If you would like to send your offering through the mail, our mailing address is:
CrossPointe Community Church
P O Box 126
Chippewa Lake, OH 44215
SCRIPTURE
Christ is the visible image of the invisible God. He existed before anything was created and is supreme over all creation, for through Him God created everything in the heavenly realms and on earth. He made the things we can see and the things we can’t see—such as thrones, kingdoms, rulers, and authorities in the unseen world. Everything was created through Him and for Him. He existed before anything else, and He holds all creation together.
Christ is also the head of the church, which is His body. He is the beginning,
Colossians 1:15-22
supreme over all who rise from the dead. So He is first in everything. For God in all His fullness was pleased to live in Christ, and through Him God reconciled everything to Himself. He made peace with everything in heaven and on earth by means of Christ’s blood on the cross. This includes you who were once far away from God. You were His enemies, separated from Him by your evil thoughts and actions. Yet now He has reconciled you to Himself through the death of Christ in His physical body. As a result, He has brought you into His own presence, and you are holy and blameless as you stand before Him without a single fault.
Let the message about Christ, in all its richness, fill your lives. Teach and counsel each other with all the wisdom He gives. Sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs to God with thankful hearts. And whatever you do or say, do it as a representative of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks through Him to God the Father.
Colossians 3:16-17
SERMON
My Heart Will Sing
Randy K’Meyer
Let the message about Christ, in all its richness, fill your lives.
Colossians 3:16
When the message about Christ, in all its richness, fills our lives, it will have an impact on what comes out of our mouths: We will speak: “Teach and counsel each other with all the wisdom He gives.” And we will sing: “Sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs to God with thankful hearts.”
Today, I choose to focus on the latter result of being filled with the message about Christ; that is, singing.
How many of you sing in the shower? How many of you sing in the car?
By the way, did you know that singing in the shower is all fun and games until you get shampoo in your mouth? Then it becomes a soap opera.
Scientists have shown that an uncontrollable urge to start singing the Tokens’ hit single The Lion Sleeps Tonight is always just a whim away. A whim away a whim away!
“Hey doc, I keep spontaneously singing songs by The Who.”
“How long has this been happening?”
“Ever since I was a young boy.”
I recently had a wedding where a Jewish man married a Catholic woman
and the soloist sang, Oy Vey Maria. Oy Vey is right!
Would anyone want to venture a guess on how many times the word ‘sing’ appears in the entire Bible? 100? Close but no cigar; 200? Close but no cigar; 300? Close but no cigar. The word ‘sing’ appears in the Bible over 400 times.
50 times, as a command as in today’s text. 1 “Sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs to God with thankful hearts” (Colossians 3:16). Singing doesn’t seem to be optional for the Christian.
From the beginning, the church has been a singing church?
Of course, they began by singing the Psalms. No surprise there; that’s what they knew; the Jewish people had been singing the Psalms for 500 years!
Were you aware that all 150 Psalms are actually songs? We’ve lost the music, but we still have the lyrics. And the word ‘sing’ appears 70 times in the Psalms. 2 Nine Psalms begin with an admonition to sing as the following three exemplify:
O come, let us sing for joy to the Lord.
Psalm 95:1
Sing to the Lord a new song.
Psalm 96:1
O sing to the Lord a new song, for He has done wonderful things.
Psalm 98:1
But it wasn’t long before those new Christians needed a new hymnal to express their distinctiveness from the Jewish faith. For now, they not only believed in the God of the Old Testament, but they also embraced Christ Jesus as being the same!
Biblical scholars point out that there are likely four of these early Christian songs that have made their way into the New Testament.
In Romans 10:10 “If you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you shall be saved.”
For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, that He was buried, that He was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures.
1 Corinthians 15:3-7
You must have the same attitude that Christ Jesus had. Though He was God, He did not think of equality with God as something to cling to. Instead, He gave up His divine privileges; He took the humble position of a slave and was born as a human being. When He appeared in human form, He humbled himself in obedience to God and died a criminal’s death on a cross. Therefore, God elevated Him to the place of highest honor and gave Him the name above all other names, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue declare that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
Philippians 2:5-11
Great indeed, we confess, is the mystery of our religion: He was manifested in the flesh, vindicated in the Spirit, seen by angels, preached among the nations, believed on in the world, taken up in glory.
1 Timothy 3:16
If these four passages were all we had in the entire Bible, they would be enough; for they tell us all we really need to know about Jesus and what He has done for us.
Based upon that, I want to speak about three reasons we sing.
First, we sing because it gives us a much-needed emotional outlet for our worship.
I am so glad that Jesus modeled that for us. On the night on which He was betrayed, He and His disciples celebrated the Jewish Passover together. As you know Jesus turned the Passover into what we know as Communion. And both Matthew and Mark record that after Jesus served communion, “they sang a hymn and went out to the Mount of Olives” (Matthew 26:30, Mark 14:26). What did they sing? Scholars tell us it was customary for Jews celebrating the Passover to sing Psalms 113-118. These Psalms are collectively referred to as The Hallel; for ‘hallelujah,’ which is the first word in Psalm 113. These Psalms proclaim the faithfulness of God. That’s exactly what Jesus needed as He faced the cross. In the heart of the Hallel, we find these verses and I want you to imagine Jesus singing them:
I love the Lord, for He heard my voice; He heard my cry for mercy. Because He turned His ear to me, I will call on Him as long as I live. The cords of death entangled me, the anguish of the grave came over me; I was overcome by distress and sorrow. Then I called on the name of the Lord: “Lord, save me!”
The Lord is gracious and righteous; our God is full of compassion. The Lord protects the unwary; when I was brought low, He saved me. Return to your rest, my soul, for the Lord has been good to you. For you, Lord, have delivered me from death, my eyes from tears, my feet from stumbling, that I may walk before the Lord in the land of the living.
As Jesus worshipped the Lord, His singing gave Him and emotional outlet.
There’s this great story starts in 2 Samuel 5, in which King David brings the Ark of the Covenant back to the city of Jerusalem. The Ark was Israel’s most sacred possession; a symbol of God’s presence, a reminder of what he had done, what he was doing, and what he would do. And it needed to be in Jerusalem, so David went and got it.
Throughout the journey home, “David worshiped God with all of his might” (2 Samuel 6:14-15). This was full body, no-holds-barred worship. It’s such a beautiful image, if you leave out one little part of the story. David was getting his praise on wearing nothing more than a linen ephod, a sleeveless undergarment that came down to about the hip. It was essentially nothing more than his underwear. It’s a powerful picture, if not a little bizarre. A world leader, dancing and singing in front of all of his people, in his underwear.
Why did the writer include this story? Because it shows that David worshiped God not only with all his might but also with complete abandon, with complete disregard for how he looked or what others thought; including his wife Michal.
She was very offended that a king would be seen dancing around in his underwear. No wife likes to see her husband dancing through the streets in his underwear, especially not the wife of a king. But David didn’t care about how he looked or about what anyone else thought. His primary concern was worshiping God.
How cool is that? To be so lost in the glory of God that you could care less about how your voice sounds or how the person next to you sounds, or how you look, or who’s looking at you.
My guess is when we get to heaven we won’t be concerned about those things.
The Book of Revelation paints an awe-inspiring scene of heavenly worship:
Then I saw a Lamb that looked as if it had been slaughtered, but it was now standing between the throne and the four living beings and among the twenty-four elders. He had seven horns and seven eyes, which represent the sevenfold Spirit of God that is sent out into every part of the earth. He stepped forward and took the scroll from the right hand of the one sitting on the throne. And when he took the scroll, the four living beings and the twenty-four elders fell down before the Lamb. Each one had a harp, and they held gold bowls filled with incense, which are the prayers of God’s people. And they sang a new song with these words:
“You are worthy to take the scroll and break its seals and open it.
For you were slaughtered, and your blood has ransomed people for God
from every tribe and language and people and nation. And you have caused them to become a Kingdom of priests for our God. And they will reign on the earth.”Then I looked again, and I heard the voices of thousands and millions of angels around the throne and of the living beings and the elders. And they sang in a mighty chorus:
“Worthy is the Lamb who was slaughtered—to receive power and riches
and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and blessing.”And then I heard every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea. They sang:
“Blessing and honor and glory and power belong to the one sitting on the throne and to the Lamb forever and ever.”
And the four living beings said, “Amen!” And the twenty-four elders fell down and worshiped the Lamb. (Revelation 5:6-14).
Second, we sing because sometimes when life throws us a curve, the best thing we can do is sing.
We sing individually and we sing together. We sing songs that remind us of who God is; that He loves us despite the most difficult circumstances, that He is always there for us and will never give up on us.
Many early Christians who suffered sang while undergoing hardships. Paul and Silas were arrested, beaten and thrown into prison and Acts 16:25 says: “Around midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God.”
