thought is, “what planet is she living on?”

It is easy to see that Gershoff is spewing her own propaganda for whatever reason, especially evidenced by both this statement,

[W]e need to stop hitting our children in the name of discipline. And yes — spanking is just a euphemism for “hitting children.” We do not allow adults to hit each other, but for some reason American society has decided it should be legal and even desirable for adults to hit children. We need to end this double standard and provide children with the same protection from hitting that is given to all adults.

and these ones,

We consistently find that the more a child is spanked, the more aggressive he or she will be in the future. 

Spanking also teaches children that it is acceptable to use physical force to get what you want. It is thus no surprise that the more children are spanked, the more likely they are to be aggressive or to engage in delinquent behaviors like stealing.

These are false statements.  Calling spanking, “hitting children,” and comparing adults hitting each other, are atrocious, abhorrent lies.  It is a serious attack on God, the Bible, the Christian faith, Christian parents, and religious freedom.  Spanking is not hitting children.  It does not encourage or cause violent behavior.  It is just the opposite.  Children, who are not spanked, are far more greatly out of control, and more likely to get violent with others.

I don’t trust the studies.  They are disputing scripture, flying in the face of God.  I do. not. think or believe that children, who are not spanked as a form of child discipline, are better behaved.  A lot of the “studies” or “research” of psychiatrists and in the social scientists are junk science.  I’m saying they are not science.  They are fake.  This has been proven many times.  Very often the “studies” or “research” contradicts each other.  There are many examples, but even the Smithsonian in a massive project proves that more than half of psychological studies, when replicated, got different results.

It’s actually worse than “they’re wrong.”  When they’ve been wrong, people have moved to follow their “science.”  They’ve been given the respect of science.  People have to change now, because their studies show.  They don’t, and they can be proven wrong.  Most of the time, their false results proceed from their own presuppositions.  They want to find a result, so they do.  People don’t want a God, so they use “science” to prove He doesn’t exist.  Studies show.  Studies showed that self-esteem was important and we entered the self-esteem era, ruining children and people, and now they say, we were wrong, so we live in a narcissistic society.  Ooops.  A generation of parents did it wrong, telling their children how great they were, speculating about every possible problem due to low self esteem.  Meanwhile, horrific damage.  No children think they are as great and wonderful as American children.

“Studies” have to be done.  People have to prove they are studious and students.  It helps if someone can come up with something new that no one has heard before.  It proves how smart the student is.  He found this.  No one else had.  It doesn’t make you look smarter to say, this is something people have known for centuries and it works, so keep doing it.

Gershoff is a progressive.  This is the curse of progressivism, where people think that they will progess, in their own depraved, proud thinking.  They think we’re evolving and we need to progress to evolve further.  It is also at the base of Marxism and almost entirely of these “social sciences.”  They have been given the elevated status of “science,” what scripture calls “science false so called” or how we would put today, “so-called science” (1 Timothy 6:20-21).  Observations of men are not superior to revelation of God.

I do believe that parents abuse their children in the name of spanking and religion.  They don’t follow the biblical pattern.  I believe far more unbelievers, who don’t believe in spanking, actually abuse their children and do not get in trouble for it.  Their children become criminals and murderers and they take no responsibility, because they did the favored thing of not spanking and trusting the government institutions for the behavior of their children, “taking a village,” code language for “not taking responsibility.”  They’re fools.

Enemies of the biblical way latch a hold of any parent who does a bad job of parenting, that uses spanking as one of the methods as proof that it’s a bad way.  No, it’s one bad parent, who really isn’t following the biblical way.  Abusive methods abound, even abuses of spanking.  Yes, parents can “beat” their children and “hit” them, but this is not related to biblical spanking.

Something Gershoff is very happy about is that there is less spanking today, giving her encouragement that the world can be rid of spanking totally, even as the title of the article explains.  She seems to be encouraging the forces against spanking to keep up their good work, their war against spanking.  There is less of it.  Governing regions and institutions have done away with it, made it illegal.  She celebrates that and is calling for more regulation against.  She wants to stop it.  She wants to take away the right, criminalize it.

