What if our Worship Music was as Multifaceted as the God We Worship? (Part 1)

One of my pet peeves as a Christian and as a pastor is that even though we serve and love and worship and trust a God Who is interesting, inventive, and unique, our worship music could hardly ever be called by those same adjectives.

There are three main areas that I find especially saddening given the God we worship. Today we look at the first, over the next couple weeks, we will also talk about the dearth of poetic and musical genres in Christian worship.

First, unless we are singing about God's love, we Christians in the West seem to not know anything to sing about. Ok, so we also sing about His holiness and sometimes our commitment to Him. That's good, but we are still missing out on worshiping God for His other important attributes. But what could they be? How about His wrath? His Truth? His Creativity?  His Triunity? 

Someone just choked on their coffee and destroyed their keyboard--"HIS WRATH!?! Why would anyone ever praise Him for getting angry? Anger is bad. It isn't nice. I thought God was nice. I don't like thinking about when God doesn't act nice like good people should." 

Ok, well for us in the west, we have believed a lie abundant in our culture that all expressions of anger are bad. Sure, many are, but not all. On top of that, if anyone has a right to get angry at the world, I'm guessing it's the One Who created it to be good and now is watching fill with more and more evil. Make no mistake. Our God gets ticked. Angry. Enraged even. Throughout the Old and New Testaments this has been something that God's people have celebrated, just read Revelation 6, Revelation 11.16-19, or Exodus 15.1-21. 

His Truth and His creativity, subjects of such grand importance one would think that they captured more of our attention given Isaiah 44.6-20 on God's Truth/Reality and Psalms 19 and 139 on His creativity and reality. Not to mention His Triunity, which distinguishes Him from all other so-called gods. 

This subject has come up to my attention again and again throughout my years in ministry. It is pressing in upon me again right now because I am preaching through the book of revelation, which is not really about the love of God. Yet, I want the songs we worship with to resonate with the passage we will be listening to and meditating on. For the past couple of weeks, and for the next couple God's wrath will be the main focus of the passages, so I have looked all over for a song that celebrates God's righteous anger and praises Christ for His coming ruthless victory over all those who oppose Him. I have found this song, written by the worship team at Sojourn Community Church in Louisville. It's called Warrior. FYI the Warrior is Jesus. Please enjoy it. Please leave a comment on your favorite line in the song (or least favorite, if you want to be that person).