Can You Hear Him Singing?
I recently stumbled across a YouTube channel featuring congregational singing
"mostly from three sound Calvinist churches: John MacArthur's Grace Community Church (Sun Valley, California), C.H. Spurgeon's Metropolitan Tabernacle (London) nowadays and Westminster Chapel (London) during the ministry of Martyn Lloyd-Jones".
One of the reasons that the channel has almost 80k subscribers seems to be that the recordings from Westminster Chapel feature Lloyd-Jones himself singing: if you listen carefully, you can hear him.
Yet it reminded me of a far greater truth: Jesus himself promises to sing with his people. If you listen carefully, you can hear him.
"Christ leads our songs"
Hebrews 2:12 makes clear that it is Christ himself who promises in Psalm 22:
“I will tell of your name to my brothers;
in the midst of the congregation I will sing your praise.”
Christopher Ash helps us see what this looks like:
I have found helpful the old metaphor of a choir with a choir leader or lead singer. The choir is the church of Christ throughout all generations. Jesus Christ is the lead singer and leader of the choir (cf. the "Choirmaster" of a number of psalm superscriptions)
In John Calvin's words:
Christ leads our songs, and is the chief composer of our hymns.[1]
If you listen carefully, you can hear him.
Listen for his voice
As Michael Lefebvre points out, this should particularly impact how we sing the Psalms:
Finding Jesus in the Psalms is not simply about the prophecies of his work in this line or in that line. We find Jesus in the Psalms by hearing his voice leading our praise in every line.
This is different from other songs:
When we sing sings like "Amazing Grace" or "How Deep the Father's Love for Us", we don't sing them with their authors - John Newton and Stuart Townend, respectively ... neither of these men are present in our services - and neither of these men can (or would presume to!) mediate our acceptance before God. Such songs can speak about Jesus, but they cannot give us the voice of Jesus. But Jesus is present with his people in worship.
(This is true even of the psalms of confession — if it was "fitting" for Christ to undergo a baptism of repentance, it is also fitting that he sing these songs as our representative).
Therefore, while "Hymnwriters compose songs for the congregation to sing as their song to God, with the song's original author and his experience disappearing from view ... the Psalms are radically different".[2]
And so, as you sing from the Saviour's Playlist, listen out for the Galilean Voice:
Hear him stand in your place and sing for you; hear him stand beside you in trials and sing to you; hear him sing with his people in glad-hearted celebration; hear his prayers for his church under attack, his people under pressure. I think you’ll find your love for your Saviour growing richer and deeper and a new appreciation for what he has done, is doing and will do.
If you listen carefully, you can hear him.