Why is there less spanking?  It’s not because the state has done a good job of persuading.  It hasn’t.  There is less of it, because there is less obedience to God, less Christianity.  It’s hard to be a good parent.  It takes discipline of the parent to discipline of children.  There is more laziness.  In general, there is more sin, and that’s why there is less spanking.  I foresee more sinning and less good parenting, less spanking.  It is a symptom of more falsehood, turning away from God, more apostasy.  It does not portend for anything good in the future, only evil.

We do not know how many people to whom Peter preached in Acts 2 on the Day of Pentecost, at least 3,000 and likely ten plus thousand.  That mammoth number of people was told that the one they had killed in fulfillment of Psalm 110 was now sitting at the right hand of God the Father, ready to make His enemies His footstool.  A large number in the crowd sought what to do in order to deal with this problem.  They should have been, and likely were, afraid of the consequences, but it seems that they also were affected by their knowledge that they had so offended God.  If they thought about how good God had been to them, it would have seemed like a gigantic injustice to have offended Him in so many ways.

The content of this post is now available in the study of:

1.) Evan Roberts

2.) The Welsh Revival of 1904-1905

3.) Jessie Penn-Lewis

on the faithsaves.net website. Please click on the people above to view the study.  On the FaithSaves website the PDF files may be easiest to read.

You are also encouraged to learn more about Keswick theology and its errors, as well as the Biblical doctrine of salvation, at the soteriology page at Faithsaves.

Here is the Jordan Peterson interview by a feminist for British GQ:

People should see this and let it affect their view of certain media, essentially the mainstream.

Right now I’m preaching through Acts on Sunday mornings, the second time for me.  Last Sunday, I finished the body of Peter’s sermon in Acts 2.  Peter is a good example of preaching in Acts 2.  He was taught well by his Teacher.  Preachers should well consider what Peter did on the Day of Pentecost and how he did it.

My first sermon was in 1976, my Freshmen year in high school.  I knew I would be a preacher in 1977.  I wanted to preach.  There was no mystical, bright light, shudder blowing experience.  It was a desire.  It started with hearing preaching.

I became an enthusiast or devotee of preaching.  I took pages of notes on most sermons I heard.  I became convinced that that a true preacher, an actual preacher, preached what scripture said.  I enjoyed the analysis of different sermons or some that perhaps were only speeches.  I began to conclude what I liked and didn’t like.  The liked became smaller and the didn’t like became much bigger.  I was more discerning of a bad sermon.

When I was in high school through college, I heard preaching most days, most of the time more than once every day.  It wasn’t until the end of college that I began to understand what right preaching was, and even now I’m far different as a preacher than I was then.  I had heard expository sermons, not many in college.  However, I started to listen to radio preachers.  Some of them did exposition of texts.

I was preparing to exegete.  I started Greek in high school, two years, majored in biblical languages in college, took languages all four years, kept them up in three years of graduate school.  I heard several preachers on the radio who also referred to original languages.  I heard J. Vernon McGee, Chuck Swindoll, D. James Kennedy, and John MacArthur.  I read W. A. Criswell, Warren Wiersbe, and Haddon Robinson.  I bought exegetical and expository commentaries.

My favorite of what I heard was John MacArthur.  I listened to him a lot.  I thought what MacArthur did was close to what preaching should be.  I didn’t have all the same beliefs as him.  He wasn’t strong enough as a preacher.  However, he had a lot of influence on me, because I wasn’t hearing anyone else who preached like him.  I was very open minded to MacArthur.  He impacted me a lot, but I didn’t follow him in my belief and in practice, just in the type of preaching a preacher should do.

What’s different between what I did and do than MacArthur?  He has become more strong in his preaching through the years, but he doesn’t make strong applications.  He does very little in the way of strong applications.  He leaves too much to the listener in the way of applying what the passages say.  He gives a good example of how to go about explaining what a passage says.  His process is good.  He would say, I believe, that he mainly leaves the application to the Holy Spirit, while I believe that the Holy Spirit Himself wants the preacher to make that application.  This is a major difference between evangelical preaching and separatist preaching.

MacArthur is not a separatist.  He has a wrong view on the church.  He has become more and more Calvinistic in all the years I have heard or read him.  He doesn’t believe in the perfect preservation of scripture.  His church is worldly.

I ask myself if MacArthur overall has done more damage than good.  It’s hard, because I think he has had a major good impact overall.  God has used him.  However, I think the bad has outweighed the good.  I attribute his numbers and his influence to compromise.  His permissiveness and lack of separation have allowed for a lot of the wrong belief and practice that even he himself is against.  He has produced weak people, men much weaker than himself, and with permission.  When Jesus said, by their fruits ye shall know them, he was speaking of the fruit of a teacher’s work.  MacArthur’s fruit is weakness.

I heard Swindoll often when I was young too, but I couldn’t stick with listening to him.  He turned me off to him.  His emphasis was too much on the communication, the craft, and cleverness in preaching, not enough on the Word of God itself.

MacArthur was different than Swindoll.  He centered on the words of scripture.  I’m happy for all the good that has come through John MacArthur.  I’m thankful for what his preaching did for me.  If someone could take the good without the bad, he could be a help to them, like he was me.  I can’t recommend him because of his bad influence.  I still read him myself, but I always put a strong disclaimer on him for reading of him by others.  Many times I wouldn’t even mention him, because I was afraid of the result for someone who wasn’t settled in his belief and practice.

I know someone could become stronger than what he was, if he started in some weaker form of evangelicalism to move toward the conservative evangelicalism of MacArthur.  However, in general, even though he is a good model for important aspects of the right kind of preaching of God’s Word, people, who start stronger than MacArthur and then begin listening to him and follow in his path, will become weaker and weaker.  A lot of fundamentalists were at one time much stronger than they are today and they took their path leftward by listening to MacArthur.

The most important trait for a biblical preacher, I believe, is courage.  He has to preach and apply exactly what God says in His Word.  This includes following through in leading in the discipline of the practice of God’s Word.  There are some unpopular parts to scripture and those have to be represented just like God expects and like the original authors meant when they wrote them.  The application can’t be conformed to what will allow to keep the bigger crowd of people.  A preacher is not doing his job if he doesn’t take the application and practice of the passage all the way to its end.

Part One

Salvation distinguishes one thing from another.  Sanctification distinguishes one thing from another.  Righteousness distinguishes one thing from another.  Worship distinguishes one thing from another. Wisdom distinguishes one thing from another.  When distinctions are blurred, someone cannot distinguish one thing from another.  Sometimes it is as simple as who is God and who or what is not.

Qualities of God, heavenly things, in accordance with the divine, sacred ones, are laid out in God’s Word.  The qualities of the world, the system set against God, the flesh, and the devil, profane ones, are different than those of God.  The qualities of God and the qualities of the world, the flesh, and the devil should be distinguished one from another.  Blurring the distinctions between the qualities of one from the other affect salvation, sanctification, righteousness, worship, and wisdom.

When it comes to judging music, what I hear is, you really can’t tell the difference between the sacred and profane or there just is nothing sacred or profane.  That would be to say that music really can’t be sexy, for instance, even though I don’t know anyone who says music can’t be sexy. One would think that if someone could judge music to be sexy, than one could judge more than that, even a lot, about musical style.

Because music does have message and meaning, music is used very often for movie scores or the soundtracks of movies, to state something obvious.  The message and the meaning isn’t just neutral.  It can be immoral.  It can be moral.  It shouldn’t surprise anyone that the world produces mainly immoral music.

The idea that art itself cannot be moral or immoral originates from the world.  For instance, the world might think its music is sexy, but that doesn’t make the music itself immoral or the artist committing immorality  — to the world.  This is moral relativism.  The world doesn’t judge itself next to God or His Word.  It has its own standards of morality that are very flexible and adaptable.  It can call what it wants whatever it wishes.  Churches and church leaders have picked up on this practice.

On the other hand, there is a long record of significant historical figures saying that music itself is moral.  Both Plato and Aristotle, Greek philosophers, believed there was intrinsic moral or character qualities to music itself.  Plato wrote in his Republic:

[E]ducation in music is most sovereign, because more than anything else rhythm and harmony find their way to the inmost soul and take strongest hold upon it, bringing with them and imparting grace.

