Tuning our Heartstrings

The Power of Music in Learning to Love

Photo by Marius Masalar on Unsplash

An address to church musicians.

(Much of what follows adapts insights by James KA Smith, You Are What You Love)

1. To be human is to love

At the beginning of this year, one of the members of my church, a woman of only 59 year of age, was dying of cancer. I went to visit Wendy in her hospital bed, and her daughters were there. Wendy only had days to live.

Her youngest daughter, Ruth, had been a member of our choir. She had her hymnbook there and was singing to her mother, who was faintly singing along:

Praise My Soul the King of Heaven

To his feet thy tribute bring

Ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven –

Evermore his praises sing.

And then:

Love divine, all loves excelling

Joy of heaven, to earth come down

Fix in us thy humble dwelling

All they faithful mercies crown.

What made it so that these words and tunes brought the comfort of Jesus Christ to these terrible days of parting? Why did this music work?

I want to return to that question. But first, let’s hear the words of Paul’s great prayer, from Philippians 1:9:

…this is my prayer: that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, so that you may be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ – to the glory and praise of God…

I want you to notice something about this prayer. It’s a great thing for us to know more about God revealed to us in Christ Jesus, and for us to be able to discern the best – to develop a taste for the world that is to come. He wants our hearts to be inflamed with desire for the day of Christ, so that we will be able to want what God wants.

But where does it come from? What is the path to depth of insight?

It is love.

We tend to think that we know in order to love.

But Paul wants us to love in order to know.

We like to believe that we human beings are primarily thinking things. After all, what makes you different from your cat? Surely it is your power of thought! And so we think that if we just put enough information into our heads, we’ll get the right outcomes.

That’s how a computer works, isn’t it? You put the right data in, and you get certain outputs out. If you want to change what a computer does, you put different information into it. But we aren’t computers. We don’t work like that. We aren’t simply minds. We are hearts and minds: and there’s a very strong connection between the heart and the mind.

In the Bible’s view, we are lovers. We are made for loving relationships, with each other, and most especially, with God himself. What does that mean? It means that what drives us and persuades and motivates us is not information, but love.

It’s how relationships work. What starts us on the quest to know something or someone is a desire for that thing. My son Simon loves Japan and Japanese, and he is extremely motivated to learn the language. He chose to do it at Uni, even though it wasn’t part of his school studies. It was something he discovered independently, and he simply enjoys it. You don’t have to ask whether he’s done his uni work. He’s fallen in love with it, and so he desires to learn all about it. The more he learns about it, the more his love of it gets deeper, and his joy more profound. Eventually, he moved to Japan!

This is like a picture of the Christian life. We are creatures made for the love of God from the beginning. Now we are saved; what we’re called to is a deeper love of God: not simply to know about him, but to know him. We are called to know him so that our love for him bursts into full flame. God has shown his great love to us by pursuing us in Jesus Christ: now we begin to pursue him. This is the thought that we get in 1 John 4: we are called to love God, and to love one another, because God’s love has been shown to us.

2. Our hearts are wayward

But here’s the trouble.

We are made for love, and so our hearts are easily captivated by alternatives to God. And other things in this world call to our hearts. There are other kingdoms than the kingdom of God, and they want us to dream for them. And they do a great job at calling to us.

The songs, rituals, and cathedrals of these other loves surround us all the time. We are immersed in them

In fact, we have a whole industry dedicated to capturing our hearts: it’s called the advertising industry. The gospel of consumerism is preached to us, without exaggeration, all. The. Time. President of the Marketing Firm Yankelovich, Jay Walker-Smith, says that we have gone from being exposed to perhaps 500 ads a day in the 1970s to something more like 5000 today. That’s 5000 attempts to seduce you – per day: on your FB feed, in your Twitter account, on the bus shelter, on your phone, in your inbox, on every website you look at, and when you watch a cat video on YouTube.

And how do they do it? I always like the example of Qantas. A while back, Qantas was getting into trouble because of some bad press. What did they do? Correct the facts? Put a statement on the public record?

No. They appealed to our hearts, with the ‘Feels Like Home’ campaign. Now I don’t know about you, but it seems a bit weird for an airline, which surely wants us to go visit the world, to be telling us about how good home is. But the longing for home is one of the most powerful desires of the human heart. It reminds us of parental love, and soup, and sleeping in, and … it’s about security.

And – it goes without saying: notice how prominent music is in getting us to love things. Advertisers know that they can embed a longing in you and me by using music, because music has a way of getting not just into our brains, but into our bodies. Attach a longing to music, and it is very powerful indeed. That’s why we have national anthems.

3. What can we do to teach ourselves to love rightly

The people who come to your church, including you, have been swimming in a very deep sea of messages aimed at their longings. They’ve been – we’ve been – attending the church of consumption and materialism for basically the other 143 hours of the week.

