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The purpose of this document is to describe my personal philosophy of music within the context of God's will in the broader sense and the context of the church particularly.
Philosophical concepts such as "worship" and "church music " require definitions at broader and narrower levels. To begin with, however, it is necessary to establish some general topics.
1. VIEW OF GOD
First of all, to quote the "Bob Jones Baptist catechism," "God is a spirit and does not have a body like man." He is the Supreme Being who exists on a distinct plane greater than, but not apart from, his creation. Jesus Christ is God (John 8:58), was the force behind creation (John 1:1-5), and is the ultimate pattern for all of humankind. To say that we "bear the images of God" is true of all men, but this concept reaches its pinnacle when it is applied to sons and daughters of God in Christ.
2. VIEW OF PROVIDENCE
Creation itself is an act of providence. God saw fit to create this existence, doing so merely by speaking it. And since just as God is just, He is also love (1 John 4:8), His creation must have been as much an act of love as it was of power and majesty. He further demonstrates his love in his creation of man, who alone in all of creation has been imbued with the power to create (not ex nihilo, or out of nothing as God can, but sui generis, or completely originally)1.
In the fall, man fell from the status God had intended for him into spiritual death. As God's only "image-bearer" in all of creation,2 he alone has access to the opportunity of redemption; the rest of creation, tainted by sin, will be done away with in lieu of a new one. This fall has touched humanity in three distinct ways.
First, man's fall has affected his soul. Born as sons of Adam, we now have a sin nature that implicates us of having broken God's law. This makes us unacceptable to God; we were born dead in our sins (Eph. 2:1-5), and if left to our own resources would die the same.
Second, man's fall has affected his mind. We are born unregenerate, and our thinking will reflect this. Consequently, we have retained none of the stature we were originally intended to possess.3
Third, the fall has voided any of man's works. Nothing created in this existence will ever be what it could have been. Since God's creation has been tainted, and man is part of the creation, nothing he creates will be perfect, either.
In order to reclaim His creation, there had to be a way of salvaging the one creation that God made in his own likeness and was capable of having a relationship with him. Overcoming the separation involved finding a proxy for the penalty of the offense. Michael Card expresses the paradox of the eternal Christ's participation in our physical existence with this rather poetic turn of phrase: "Eternity stepped into time."4 The Old Testament practice of sacrifice was finally and ultimately realized in Christ's death, once and for all establishing a conduit back into God's favor for anyone who would accept it. It is the ultimate creation: a way to provide man restored fellowship with God without the due penalty of sin.
Salvation is undeserved, and it is imparted without merit. No one is in a position to earn, let alone deserve, God's favor, and God is not about to change the rules. Only the work of Christ on the cross (which satisfies prophecy and God's requirement that sins' offense be recompensed) and in the resurrection (which validates the work on the cross) could give man an opportunity to stand before God without fear of condemnation for the sins he has committed.
The work of Christ now has given all believers the capacity to relate to God the Father in a way they could not before. This was an act of God himself (Rom. 8:29-30). Commensurate with this restored relationship is the fellowship and empowering of the Holy Spirit, which gives the capacity of true ministry to each believer.
In response to the unspeakable gift Providence has supplied, our entire existence ought to be directed to worshiping the holy God who made a way to restore us to holiness. Worship is an acknowledgement of our gratitude and indebtedness to God for his grace.
Worship is also a sacrifice of honor. We direct our entire focus in all things to the One who causes all things to work together for our good (Rom. 8:28), but all ultimately for his own glory. In our every action, we present God to the world in some way. Worship is the acknowledgement of God's effort on our behalf for his glory; how I present my sacrifice of worship to him will show my estimation of his work on my behalf. It is my honor as his image-bearer.
Ministry is, in a nutshell, worship at work. It is the "cultivating [of our] own salvation" (Phil. 2:12). In our ministry, we demonstrate faithfulness to God's agendas and his calling, and we help others to be faithful to his calling in their lives. It enables us to serve others, but the subtext is always the worship and glory of God.
It is in this context that the nature of God and his providence, his plan of redemption, and the purpose of worship all come together reflexively: service for God will always affect other people, and serving other people will be a by-product of our service to God.
All of these foci are present in the lives of all believers in personal application. In my case, I was saved when I was seven, under the ministry of my mother. In his providence, God had placed me in a healthy Christian home where a confrontation with him and his requirements on my life were inevitable.
His calling to me for full-time music ministry came when I was a sophomore in high school. My mother was a pianist, and my father was an evangelist who used to like having me sing before he preached. They made the sacrifice of putting my and my siblings through private (and, when expenses got tight, home) schools.
My education career continued into college, where I graduated with a degree in vocal performance. My degree was obtained at a secular university, where I had the temporary change of focus from ministry to opera. Not living in a region with a deeply sophisticated, cultural atmosphere meant that a realization of an opera career would not happen unless I moved, and God kept those doors closed.
It was in this "desert of purpose" that God led me to my wife. We met under particularly providential circumstances, and were married a year later. Joy is an accomplished pianist, and even I was not so dense to miss what God was telling me: I was being equipped for Christian music ministry.
Still, I had the tendency to control my own circumstances (or try to); consequently, my pursuit of ministry went nowhere. Eventually, to get my attention and to remind me who was really "in charge," God gave me a brain aneurysm that could quite possibly have taken away all of the gifts he had given me, but that I had worked so hard to cultivate. In sparing me any real damage, he brought me to an acceptance of his Lordship and ownership of all I am and have been given.
I now have the corrected perspective of God and the true nature of worship. As with all followers of Christ, I am still a "work in progress," but thanks to circumstances and profound learning opportunities, I am becoming more aware of the requirements of worship of the believer's life, and that to a deeper extent than I otherwise would have been inclined to discover in my own volition.
1 Johansson, Calvin. Music & Ministry: A Biblical Counterpoint. (Hendrickson: 1998), p. 9.
2 Ibid., p. 2733.
3 Ibid., p. 32.
4 Card, Michael. "Joy in the Journey." The Final Word. Sparrow:1986.
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