And so should we, especially when confronted with difficult times. I love How Firm a Foundation, It Is Well With My Soul, I Will Not Be Shaken and Still.
Did you know some of the greatest songs have been written in the midst of suffering? Don Moen was on a plane going to sing for the funeral of his young nephew who died in a horrific automobile accident. As he read Isa. 43:19, “I will even make a way in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert,” God gave Don the song, God Will Make a Way.
Laurie Klein going through loneliness and financial strain, picked up her guitar and out of her mouth came, “I love you Lord, and I lift my voice to worship You.”
Marc Byrd, in deep despair and penniless, spent an entire weekend studying the Psalms. Out of that weekend came the song, God of Wonders.
Darlene Zschech experienced dark days in her life in 1993. Life seemed to be unbearable. She turned to Psalm 96 and inspired by it wrote, Shout to the Lord.
We sing together in worship because it is one of the sweetest privileges we have
as followers of Christ. Singing together builds up the church and it reminds us of the gospel that’s brought us together as one community. When we sing with other believers, we’re saying we’re in this together. And that gives us strength.
But thirdly, and most of all, we sing songs of praise and thanksgiving because we are extremely grateful for what God in Christ has done on our behalf.
To those people who lived in the first century, where death was an ever-present reality this message about eternal life in Christ was worth far more than all the silver and gold the world had to offer! No wonder it was worth singing about.
I recall the few times I attended church services before Christ – weddings, funerals, baptisms, and child dedications. And the people would stand and open their hymnals and sing. You wouldn’t have caught me dead singing in a setting like that. For one thing, I didn’t believe in what they were singing about and two singing was for girls or sissies.
Then one day I heard a song: Pass It On.
It only takes a spark to get a fire going.
And soon all those around will warm up in its glowing.
That how it is with God’s love once you experienced it
You want to sing, its fresh like spring, you want to pass it on.
Something about that song grabbed me. I found myself stealing little moments here and there when no one was around playing it on the record player. I am convinced to this day that God used that song to open my heart and bring me to the point where I accepted Christ as my Savior.
Then I began to attend church services. And guess what happened? I began to open a hymnal and sing. How Great Thou Art quickly became my favorite hymn. And I remember being filled with a sense of awe and mystery when singing Holy, Holy, Holy.
What caused that change in me? Why was I willing to be seen by others as a sissy? Because Christ had come into my life and things were never going to be the same. Because suddenly I knew that there was a God and that He loved me and had forgiven me. Because I was so grateful that Christ had given His life for me.
We sing songs of praise and thanksgiving because we are extremely grateful
for what God in Christ has done on our behalf.
Some of you probably remember the name, Orel Hershiser. At one time, he pitched for the Cleveland Indians. But in 1988, he pitched an unbelievable season for the Los Angeles Dodgers.
Following a complete game shutout in August, he pitched multiple shutout innings and hurled five more complete games through the end of the regular season. He did not allow his opponents to score an earned run in 59 consecutive innings.
When the Dodgers faced the New York Mets in the National League playoffs, Orel continued to dominate hitters, leading the Dodgers to victory by pitching more than 24 innings, crowned by a complete game shutout in the final game!
In the World Series, his complete game victory over the Oakland A’s in game five clinched the series for the Dodgers. No wonder Orel was awarded the Cy Young award and two MVP awards, one for the National League playoffs and the other for the World Series.
During the playoffs, the TV cameras zoomed in on this legend in the making. They caught Orel in the dugout between innings singing softly to himself. Unable to make out the tune, the announcers merely commented that Orel’s record certainly gave him something to sing about.
Johnny Carson had Orel on the Tonight Show a few days later and replayed that tape. Johnny asked him what song he had been singing during the game and if Orel would sing it again right then and there. The audience roared its approval over Orel’s embarrassed reluctance. So on national TV, Orel softly sang the tune TV crews had barely caught on tape:
Praise God from whom all blessings flow.
Praise Him all creatures here below;
Praise Him above ye heavenly host,
Praise Father, Son and Holy Ghost.
Amen.
1 How Many Times Does the Word ‘Sing’ Appear in the Bible? https://teacherscollegesj.org/how-many-times-does-the-word-sing-appear-in-the-bible/
2 How Many Times Does the Word ‘Sing’ Appear in the Psalms?
https://www.answers.com/Q/How_many_time_does_the_word_sing_appear_in_the_psalms