On a Sunday, the pastors are feeding souls with good songs. They are also responsible for keeping the songs biblically balanced. Does the church sing too many songs about God’s grace and nothing of God’s justice? Or is there too much wrath and no mercy? Are the songs all joy and no lament, or all lament and no joy? These are questions that the pastor must answer in order to shepherd well.

Songs are shepherding tools. We think of the word preached as a tool of the shepherd, and it is. We think of prayer as a shepherding tool, and it is. We think of baptism and the Lord’s Supper as shepherding tools, and they are. But do we think of the songs as shepherding tools? When God gave Moses the commandments, He also gave Him a song. He told Him to teach the people the words from the mountain, and He told Him to write a song. He tells Moses that, while they might forget His covenant, “this song shall confront them as a witness (for it will live unforgotten in the mouths of their offspring)” (Deut 31:21). With this in mind, I want to exhort pastors and music leaders to remember that there must be oversight in the musical ministry of the church.
The Importance of Music
As the music coordinator of our church, and not a pastor, I’m not looking down on the non-pastoral music guys out there. I try my hardest to love God and to love our people by faithfully preparing each Sunday to lead the musical worship. But too often the responsibilities of Sunday morning song selection are delegated out to someone who is not a pastor. And unfortunately, not only “not a pastor”, but sometimes someone deeply disqualified to lead in God’s church. This person might be the most talented musician around, but musical talent is not a mark of spiritual maturity. And when this shepherding tool is not wielded well, there can be serious consequences.
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Written by R.C. Sproul |
Friday, February 18, 2022
The order of the process to destroy doubt is crucial. For example, the miracles of the Bible cannot and were never designed to prove the existence of God. The very possibility of a miracle requires that there first be a God who can empower it. In other words, it is not the Bible that proves the existence of God, it is God who through miracle attests that the Bible is His word. Thus proven, to believe the Bible implicitly is a virtue. To believe it gratuitously is not.

Spiritus sanctus non est skepticus—“The Holy Spirit is not a skeptic.” So Luther rebuked Erasmus of Rotterdam for his expressed disdain for making sure assertions. Luther roared, “The making of assertions is the very mark of the Christian. Take away assertions and you take away Christianity. Away now, with the skeptics!”
Doubt is the hallmark of the skeptic. The skeptic dares to doubt the indubitable. Even demonstrable proof fails to persuade him. The skeptic dwells on Mt. Olympus, far aloof from the struggles of mortals who care to pursue truth.
But doubt has other faces. It is the assailant of the faithful striking fear into the hearts of the hopeful. Like Edith Bunker, doubt nags the soul. It asks “Are you sure?” Then, “Are you sure you’re sure?”
Still doubt can appear as a servant of truth. Indeed it is the champion of truth when it wields its sword against what is properly dubious. It is a citadel against credulity. Authentic doubt has the power to sort out and clarify the difference between the certain and the uncertain, the genuine and the spurious.
Consider Descartes. In his search for certainty, for clear and distinct ideas, he employed the application of a rigorous and systematic doubt process. He endeavored to doubt everything he could possibly doubt. He doubted what he saw with his eyes and heard with his ears. He realized that our senses can and do often deceive us. He doubted authorities, both civil and ecclesiastical, knowing that recognized authorities can be wrong. He would submit to no fides implicitum claimed by any human being or institution. Biographies usually declare that Descartes was a Frenchman but his works reveal that he was surely born in Missouri.
Descartes doubted everything he could possibly doubt until he reached the point where he realized there was one thing he couldn’t doubt. He could not doubt that he was doubting. To doubt that he was doubting was to prove that he was doubting. No doubt about it.
From that premise of indubitable doubt, Descartes appealed to the formal certainty yielded by the laws of immediate inference. Using impeccable deduction he concluded that to be doubting required that he be thinking, since thought is a necessary condition for doubting. From there it was a short step to his famous axiom, cogito ergo sum, “I think, therefore I am.”
At last Descartes arrived at certainty, the assurance of his own personal existence. This was, of course, before Hume attacked causality and Kant argued that the self belongs to the unknowable noumenal realm that requires a “transcendental apperception” (whatever that is) to affirm at all. One wonders how Descartes would have responded to Hume and Kant had he lived long enough to deal with them. I have no doubt that the man of doubt would have prevailed.
There were clearly unstated assumptions lurking beneath the surface of Descartes’ logic. Indeed there was logic itself. To conclude that to doubt doubt is to prove doubt is a conclusion born of logic.
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Artist Ricky Cometa said, “When Dana first approached me, she said that ‘we’re trying to make this demon realm part of Disney,’ which is something I didn’t think would happen.” Cometa went on to say, “We really wanted to make this demon realm feel like home, and just had to figure out how to do it.”

Disney+ has dropped its latest animated series which follows the life of a young teenage girl who learns she is a human-demon hybrid spawn of Satan.
The series, titled Little Demon, is set 13 years after the Devil impregnated a single “reluctant mother,” resulting in the birth of their “antichrist” daughter Chrissy.
Disney Plus Informer describes the show as “an animated comedy featuring the voices of Danny DeVito and Aubrey Plaza. It has been 13 years since being impregnated by Satan, and a reluctant mother, Laura, and her Antichrist daughter, Chrissy, attempt to live an ordinary life in Delaware. However, the two are constantly thwarted by monstrous forces, including Satan, who yearns for custody of his daughter’s soul.”
The series is said to feature demonic witchcraft, pagan rituals, gratuitous blood, gore, and nudity.
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