The actions of moral agents are either good or evil — people can do good things (Lk 6:33; Rom 2:14-15) and sinful things (1 Jn 1:8).  Music is an action of moral agents, so it must be either moral or immoral, but it is easy to see through scriptural examples.  From purely instrumental music in 1 Samuel 16:23, “the evil spirit departed from [Saul].”

Even though music doesn’t communicate like the spoken word, it does communicate.  Scripture implies that music communicates and people know it.

Acclaimed music critic at National Public Radio, Ann Powers writes in her 2017 book, Good Booty, a history of popular music in the United States:

Popular music’s very form, its ebb and flow of excitement so closely resembling the libido, drew people to it as a way to speak what, according to propriety, couldn’t be spoken.

In the journal, Soundrack, in 2011 Erik Hedling  of Lund University writes in his paper, Music, lust and modernity: Jazz in the films of Ingmar Bergman:

What is significant here is how jazz is employed to evoke feelings of alienation, lack of control and sexual threat, the latter particularly pertaining to the  women. . . . [One character who plays jazz] is made to personify the ‘wicked’ aspects of modernity: the moral decay of the big city, and the emotional emptiness and the undisguised and animal sexuality of jazz music.

When music, which communicates a message incongruous with the nature of God, is used in church or worship of God, it blurs the distinction between the sacred and profane.  What’s happening?

People may not understand music.  They are deceived.  They could be lying too.  Maybe they’re right and music is amoral.  The latter, I reject, so I’m left with deceived or lying.

If people are deceived, they are also deceived as to the nature of God.  They are giving God something not in His nature.  Whether someone is deceived or lying, God is still blasphemed.  People then are deceived as to the nature of God.  They don’t know God.

The priestesses of the goddess Diana in Ephesus, like others in the history of false religion, worshiped their god with sexuality and ecstasy.  Turning worship into ecstasy is in fitting with that god and gods like that one.  The feeling they have fools them with an experience.  They correspond that experience to some genuine communion with God.

It’s not like the ecstasy of mystery Babylon cannot be incorporated into a church.  It occurred at Corinth.  They corrupted true spirituality, not able to distinguish between the Holy Spirit and fleshly lust.  Doctrines were affected. It started with inculcating the worship aspect of pagan religion into the church.  People didn’t know they could have it both ways.  They can’t, but they now think they can, because it has been accepted.

I’ve talked to many people who trust their sincerity and their feeling.  They don’t know what love is.  They’ve replaced it with sentimentalism.  Instead of affection for God, they feel passion.  They think that is the Holy Spirit.  None of it is true, so it is a lie.  Their worship is a lie.  God is worshiped in truth.

The music of true worship distinguishes between the true God and false gods.  The music of true worship distinguishes between true love and sentimentality.  The music of true worship distinguishes between the church and the world.

This is not part two of my post from Monday, where I will likely break down how music communicates for what someone called spiritual babes or adolescents.  This is related to part one though.

Here are two paragraphs from yesterday’s Washington Times:

The Trump administration may soon spearhead efforts to define sex and gender according to biology. In a Department of Health and Human Services memo leaked to the New York Times, officials argue the federal government should adopt a definition of sex and gender “on a biological basis that is clear, grounded in science, objective and administrable.” This move would essentially roll back changes the Obama administration made, which allowed folks to choose their identity and receive federal protections under Title IX. 

According to the memo, HHS proposes that a person’s sex be either male or female and match that of their genitals at birth. “Sex means a person’s status as male or female based on immutable biological traits identifiable by or before birth. The sex listed on a person’s birth certificate, as originally issued, shall constitute definitive proof of a person’s sex unless rebutted by reliable genetic evidence,” the memo says.

I’m using these paragraphs as an example of the world’s normalization of aberrant behavior.  This is behavior that at one time would have been (1) criminal, which turned to (2) psychological disorders, (3) socially unacceptable, then (5) tolerated, and finally to (4) normalized.  A Christian would have just titled this sinful or something like immoral, deviant, or reprobate.  Calling something a psychological disorder is one of the steps toward normalization.  When something has become normalized, the people who oppose begin with some to be targeted as if they have the disorders, are at least mocked as destructive to a “civil society.”

