If you can speak, you can sing. God designed you to sing and gave you everything you need to sing as well as he wants you to. He’s far less concerned with your tunefulness than your integrity. Christian singing begins with the heart, not the lips (Eph. 5:19).

Sometimes we meet people who say, “I can’t sing”—as in, “The sound that comes out of my mouth when I try to sing is not what I was hoping for.”

Perhaps this is you, and you can recall an awkward conversation as a child when you were asked to mouth the words, rather than sing them, or you were told that being a member of your school or church choir might not be the “best fit” for your gifts.

But if you can speak, you can sing. God designed you to sing and gave you everything you need to sing as well as he wants you to. He’s far less concerned with your tunefulness than your integrity. Christian singing begins with the heart, not the lips (Eph. 5:19).

He Treasures All Voices

When our young daughters sing together, the older is more confident than the middle one, who is in turn more fluent than the youngest. This may change as they all get older, but the point is this—to their parents’ ears, each voice isn’t only as important as the others; each is as treasured as the others.

Your heavenly Father cares whether and what you sing, but he doesn’t mind how well you sing. While we may have choirs within our churches made up of voices who have expertise and ability, the congregation of a church is the ultimate choir, and it is without auditions—everyone can and should be in it.

The beauty of such a congregational choir is that our voices and hearts are knit together in praise. It’s exhilarating to be part of a body of believers singing truth together.

We recently met with a missionary to China who was home on furlough in America. After the singing, he said how wonderful it was to be able to sing freely with other believers again, for the part of China he lived in imposed heavy restrictions on such a thing. “Oh, how my heart misses the singing,” he said.

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