Last night, Glenn and I watched a documentary movie (with our Vidangel) called Twenty Feet from Stardom. It was about back-up singers to the stars—people like Merry Clayton, Judith Hill and Darleen Love and others. Interviewed were mostly African-American women who had carried a big part of the musical load onstage, and in recording studios, for people like Elton John, Bonnie Raitt, Ray Charles and Sting, and groups like The Eagles and The Rolling Stones.
So many things about the film were interesting, just because these people whose names are not household words for most of us, actually did the doo-wops and the beautiful, sometimes repetitive harmonies that made songs top out on the charts. Lots of times, the hits would not have landed in the top forty had it not been for the creativity and sheer talent of those who rarely got a spotlight.
Mixed in the movie were quotes about singers, like this one from Jazz drummer Bill Maxwell:
The human voice is the most pure expression coming from your own being. There’s nothing between your soul and your ability and your body, and it’s not being camouflaged by a trumpet or a saxophone or a guitar. It’s pure. And that’s why they’re so sensitive about it. Because, they’re putting it out there.
This morning as we drove to worship God, I mentioned to Glenn that I thought about our a cappella worship when I heard statements like Maxwell made. I said that God, who made our voices and gave us our abilities to harmonize, must have been so keenly aware of the closeness of the soul and the human voice when He prescribed for us the kind of music that is purest and closest to our selves, for worship to Him.
Glenn said, “Oh, I thought the same exact thing. My mind took that same journey when I heard those quotes.”
God doesn’t have to have a reason to prescribe a certain kind of worship. I don’t have to be able to “logic it out” to know that He is sovereign and He is to be obeyed. Since I know that every command for music in worship in my New Testament instructs me to sing and since I know that no musical instruments were used in worship of the church till hundreds of years after it’s establishment, I know that singing is the authorized mode of worship music.
But it is fun when I hear the 21st century secular world articulate truth about the purity of the very kind of music that God authorized in worship.
We don’t have to know why, but sometimes, as we ponder His perfect system of authority in worship, perhaps we do get partial glimpses into the infinitely wise God we serve.