“You don’t have to be a seminary student or a missionary to Peru to step into the world of psalm singing. You only need to do two things. First, consider the benefits that God attaches to worship in psalm. Second, decide practically how you will begin singing the psalms.”

How interested would you be if archaeologists unearthed a hymnbook embossed with the name, “Jesus of Nazareth?” Overlooking the anachronism for a moment, wouldn’t “Jesus’ hymnbook” be immediately republished and rocket to the best-seller lists? Wouldn’t those songs find instantaneous popularity in worship services across the globe?

We have that hymnbook. We do know what songs Jesus sang: he sang the psalms.

So a question arises: if you’d be excited about singing the hymns from our fictional archaeological find, then why aren’t you more excited about singing the psalms? Two events in my life significantly nudged me into answering that question.

The first event was a dumbfounded stare in the seminary bookstore when I was a first year M.Div. student. I stood looking at the required reading for New Testament Greek and saw the Trinity Psalter as a required purchase. Why was I being asked to purchase an Old Testament book in English for a New Testament Greek course? It turns out my professor had a habit of beginning each class by requiring his students to sing a psalm together. So I become a psalm singer by requisite.

The second event happened in the Peruvian mountains. I led a group of students on a short-term mission trip. Our task was to dig a ditch around a church under construction. Our Peruvian host was a minister in the Peruvian Presbyterian Church and they mainly sang psalms.

We had a long conversation about why this was their practice, but one reason stood out to me. He was fighting heresy in the churches he pastored. False teaching slipped into his churches through folk songs adjusted for worship. Psalm singing was his attempt to guard his people from heresy sung to a familiar tune. Psalms served that growing community of churches as a biblical bulwark against encroaching syncretism. Reflecting on that conversation, I realized that I had become a psalm singer through missions.

You don’t have to be a seminary student or a missionary to Peru to step into the world of psalm singing. You only need to do two things. First, consider the benefits that God attaches to worship in psalm. Second, decide practically how you will begin singing the psalms.

Read More

[Editor’s note: the original URL (link) referenced in this article is no longer valid, so the link has been removed.]