I’ve been exploring some of the very modern worship songs as an old guy 😀. But now, I’ve decided to alternate between very modern hymns, old hymns, and in-between hymns, namely the worship songs from the 60s to the 90s that feature in hymnbooks such as Mission Praise. Today it’s the turn of the very modern hymns.
Today’s song is Holy is the Lord from 2003.
Sometimes older people think that newer songs don’t emphasize how holy or how awesome God is, but when I look on the lyrics, I see little difference between the old and new hymns. It’s true that the newer ones are often faster, but I don’t see anything in Scripture about God telling us his musical preferences. He’s more concerned with what goes on in our hearts and minds. Music is a gift of God, and it’s nice to use it in our worship, whatever our cultural preferences are.
I always like hearing this lyric in U2’s Magnificent
I was born
I was born to sing for you
I didn't have a choice but to lift you up
And sing whatever song you wanted me to
I give you back my voice
From the womb my first cry, it was a joyful noise
I see many videos with both lyrics and chords. So, you can easily just play along with them if you have a guitar. And I generally play the older hymns on the piano, organ, or keyboards – where you can add strings etc.
People use pop/rock music to sing about all sorts of sordid things. Even back in the 1980s, people (not even Christians) used to see MTV videos as being dominated by soft pornography. Maybe that was an exageration, but it was so fashionable to promote violence, drugs, promiscuity etc. in music. If someone promoted God or morality, that wasn’t seen as cool. Maybe Band Aid/Live Aid helped to change that. Of course, music did have left-wing protest songs, but they rarely spoke of God – apart from Bob Dylan himself and a few others.
I see many YouTube videos criticizing sources of modern worship music too. You do hear of scandals etc. But the writers of old hymns wouldn’t have been perfect either. We might be shocked it we had complete insight into their lives. But hymns are about worshipping God, not the artists or writers. So, I’m not particularly interested in YouTube videos that tell me to stop listening to modern artists. King David had his scandals, but that doesn’t stop me reading his psalms 😀. And Samson wasn’t anywhere near perfect either. Yet, he’s listed among the heroes of faith in Hebrews 11. And just because an artist might have been associated with a movement who had some leader involved in a scandal, doesn’t mean that the artist would have approved of the behaviour. And sometimes churches get criticized, not for scandals, but because they don’t fall into line with the woke or LGBT agenda or whatever.
Anyway, here are some other versions of today’s hymn:
