Raising Voices

Late one night, my phone vibrated on my bedside table. I looked at the clock. It was nearly 11, so I assumed it was bad news. I picked up the phone and saw a text message from one of my lifelong friends.

“After a long bout with sickness, my mother has resigned her failing body,” he said.

That last phrase – resigned her failing body – is from an old hymn by Isaac Watts that we’d recently begun singing at our church. In a moment of crisis and sorrow, the song had given him the ability to speak and express hope.

I, like most of the other recipients of the text, knew the next line of the hymn: “The angels point my way.” His mother had died, but she had not simply disappeared; she’d gone home. His words were more than mere information. They were a sign of hope.

Eugene Peterson once said the primary goal of pastoring was to teach people to pray. I agree, but I might amend his words slightly: to learn to pray, we must learn to sing.

This shouldn’t take any serious student of the Bible by surprise. Music shows up early in the Book of Genesis, and the people of God are seen singing throughout both Testaments, in ordinary places and odd ones: on their way to battle, while chained up in prison, and at the end of the world. I confess, I cringe a little when I hear the Psalms described as the great “prayer book” of the Bible. It’s not that this statement is untrue – the Psalms are certainly prayers – but it is incomplete; the Psalms are first and foremost songs.

The unique power of song

Songs have a way of sticking with us. Every week, the church gathers to remember the hope to which we’ve been called, and then scatters to our ordinary lives, often to places where our faith makes us outsiders. Meanwhile, songs stay lodged in our memories, their words showing up in our thoughts when otherwise, we might struggle to speak. Songs are both a reference point and a tool; a resource that enables us to articulate our faith while we live in the wilderness of everyday life.

At the church where I serve as a pastor, we regularly read the testimonies of folks who are being baptized. It’s remarkable how often I hear phrases from songs and hymns in the stories people tell about themselves – lines like, “prone to wander, Lord I feel it,” from “Come Thou Fount,” or “simply to the cross I cling,” from “Rock of Ages.”

As we sing these songs, we not only pray the words, we absorb them. They equip us with language that describes our experience. We cling to them like life preservers when our faith is challenged.

Singing: praying with the body

One might think that the power of songs is in the beauty of music, or the beauty of poetry. That’s true, but it’s not the whole truth. Singing also has a unique power in our lives because it’s an embodied act. Singing demands a certain posture and attentiveness from the body. When we sing, we recruit our lungs, throats, tongues, and teeth. You can’t sing without a body.

To sing, then … to breathe deep, sing loud, and project with your voice, is to commit your whole self, body and soul, to praising God. Like kneeling or lying prostrate, like the tactile experience of baptism and communion or the strain of fasting, singing reminds us that God does not redeem us as disembodied spirits, but through his Spirit “gives life to our mortal members” (Rom. 8:11).

God’s word invites us to experience a gift that not only delights the senses with beauty, but recruits the whole body to respond to who God is and what he’s done. By singing, we not only confess our faith, but strengthen it, taking in phrases, ideas, and images that can buffer us in life’s storms, assure us in the midst of doubts, and enable us to shout out in gratitude when life is blessed. Singing equips us with tools for all-of-life prayer and worship.

Paul tells the Colossians that Christ “dwells richly” among us as we sing (Col. 3:16). Commentators differ about what exactly this phrase means, but I wonder if a plain reading of the text doesn’t serve us best: there is a richness to prayer, to worship, and to life together that is experienced most richly when embodied, redeemed creatures join together to sing.

Like my friend texting hymns at his most trying hour, we sing songs as a united expression of faith. In simultaneous breaths, we confess together that Jesus is Lord.

Mike Cosper is the pastor of worship and arts at Sojourn Community Church in Louisville, Kentucky. He and his wife, Sarah, have two daughters. Mike is the author of The Stories We Tell and Rhythms of Grace, and is the founder of Sojourn Music, a collective of musicians writing songs to serve the local church.