Worship & Theology: The Disease of Sin
Show me your favorite worship songs, and I will show you your imagination of God and the Christian Life.
Show me your favorite worship songs, and I will show you your imagination of God and the Christian Life.
The early church Fathers said it in slightly less pithy terms:
Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi, Lex Vivendi.1
That’s pretentious latin for: what we pray shapes what we believe and how we live.
When I pray with my three and six year old daughters, I want to make sure that we’re not just offering petitions to God. Otherwise, their imagination of the Triune God would be diluted into a cosmic Siri or Alexa.
The transcript of our prayers and our songs of worship form our theology and behavior.
This is why as a Methodist pastor, modern worship songs (and many old hymns at that!) leave me feeling the same way I feel when my daughters pray for God to give them a Barbie Doll dream house.
Like, it’s not wrong.
But there’s more to explore and enjoy and embrace!
In the coming weeks, I will be offering recordings and reflections on songs of worship that emphasize themes of spiritual formation in Wesleyan and Contemplative traditions.
Here is a list in no particular order:
Therapeutic Model of Sin and Salvation. Come Thou Fount with New Stanza.
Lament as an Act of Worship. All I Can Say.
Uncertainty as a Place of Devotion. Merton Song.
The Aspiration for Perfection. The Cry of the Disciple.
Orthodoxy, Orthopraxis, Orthopathy. I Want a Principle Within.
Attentiveness as Spiritual Maturity. Not in a Hurry.
Below is the first in the series…
Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing with Wesleyan Stanza
Song
Lyrics
Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing
Tune my heart to sing Thy grace
Streams of mercy never ceasing
Call for songs of loudest praise
Teach me some melodious sonnet
Sung by flaming tongues above
Praise the Mount I’m fixed upon it
Mount of Thy redeeming love
Here I raise my Ebeneezer
Hither by Thy help I come
And I hope by Thy good pleasure
Safely to arrive at home
Jesus sought me when a stranger
Wandering from the fold of God
He to rescue me from danger
Interposed his precious blood
O to Grace how great a debtor
Daily I’m constrained to be
Let Thy Goodness like a fetter
Bind my wandering hear to Thee
Prone to wander Lord I feel it
Prone to leave the God I love
Here’s my heart Lord take and seal it
Seal it for Thy courts above
O that day when freed from sinning
I shall see Thy lovely face
Clothed then in blood washed linen
How I’ll sing Thy Sovereign Grace
Even now God as I tarry
Heal me of my sin disease
Through Thy mercies sanctify me
Until I love my enemies
Salvation and Rotator Cuffs
Courtroom
Have you ever been to court?
I have. I was 18. I was late to pay a speeding ticket.
I was ready to plead my case with the judge. Except there were about 20 people in front of me, and there was about 20 minutes until lunch.
By the time the judge got around to me, he flippantly said, “Look. I’ll give you an extension. I’m gonna get some lunch.”
Mercy and grace.
Physical Therapy
Have you ever gone to physical therapy?
I have. I was 32. My rotator cuff didn’t heal properly after one of those long-past-my-glory-days-that-never-were sports injuries.
Every time I went, the therapist would tell me to engage in these painful stretches and exercises in order to strengthen the muscle that needed repair.
A Powerless Christianity
Which of these two images come to mind when you think of sin and salvation?
If you grew up in a Christian home in America, you were probably taught that sin was a crime in need of punishment, and that Jesus died for you to be pardoned of your sin.
This is a powerful, beautiful, biblical image. But it is an incomplete one.
First, Jesus didn’t go around from village to village saying that he would save people from future punishment in the afterlife. He invited them to follow his particular way of life!
Secondly, in the courtroom metaphor, while Jesus saves us from the guilt and punishment of sin, he does not deliver us from the power of sin itself.
Going to the extreme, if Christian salvation is primarily a legal transaction removing the guilt of our individual sin, then it has no implication for how we live, or dealing societal injustice or taking personal responsibility for our own actions.
When salvation is principally about being forgiven in order to get to heaven and avoid hell, following Jesus becomes an unnecessary extracurricular activity.
The Scripture Way of Salvation
For Wesley, salvation was an ongoing work of restoration.
Like the therapist working with me to restore my body to its intended design, in salvation, we participate in the work of the Spirit to restore God’s original intent for our lives and our world in the present time.
By salvation I mean not barely according to the vulgar notion deliverance from hell or going to heaven but a present deliverance from sin, a restoration of the soul to its primitive health, its original purity, a recovery of the divine nature, the renewal of our souls after the image of God in righteousness and true holiness in justice mercy and truth.
—John Wesley
The Disease of Sin
Many worship songs speak of Jesus forgiving us of our sin, dying for our sin, but very few songs speak of Jesus healing us from the power and disease of sin.
I wanted this notion of sin to be placed on the lips of the people I was pastoring. So I wrote a new stanza to the popular hymn Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing.
Even Now God, as I Tarry
Heal Me of My Sin Disease
Through Thy Mercies Sanctify Me
Until I Love My Enemies
Baptists and Methodists
Our Baptist brothers and sisters love to ask “When were you saved?” My answer is easy: In Vacation Bible School, when the pastor scared me into accepting Jesus into my heart for fear that I would suffer eternal conscious torment on account of my dishonest academic practices during the Third Grade spelling bee.
For Methodists, salvation is an ongoing work of restoration. So we ask about traumatic religious events from childhood, but we also ask “How are you being saved today?”
May you praise God for pardoning your sin, and may you join God in the work of being healed from the disease of sin.
Amen.
Literally translated: the law of praying, the law of believing, the law of living.