Songs Are Sermons by Holly D. Sands

What We Sing, We Believe

Most of us couldn't recite our own church's statement of faith. But I'd bet you could sing me the bridge of whatever song the worship team led last Sunday. Probably twice.

That's the thing about music: it sticks. A sermon is heard once, but a song is sung over and over, hummed in the car, and stuck in your head while you're doing the dishes. Over time, the songs we sing teach us who God is, what He's like, and what we can expect from Him, whether we mean for them to or not.

Paul understood this. He told the Colossians, "Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God" (Colossians 3:16).

In Paul's mind, singing is teaching. So the question every church member ought to be asking is a simple one: what are our songs teaching us?

That includes the songs built straight from Scripture. Singing God's Word back to Him is about as good as it gets. The Psalms were Israel's hymnbook, after all.

But even a Scripture song deserves a second look, because a verse can be lifted out of its context and made to say something it never said. A song can quote the Bible word for word and still teach something the Bible doesn't. So it's not enough to ask whether a song uses Scripture. We have to ask how it uses it.

Who's Writing the Church's Songs

Most worship leaders pull from the CCLI Top 100, a ranking of what licensed churches across every denomination actually report singing. Here's the CCLI top ten as of this week:

Goodness of God (Ben Fielding, Brian Johnson, Ed Cash, Jason Ingram, Jenn Johnson)
Holy Forever (Brian Johnson, Chris Tomlin, Jason Ingram, Jenn Johnson, Phil Wickham)
Great Are You Lord (David Leonard, Jason Ingram, Leslie Jordan)
Gratitude (Benjamin Hastings, Brandon Lake, Dante Bowe)
Worthy of It All (David Brymer, Ryan Hall)
Build My Life (Brett Younker, Karl Martin, Kirby Elizabeth Kaple, Matt Redman, Pat Barrett)
How Great Is Our God (Chris Tomlin, Ed Cash, Jesse Reeves)
Trust In God (Brandon Lake, Chris Brown, Mitch Wong, Steven Furtick)
What A Beautiful Name (Ben Fielding, Brooke Ligertwood)
Firm Foundation (He Won't) (Austin Davis, Chandler Moore, Cody Carnes)

Some of those names should sound familiar.

Brian and Jenn Johnson lead Bethel Music.
Ben Fielding, Brooke Ligertwood, and Benjamin Hastings come out of Hillsong.
Chris Brown and Mitch Wong lead worship at Elevation, and Elevation's pastor, Steven Furtick, is a credited writer on five of the top 20.

All told, about half of the top 20 come from Bethel, Hillsong, or Elevation, or from writers like Brandon Lake, Chandler Moore, and Cody Carnes who regularly write and record with them.

Now, I do want to clarify that these four churches aren't identical.

Passion's teaching is mainstream evangelical.

Bethel is closely tied to the NAR (the New Apostolic Reformation, which teaches that God is restoring modern-day apostles and prophets to govern the church and exercise dominion over societal and political spheres).

Hillsong's problems came from the top. Its leadership drew years of criticism for prosperity-leaning teaching and celebrity culture before collapsing in scandal, and some of its own musicians were mistreated along the way.

Elevation Church looks fine on paper, but if you've ever listened to Steven Furtick preach, you'll hear him put himself (and you) right in the middle of passages that are about God. Others have a name for what he does that I think rightly fits. They call it "narcigesis," narcissism plus eisegesis. What you end up with is a watered-down prosperity gospel where God is your ticket to a bigger, better life.

Different as they are, all four have shaped how a whole lot of us think about worship and what's supposed to happen when we sing. Their reach goes way past their own churches, too. Adam Perez, a worship scholar at Duke Divinity School, says these big worship brands now have more say over what we sing on Sunday than our own denominations do.

What the Songs Are Teaching

When a handful of churches write most of what the whole Church sings, their theology travels with the music. Some of it is in the lyrics. A lot of it isn't. Here are three things I see:

1. Expecting God to show up in the music. Bethel and Hillsong both grew out of Pentecostal churches, and Elevation and Passion have borrowed heavily from that style of worship. What they have in common is the belief that God shows up in a special, powerful way when the congregation sings a certain kind of song. You can see it in how services are built now: the long build, the bridge repeated until something "breaks," the lights coming down. The music becomes the moment we meet God, and the sermon becomes what happens after.

I should say where I'm coming from. I'm Reformed Charismatic. I hold to the sovereignty of God and the doctrines of grace, and I believe the Holy Spirit is still active today, moving in power and giving His gifts to the Church. So this isn't a swipe at charismatics. My problem isn't that people expect God to show up. It's the idea that a band can make Him show up, as if He comes on cue when the drums kick in.

Jesus said, "God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth" (John 4:24). Spirit and truth. God's presence isn't something we produce with the right chord progression. And a lot of Baptist and Reformed churches that would never sign Bethel's statement of faith have soaked up this view of worship without ever noticing.

2. Singing the victory and skipping the valley. People who study these charts keep noticing the same thing: power, deliverance, and victory are the big themes in the songs churches sing most. Just look at what's near the top right now: "Goodness of God," "Gratitude," "God I'm Just Grateful," "Graves into Gardens," "Way Maker," "Firm Foundation." God is good to me. He's been faithful in my story. He turns things around.