We have one hour, maybe an hour and a half, to enter into a different dream – to open up your heart to the thing it is actually made to long for. This is the dream that Paul wants the Philippians to be into: a longing for a deep knowledge of God, a knowledge so deep that it will make them long for heaven as their home.

So, what can we do to teach ourselves – and others - to love rightly? What can we do to act as an antidote?

We have to become curators of the heart.

What’s that mean? A curator of a garden cultivates the plants in her care. She provides the conditions for them to grow. She protects them from pests. She makes sure they have the best quality soil, and that the weeds are removed.

That’s what we need to be for hearts.

How do we do that?

We need not just to know facts about God’s kingdom: we need to long for it. There are three realities about God that we need to shape us.

First: We need not just to know that God created the heavens and the earth: we need to feel this reality in our bones, and experience the feeling of awe.

Second: We don’t need a list of technical theological terms for the atonement rattled off. We need to come to the foot of the cross in tears and leave in joyful relief, so that we know the depths of our need before God and the surpassing measure of his love.

Third: We need to feel what it is to yearn for the return of Jesus Christ, and for the new heaven and the new earth, our true home: to hope in other words.

Creation. The Cross. The final hope.

One of the greatest ever Christian songs moves through this pattern:

O Lord my God,

When I in awesome wonder

Consider all

The world Thy Hand hath made… then sings my soul, how great thou art…

There’s awe at creation. And where does it move to?

And when I think,

That God, His Son not sparing;

Sent Him to die,

I scarce can take it in…

It takes us to the cross – and then lastly:

When Christ shall come,

With shouts of acclamation,

And take me home,

What joy shall fill my heart!

It brings us finally to hope.

That song is a great example of heart curation. It draws our attention to the most important realities that a human being can know, and generates for us feelings of awe, humility, love, and hope.

4. How to play music for lovers.

Now this idea of heart curation should shape everything we do when we gather, but I hope you can see the role that music should have in curating our hearts to love God. Music is a great gift of God that gets things into our bones so that they stay there, even when those bones are riddled with cancer. Singing the truth means that the truth becomes something we long for.

What can you do, as church musicians, to cultivate the heart?

The first thing is that you can be selective about the songs you choose to sing. No pressure, but we’ve got four songs in which to have our hearts moved so that we long for heaven and not for ice cream or sexy shoes or health insurance. Raise your standards. There’s no time for songs which are either lyrically or musically flat. We don’t want songs that don’t take us anywhere; that are worthy but dull. We don’t want songs that are epic in scope but say nothing. Let me put it bluntly: we need songs that we can sing on our deathbeds. Do the songs on your list pass the deathbed test? Be ruthless.

We need songs that meet us in our real world experience of life, and transport us, through the lens of the gospel, into a real and felt experience of the love of God that is for us in Christ Jesus. What about this:

Riches I need not, nor the world’s empty praise,

Thou mine inheritance, now and always.

See how this ancient hymn takes us from the lure of possessions and acclamation, and instead draws us to a vision of God as our treasure? It’s a brilliant move.

Notice how Rob Smith’s song ‘Undivided’ explicitly does what I am saying here:

Give me an undivided heart/ for all that you desire.

We are actually addressed as hearts that need to long for what God is longing for.

Or another, by Simone Richardson:

I take comfort in the hope

of the thief upon the cross

For I am worthy of as little love as he.

This takes us to the cross to find our comfort and then turns to hope.

The second is that you can take care about how you play. Practice, rehearse, and play well, so that the heartstrings of the people of God are tuned to the key of heaven by your playing. That extra session, or that extra half hour of rehearsal time, will show. Don’t underestimate the influence of what you can do, musically speaking, to cultivate in people the love of God. How could you take the music at your church to the next level – by improving your own playing, but also by helping the other musicians to develop theirs? And: if you have any say in church budgets: are the musicians well supported by the budget?

Now, I don’t want to be misheard here as advocating a kind of sappy emotionalism. You know when a person is in love with the idea of being in love and not really the person themselves? They actually can’t say anything about the person much because of the fog of emotion. They are really enjoying the emotion for its own sake, and not because it actually connects them to the object of their infatuation. And actually, infatuation is narcissistic in the end, because it is all about me and my affection, and not really about the other person at all.

There are songs that do this for God. These are the songs that are just repeated statements of emotion, which feel artificial. They don’t actually show us a vision of the world to come; they just tell us what to feel – a bit like a comedian not saying anything funny but just telling us to laugh. Real, profound love for God won’t come from us telling each other how much we love God; it will come from turning our gaze lovingly to him.

So why were we able to comfort Wendy by singing to her and with her? First, because these songs were powerful enough to curate her heart with longings for God. That is: the songs were good enough. But secondly: we’d sung them enough that they’d become part of her. They weren’t just songs: they were precious reminders of her salvation in Jesus, and her hope for heaven. That’s what your ministry to the people of God should be playing for.