Many of us who are a little older will still remember some of the silly ditties we sang in the schoolyard thirty, forty or more years ago.  Sometimes I find that a problem.  At my age the amount of brain memory still available must be shrinking rapidly.  So why am I remembering rubbish songs from the schoolyard?  However, this retention of songs in our memory can also be a wonderful blessing.  That was certainly the case with a man I’ll call Jim.

Jim ended up in prison after committing a crime.  And it wasn’t a short term incarceration either.  So Jim had a lot of time to think.  Some lines from a song he had learnt as a lad kept coming back to him at the most unexpected moments.  He had learnt the words of the song, “Living for Jesus in all that I do...!” at a church boys program.  Merit badges were awarded for memorising the words and Jim had been a keen learner.  Snatches of that song often just popped into his head: “Living for Jesus wherever I go; knowing He died in my place; trying to please Him and happy to know...!”  The words wouldn’t leave him alone.  He spoke to the prison chaplain about it who asked him where he had learnt that song.  He mentioned the church boys club he had attended as a kid and in passing also mentioned the name of the man who had been his leader.  It so happened that the prison chaplain knew the youth leader.  The upshot was that the prison chaplain arranged for a visit of the man who had been Jim’s Cadet Counsellor as a lad.  That led to a turning point in Jim’s life.

But not all songs have such a positive effect.  In my previous blog last week, I pointed out that the 1960s pop-song “Poetry in Motion”, which I can still remember today, probably didn’t do much to help me as an adolescent to cope with the ‘raging hormones’ of the teenage years.  It may even have aggravated the problem.

All of this is a powerful reminder to be careful about what we sing.  There are even songs, the words of which are nothing short of demonic propaganda.  For example, I recall another pop-song from many years ago that sang, “The things you’re liable to read in the Bible... ain’t necessarily so...!”  The Gershwin brothers who wrote the lyrics and the tune of that song were often accused of trying to undermine the reliability of the Bible.

Of course Christians don’t generally sing songs that contradict the Bible or that teach falsehood.  But the problem is that songs have the power to lead us astray – and that can happen even while a song seems to be quite Biblical.  A subtle wrong emphasis can distort our thinking.  Let me mention just one example.

In the Bible the essence of sin is that it pushes God out of first place and puts self on the throne.  As someone once pointed out: the trouble with sIn is the big I in the middle.  Jesus taught us, by way of contrast, that the Christian life is about self-denial... about us becoming smaller and Jesus becoming bigger.  Not too many Christians would deny that idea.  But I put together a weekly radio program of Christian songs for 2MaxFM and I’ve come across modern Christian songs where it is not Jesus who is at the centre.  Sure, they mention Jesus... or God.  But when I read them carefully they are really about me.  Often it’s very subtle.  I’ve sometimes counted the number of first-person-singular pronouns (I, me and mine) and found there were more of those than third-person-singular pronouns (he, him and his).

I’ll be so bold as to suggest that when we sing worship songs that put me in the centre then that is probably as helpful to my spiritual life as ‘Poetry in Motion’ was to my adolescent relationship with girls.  Keeping in mind the power of a song the last thing we need is to learn songs that are all about us.  Sure, the Christian faith needs to be owned and personalised.  King David recognised that already when he wrote Psalm 23.  That song doesn’t just say that the Lord is a Shepherd to His people – true as that is.  No!  It sings that the Lord is MY Shepherd.  But at the end of the day it is Jesus who is central and not me.

John Westendorp