All true, praise God! But that's one slice of the whole counsel of God (Acts 20:27). What's missing? Lament. Confession of sin. The holiness and wrath of God. The cross explained, not just mentioned. The return of Christ. Sing nothing but victory songs long enough, and you won't know what to do when the deliverance doesn't come on your timeline.

Now, don't hear me saying we need sadder songs. In the late '90s, I used to listen to K-LOVE, and it drove me crazy how depressing so many of the songs were. I even made up a mock song about it:

I have no hope, I have no faith, and I am drowning in the lake.
I sing these songs, these songs I sing, because there is no life in me.

That's not lament either. Biblical lament doesn't just wallow. It cries out to God, then turns back to trusting Him. Read Psalm 13. David opens with "How long, O LORD?" and closes by rejoicing in God's salvation. The songs that irritated me on K-LOVE were songs about staying stuck in the pit. Today's victory songs skip the pit altogether. Neither one teaches us how to walk through the valley with God.

3. Singing about us more than about Him. Many of today's biggest songs are first-person testimony: what I've walked through, and how God was faithful to me in it. There's a place for that. The Psalms are full of it. But the psalmists never stop telling you who God is while they're telling you what He's done.

A lot of today's testimony songs shape us mostly through feeling and memory. The old hymns told their story and taught you who God is.

"But the Lyrics Are Fine"

This is the loudest pushback. And sometimes it's true. Some of these songs are lyrically sound, and a few are genuinely good! So does it matter where a song comes from if the words line up with Scripture?

I think it does, for three reasons.

The money. When a church sings a song and reports it to CCLI, the songwriters and publishers get paid. So every time your church sings a Bethel, Hillsong, or Elevation song, it's helping fund that ministry: its conferences, its schools (like Bethel's School of Supernatural Ministry), and its teaching. Your offering plate may never send a dime to Redding, California, but your worship set might!

Who you listen to next. Anybody in the pew who loves a song is going to look up the artist and find more of their music. And because they heard it in church, they figure the church must approve of that ministry. Before long, they're watching that church's sermons and soaking up its teaching. Our worship sets are giving these ministries a stamp of approval, whether we mean to or not.

What comes with it. The words are only part of the song. When your church plays it the way Bethel or Elevation plays it, with the same long build, the same bridge repeated over and over, the same lights going down, you're not just borrowing their lyrics. You're borrowing their idea of worship. The words can be perfect and the lesson still wrong: God showed up because the band did. Wrong.

Scripture tells us to "test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world" (1 John 4:1). We're pretty good at testing the words. We'd better start testing everything that comes with them, too.

How to Test a Worship Song

You don't need a seminary degree for this. Next time a song is on the screen Sunday morning, or in your earbuds Monday, ask a few questions.

Who is this song about? It's fine to sing "I" (the Psalms do it all the time). But is God still the main subject, or have I taken His place?
Who wrote it, and what do they teach? Look up the songwriter and the church behind it. Would you sit under that church's preaching?
Could I learn something true about God from it? Does it say anything about His character, His works, or His Word? Or just how I feel about Him?
Is the gospel in it, or at least not missing from it? Not just the word "cross," but sin, substitution, and grace. Over a month of Sundays, would an unbeliever learn why Jesus had to die?
Can regular people actually sing it? I can't tell you how many times I've stood in a church trying to follow a melody that jumps all over the place, or reaching for a note I was never going to hit. A lot of today's songs were written for a worship leader with a big range and a band behind them, not for regular folks in the pew. So what happens? People quit singing and just watch. And a church that's watching isn't worshiping together. It's an audience.
What is the music doing? Is it built to work up a feeling (getting louder, repeating the same line over and over, building to a big moment) so that when the emotion hits, people think that's God?

And don't just look at one song. Look at the whole set list over a month. A single song can't carry the full weight of the faith, but your church's steady diet of songs is carrying it, for better or worse.

Here's the good news: a new generation of hymn writers is out there. CityAlight, Keith and Kristyn Getty, Matt Boswell, and Matt Papa are writing songs that are rich in truth and easy for a whole church to sing. If you've ever sung "Yet Not I but through Christ in Me," you know what I mean.

Who's Writing Your Theology?

Our theology isn’t only coming from the pulpit. Think about it. Most churches would never let a stranger preach from their pulpit without knowing what they believe. But we let strangers write the words we put in our people’s mouths every single week.

So the question isn’t whether our songs are shaping what we believe about God. They are. The question is who’s doing the writing, and whether you’d trust them to teach you.

The songs are going to stick either way. Make sure they’re true.

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About the Author

Holly D. Sands has walked with Christ since 1983. She writes at He is My Song, helping fellow believers walk faithfully through every season with biblical encouragement, sound doctrine, and honest reflection. She lives in South Carolina, where she and her husband, Shane Sands, are members of a local Baptist church. Shane's been called by God as an evangelist and leads United in Christ Jesus ministry. At home, they're joined by their idiot cat, Mister Bojangles, whose main contribution to the household is sleeping and eating treats.

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