For years, the cultural left in this country, which is closely akin to the overall left (and this is no accident), has put pressure on institutions and then society in general to accept and then even celebrate aberrant, strange, and depraved behavior.  It has used the school system, the media, and the Democrat party to do this.  The changes have infiltrated everywhere and some more stark, bold, and rebellious than other.  When this has become normalized, religious figures are supportive and then the church capitulates.

I’m 56 and I’ve noticed the changes in my lifetime occur like the following.  Someone pushes the boundary of social acceptability.  Opposition is shamed by the cultural left.  The cultural left picks up the formerly unacceptable practice as acceptable and in style, promoting the change.  More embrace it.  It becomes societally acceptable. Opposition is silenced through propaganda and finally legally. There are probably more steps in there, tinier ones to get to the end, but you get the picture.  The changes occur in fashion, literature, entertainment, recreation, education, and then entire institutional structures change, including the family and church.

Let me give you an example.  I never saw a particular style of dress among women until a moderately successful comedy movie, 13 Going on 30.  We didn’t have television or go to movies, but I remember ads on public transportation in our metropolitan area on buses and billboards with a photo of the young actress, Jennifer Garner. Reading back on the film, it grossed 22 million in the first weekend, which is very successful as an opening.  Prominent in the advertising was the photo of Garner wearing a silky camisole, what was at that time only worn in private in the bedroom as lingerie.  In the movie, she wore it in public.  I remember seeing it and then thinking, “Wow, I can’t believe that’s being worn in public.”

Shortly into the run of the movie, I started seeing women in public wearing camisoles, the same kind Garner wore in her movie.  I made the connection.  Maybe they had worn them before, but this was new to me.  Then women were wearing the camisole as a blouse with a lacy border hanging down over their waistline.  Usually they had something covering their arms, but you could see the camisole underneath.  As a man, the idea of the bedroom and sex came to mind when I would see it.  It wasn’t just association.  It was a bedroom look, being worn in public, sometimes under a business coat to mix those two features of modern female life.  And finally women wore them in church.  Now it’s normal for women to wear the camisole in public and in church.  Maybe that in particular is not in style anymore, but I still see it worn.  The Wikipedia article on camisole says that it started being worn as outerwear in 2000.

I never saw a man with a man or a woman with a woman — at least I didn’t know about it — until I saw stories on NBC news, which attempted to justify the behavior with interviews and polls.  Then in 1980 CBS did a report called, Gay Power Gay Politics.  I never had seen anything like that and it shocked me.  I knew about homosexuality from the Bible, because of the story of Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 19 and other passages. I didn’t know it was happening in the United States.  Now we have same sex marriage.

The Women’s Home Journal in 1921 entitled, “Does Jazz Put The Sin In Syncopation?” said:

Jazz originally was the accompaniment of the voodoo dancer, stimulating the half-crazed barbarian to the vilest deeds. The weird chant, accompanied by the syncopated rhythm of the voodoo invokers, has also been employed by other barbaric people to stimulate brutality and sensuality. That it has a demoralizing effect upon the human brain has been demonstrated by many scientists.

A reading appreciation text at the University of Texas in 1922 reads:

We feel that the League is presenting an opportunity to member schools to do a great work in combating the immoral music which is now so popular at least insofar as the rising generation is concerned.  From the days of ancient Greece to the present time educators have recognized the high educational value of the right kind of music.  Emphasizing this point the editor of the Tacoma Washington Ledger says: 

“In this day of jazz and the abomination of sound which passes for music, anything that will lead youth to know and consider the worth while things that the great masters have handed down is to be commended.  To know good music, real music, is to love it, and where there is love of music, there is always promise of good morals, good citizenship, for love of the true and beautiful, makes for better men and women and a better world in which to live.”

The Etude Music Magazine in 1922 stated.

There can be no question that some kinds of music stimulate irregular desires and therefore must be considered immoral in their tendency.

Christian Nation in 1903 said:

According to the Cumberland Presbyterian a college professor of that state is reported as saying that many of the gospel hymns of today are immoral explaining that he does not mean the words but the music. I include in the list of immoral songs six waltzes, two two-steps, and seventeen polkas. I do not think that words set to such music are inspiring or suitable for religious exercises.

