Sunday Post for Shepherds - When You're Not Singing the Psalms on Sunday

Unlike some, I do not advocate Psalms-only singing. But when we're not singing them, they do still remain the standard and should set the trajectory for what we are singing and what we commend to our people as worthy to be employed in biblical worship and in teaching Bible truth. God defines His relationship to us. We are idolaters by nature, meaning that we imagine what kind of relationship we want with God and then imagine that's the one we have. It isn't. You and I are not sovereign. The congregation is not sovereign. Your people's feelings and likes are not sovereign. Your church's traditions are not sovereign. Your denominational leaders are not sovereign. So let's trust God enough to sing the Psalms and songs like them.

Sunday Post for Shepherds - Sing the Psalms with Your People

Every church, when she gathers on the Lord's Day, should be singing the Psalms, because the Apostle Paul says so (Ep 5:19; Col 3:16), and because it was the hymnbook of Jesus, and because the Psalms are the word of God sung and teach us much about Him, and because they express real Christian life under the sun, and because they call us to reality, and shape our expectations as they work against our modern day joy joy-all victory-yeah rah- pure happiness false theology in this broken world where the devil is the prince of the power of the air and almost nothing functions as it should. Hardship is real. Depression is real. Pain is real. Loss is real. Suffering is real. Perplexity is real. Death is real. Failure is real. Agony is real. And their reality in the believer is often not the result of personal sin. And all of these have their rightful place in the Christian experience. God, by the Psalms, teaches us to relate rightly to Him in our genuine struggles and losses. He shows us how to worship Him in our pain. And as Carl Trueman so rightly puts it, He shows us what miserable Christians can sing.

Every Sunday is Resurrection Sunday

Had Jesus not risen from the dead, the church would not gather. The whole thing would be undone, and the faith of every believer from Adam onward would be useless. So while we especially remember Christ's resurrection on this day, we ought to remember it each Lord's Day. Actually, we should remember it every morning, when we open our eyes from sleep, which is an illustration of death. Each night we go unconscious, then we awake and arise. God has woven the death and resurrection reality into every twenty-four hours of our experience. The Bible often uses "sleep" to speak of death, and "waking" to speak of life. There's a reason for that.

Jesus got up from the grave to justify His people, and to ascend to His Father's side, the place from which He mediates the new covenant in His blood. He got up from the grave to send us His Holy Spirit, who baptizes us into the Church, sanctifies us, and seals us for the day of final redemption. He got up from the grave to keep promises made to us, promises of His presence and of His return, and of everlasting life.

All of these wonders, and quite a few more, are tied up with the resurrection of Jesus. And frankly, it is the reason I have any hope at all.