“Come into his presence with singing,” Psalm 100:2 instructs us—and Scripture is filled with examples of people who responded to life’s circumstances, both joyful and sorrowful, by singing to God. After their terrifying and miraculous Red Sea crossing, Moses and the Israelites sang (Exodus 15), as did Jehoshaphat and the people of Judah heading into battle (2 Chronicles 20), Jesus and his disciples at the Last Supper (Matthew 26:30), and Paul and Silas in prison (Acts 16:25). There’s something powerful about singing together.
Your voice matters in church—to both God and to your neighbor. Here are four reasons why.
1. Your singing delights the Lord.
God makes himself at home in our praise. Some have said that a Japanese translation of Psalm 22:3—“Yet you are holy, enthroned on the praises of Israel”—says that when God’s people worship him, they make a big chair for him to sit down in. God needs nothing from us, yet he made a way for us to bring him pleasure. What a privilege!
2. Worshiping through song is the unique experience of redeemed people.
Singing is the natural response to the experience of transformation from lost to found, enslaved to free, dead to alive, hell-bound to heaven-destined. Christians are the only creatures in the universe with that experience; not even the angels can relate.
“Only the redeemed sing,” David Jeremiah notes in his study on Revelation, Escape the Coming Night. We imagine the heavenly choir as a multitude of singing angels, but the Bible primarily depicts them speaking their praise, while God’s redeemed people sing (compare Luke 2:13-14 and Rev. 4:8, 5:11-12 to Rev. 5:9, 14:3, 15:3). While it’s possible that the angels’ words are spoken in song, it’s interesting that the Greek word for “sing” appears in the New Testament only when referring to humans.
John Piper said:
“The fact that Christianity is a singing religion bears witness, not only to the way we’re wired as human beings, but to the kind of God we have: namely, a God who is one day, according to Zephaniah 3:17, going to sing over us. He is going to lead a choir and celebrate the fact that we are his. And we’re going to join in singing that he is ours, because God is so valuable and so beautiful and so multi-faceted in his perfections that to leave out the emotional component–and not let it spill over in poetry and song–would be to leave out a key element in worship.”
3. Your singing encourages your brothers and sisters in Christ.
Your church family needs to see and hear you singing (yes, really singing, not just mumbling the lyrics). Our faith is bolstered when the people around us are singing the same truths, each of us coming together with our various burdens and rejoicing in Christ despite them.
A couple on my church’s worship team suffered the loss of their two sons within a short span, after shepherding them both through a lifetime of disability and difficulty. I know God is good—his Word says so, and I have tasted and seen it—but when this couple sings of God’s goodness with raised gazes and radiant faces, I believe in it even more, and I know that I, too, can face whatever lies ahead because he is good.
As Ben Haley said in his discussion with David Anderson on the BER podcast, “I hear you repeating God’s truth through what you sing, and you hear me. That builds us up as Christians.” Ben points out that the first result of being filled with the Spirit is singing—not only to the Lord, but to one another (Eph, 5:19, Col. 3:16).
Mark Dever’s church in Washington, D.C. experienced a dramatic change in their corporate worship almost overnight when the organist retired with no replacement. He recalls that what felt like a crisis ended up being a blessing: the loud organ that had been drowning out the congregation for decades sat empty, and the people began singing with just the piano. Since they could hear one another, they were singing louder—much louder. As the congregation grew, so did the effect—and today, volume and passion in corporate worship are now trademarks of the church.
4. God commands us to sing.
Do we need any other reason? Zack DiPrima notes that Scripture contains more than 400 references to singing, including 50 direct commands, and that Israel’s songbook, the Psalms, is the largest and most-quoted book in the New Testament.
“The only instrument referred to in New Testament worship is the human voice,” he writes. “That matters. It’s God’s design that the local church’s music ministry be comprised of an untrained choir of blood-bought saints.”
For more on corporate worship, check out these episodes of the BER podcast: