Questions we do well to have personal answers to:
Can words affect you? Do thoughts implanted lead to similar thoughts? Can words follow thoughts and can thoughts expand with words? Can actions follow thoughts or words? Can music, even without words, affect and effect the emotions, thus thoughts, thus words, thus actions. Is there availability of later life after death? Is one (life or death) in the long run preferable to the other? Can thoughts, words, actions tend to life or tend to death? Temporally? Eternally?
Lucifer in his earlier purity led music in heaven, leading through music, thoughts, words, emotions thus actions in the path of life. Do you think rebellious Lucifer would be interested in and capable of turning music into a path to destruction? Has he?
If there is music with or without words that leads to life or leads to death, and life is preferable and death is not, then how well has Satan blurred the line between music of life and music of death?
If we as humans desire life and follow through with a choice to head in that direction, then that choice demands thought, words and actions, including music choices — regardless of how obscure, how blended or how indistinct the line of demarcation in music may seem to be from our current vantage point.
If the line is indistinct and you want life, how much risk of losing eternal peace and joy will you accept, or can you accept?
Most readily agree that music is a powerful medium and can be as much an act of worship as is prayer. Christ himself shared the basic principles of christian spiritual fulfilling, spiritually powerful and spiritually acceptable music in John 4:23,24. “True worshipers” He shared, “will worship the Father in spirit and truth….the Father is seeking such people….and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth.”
What is worship in spirit other than time spent in “conscious conviction, ardor (loyalty), desire? “(Webster) And what is worship in truth other than our minds and hearts interacting with the written and living Word ? (“Thy word is truth”. John 17:17, “I am the way the Truth and the life.” John 1:1; 14:6) Worship music would then encompass these.
We as fallen humans, both in secular and in religious music, commonly insert the cheap substitute for spirit called emotion. We might further mix emotion with a dab of truth for palatability, often using ‘reality’ as another cheap substitute. Emotion or ‘reality,’ not truth, conscious conviction and ardor (intense loyalty), then becomes the driving force in our music. These substitutes in Christianity being no more valid than Cain’s sacrifice.
Other ways are worshiping Christ with either spirit or truth alone. This again makes us like the fig tree Christ cursed because of only leaves and without it’s intended fullness at the time of harvest.
Yes, music can be a blessing or a snare. Music that leads to destruction tends to be a bedlam of notes, rhythm and/or words that excite emotions. Even church worshipers might think that they are being worked by a power thought to be the power of God while it is but the poison sting of the serpent Lucifer. Godly music is characterized by calmness, harmony, intelligence and dignity with an understandable truth-filled message being the driving force.
In summary: the influential essence of any music, like Christianity is in the message it gives, with or without words.
As we drop, climb, are swept or driven into the last minutes of this earth’s history, let’s leave off all which so easily besets and apply with personal courage, patience and love, personal life trending musical choices.
2021
A beautiful awareness of the true character, work and desire of the Christ who came, revealing to us by His birth, life, death and continuing ministry the character of His Father – can be found in these words rhymed to William Doane’s tune used by Fanny Crosby for the exquisitely appropriate words of “Near the Cross”. “In me, ‘round me, through me now, flows the love of Jesus, o’re me, by me, for me now, in His love forever. Christ for me, Christ in me, Christ through me forever, Jesus loves me this I know, has and will forever.”
LIFE EXCOGITATIONS 