What Good Does it Do to Sing?

In a world of so much debauchery and destruction, what good does it do to sing and dance? Aren’t we frittering away valuable time by doing something so unserious?

It’s so important to have something in your life that is based purely on art. Music is not a purely emotional thing: it is sometimes more math than emotion. Each note has a pitch, a tone, a volume and quantity (long or short). Each note is broken down on a staff and fits into a certain category. The voice is a complicated thing and can be trained with exercise, practice and technique to sing certain notes a certain way within a certain range. Like I said, music has a lot of technical engineering to it.

But it is also art; it is an expression of the soul based on those technicalities. Those that listen to music do not listen technically; they listen intellectually (is that note on pitch? What was that word? Do I relate to this song?) and emotionally (what does this song mean to me? I remember what I was doing and where I was when I first heard this song…) It is because of these connections that all are touched by music even if they are not particularly musical themselves. Music is the language of the soul, both intellectually and emotionally.

For those that do sing and dance, music is an expression of the soul of the individual. It is painting a work of art with the voice and body. The motions and the music form a single unit for the artist that causes the forgetting of self and ego and intense concentration on the full expression itself. What could be more fulfilling than to forget about self and be thinking only on the expression itself?

I enjoy singing and dancing with my show choir group. For years all I did was sing in church and stifled the body. I started leading singing as a 14 year old teenager in the little Baptist church I was raised in. I was taken aside by an old tenor that sang in a family quartet who introduced me to southern gospel quartet music, a music I have loved ever since. But we weren’t too expressive in the Baptist church; the idea of tapping feet or clapping hands was usually discouraged. After all, clapping your hands is just one short movement away from speaking in tongues, right? No, it isn’t and such a belief has stifled so much creativity and talent in the Baptist church that it is no wonder we are the farm system for the growth of every large Pentecostal church in the last 50 years.

But remember this: the complete abandonment of the mind from musical expression, disconnecting the mind from the body when singing, denigrates the music. When the body and emotions are given full reign much of the glory and expression of the music is lost. There is no music when the mind is turned off.

So I have discovered that the expression of music with body and voice speaks a language to my soul that I cannot fully explain but that I truly know is from God. He has granted me a gift to praise Him with that I know He is pleased with. Since people are fallen I know not all will appreciate this sort of thing but I’m fallen too and I know I don’t know everything perfectly either. However, the expression of song along with the expression of mind and body forms a whole that He enjoys in me. When I sing and enjoy it and bypass the usual egotistical thoughts (how do I look; who is pleased with me or not pleased with me) He is glorified. This is what we were made for as human beings: to glorify God and be enjoyed by Him forever. A little singing and a little choreography is surely a better thing to do than most of the stuff we engage in.

In a world that hates the truth, telling the truth is seen as hate (unknown source but it’s certainly worth repeating)