Douglas O'Donnell: Shall We Sing of Sanctification?

A character in Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Hours, uses two analogies for “the realm of the duped and the simpleminded.” One is “Christians with acoustic guitars.” While this post is not about determining the appropriate instrumentation in corporate worship (acoustic guitars vs. electric organs), it is about calling Christians out of the realm of the duped and simpleminded when it comes to the lyrical content of our songs. The point is not that we want the world to esteem our music. Whether or not the world asks us to “sing us one of those God songs,” as Judah’s captors asked them to do (see Ps. 137:3), matters little in our present time of exile. What does matter is how well our words reflect God’s Word. So I do care about this question, what can we do to return more to the Word in our worship? One of the ways is to return to singing what Isaac Watts called “moral songs,” or what I have called elsewhere “practical wisdom.”

In advocating “practical wisdom,” I do not mean “moralizing” Old Testament texts—e.g., allegorizing David’s five stones to symbolize obedience, service, Bible reading, prayer, and fellowship. Rather, I have in view applying the morals found in scriptural songs to our songs. I’m trying to say what John Calvin said in his Commentaries on the Four Last Books of Moses: “God never speaks except to render men fruitful in good works.” Or, what Peter Craigie writes of the Song of Yahweh (Deut. 32) summarizes well my effort. He speaks of that song being “similar to the wisdom literature in that it includes very practical advice (cf. vv. 7, 28-29); its function is to remind and to educate the people in the way they should take (cf. 31:19)—it is not simply a song of praise” (Deuteronomy, NICOT [Eerdmans, 1976], 374).

In my study of six OT canticles (God’s Lyrics: Rediscovering Worship Through Old Testament Songs), I found that those scriptural songs (typical of the majority of Bible songs!) are not simply songs of praise, but songs that call us to live righteously—to put off pride, idolatry, immorality, and ungodly fear, and to put on courage and mercy—and even to rejoice in our God-graced righteousness (“I have kept the ways of the Lord,” 2 Sam. 22:22). And in this way, they function, as Paul noted in Colossians 3:16 they should, as “wisdom” with which we are to teach and admonish one another (cf. 1 Cor. 10:1-4).

While such singing of sanctification is neglected in much of contemporary worship music, this theme is found throughout traditional Protestant hymnody. During the Reformation, it was common to write songs about the Ten Commandments, as Martin Luther did. Luther’s hymn, “That Man a Godly Life Might Live,” which is based on a thirteenth-century hymn used when Christians went on pilgrimages, gives a feel for this kind of moral song. The first verse of thirteen is as follows.... Keep reading