California has normalized indolence, indigence, and derangement.  Any one of us should, and I believe do, even if you won’t admit it, look at this and easily discern it as depraved and unacceptable.  It isn’t normal.  It shouldn’t be normal, and yet it is.  It happens because people won’t even say what it is, at least out loud and with a necessary disapproving manner.  Disapproval is disapproved.

In 1978, Californians put Proposition 6, what was called the Briggs Amendment, on the state ballot and a strong majority of Californians approved it.  I was in 11th grade unaware of its existence.  It banned gays and lesbians from teaching in the public school.  On youtube, you can watch San Francisco citizens from that time period being asked by disapproving journalists if they support it, and you can see the fear in their faces.  This is the first phase in making the aberrant normative.

At the time, Anita Bryant was crossing the country for opposition and during a televised interview, someone violently slammed a pie in her face.  She wept and prayed for the man.  Bryant was savaged by the educational, media, and establishment elite.  Proposition 6 lost.  Even Ronald Reagan opposed it.  The tide had changed in America.

Music changed very little until the inception of modernism.  In the United States a large majority of people knew what they heard in the music emerging from that period was starkly different than a premodern transcendental view of beauty.  Above I included reactions to what they heard in jazz.  They knew it was immoral music — not the words, the music.

People knew something was wrong like someone would know that something is wrong with the bum on the streets.  You don’t have to give a chapter and verse.  You can judge it as wrong, applying biblical principles.

Rock music is trash.  All the popular music that proceeded from jazz is garbage.  It’s worse than that, but someone can tell that it’s wrong and that it is immoral.  It is the soundtrack of this world that will disappear when the Lord Jesus Christ destroys religious and political Babylon.  Those tunes will be no more.  This aberrant music is perverse to normalize it for a society, let alone a church.

I wrote a book on music in 1996:  Sound Music or Sounding Brass.  Below is not an excerpt.

The Academy of Awards announced it will no longer judge best actor or actress, because no one can know how to judge acting.  Furthermore, the Academy testified that there is no means to differentiate good acting from bad acting.  And no, that hasn’t happened.  People do know in the important judgment of movies whether something is well acted.  People don’t doubt that they know when they see something cheesy or what seems fake.  Good acting is good acting, but some is better or more difficult than other.  People, and especially Christians, can judge music too, especially compared to acting.

In many a discussion about or in commentary below posts about music, people question the criteria for and the ability to judge music.  Very often they either feign the throwing up of their hands or they really mean that they can’t know.  They don’t know how to judge what’s good or bad.  They can’t go any further than saying that musical style is personal taste or preference only, there is no objective means of judging between the good and the bad.

I have yet to see something that makes very clear biblical judgment of the music itself possible.  And, I’m fairly convinced it’s not a solvable problem (in general). . . . Absent a clear standard from scripture, that’s the very definition of a Romans 14 issue. 

I too agree that music apart from lyrics has moral value. I  just want . . . someone to tell me how to determine that value in a subjective way and not by answering my question with more questions.   Please. Anyone?  I sincerely am looking for simple answers to apply to making music choices. I’ve been looking for a long time. . . . . I decided to walk away from the confusing admonitions of others and be content with having a good conscience before God until I get some clearer instruction. 

Personally, I’d never allow rap or rock in a worship service. But, I have no objective basis for that – it’s my own subjective opinion. 

That is the sixty-four thousand dollar question.  When you can offer a clear, objective standard to determine this, please let me know.  Otherwise, it pretty much boils down to whatever I say it is. 

Is all music of equal quality?  Not in my opinion.  Is all music helpful and edifying?  Not in my opinion.  I think we both agree in general that music itself, apart from the words, can be sinful, or at least come pretty close to that category.  But how to define that objectively?  I don’t know.  How to define that Scripturally?  I don’t know.  And because I can’t do so, I shy away from imposing my opinions upon others. 

I’m not saying music doesn’t communicate on its own, but I’ve yet to hear a plausible way to tell clear truth or error from notes and rhythms. 

I’ve yet to hear a good, scripturally-based objective reason for choosing not to use music.