I thank God for modern writers of hymns and songs, committed to producing music that is true and excellent for the glory of God and the people of God.  Music is a gift of God, a unique way of connecting His revelation with our hearts and minds. St. Augustine is thought to have said, “he who sings, prays twice.” The Church must recover a more robust understanding and practice of music. 

Today, January 13, we remember the Hussites who, on this day in 1501, published the first hymnal in history written in the language of the common people. The descendants of the Hussites are known as the Moravian Brethren, who carry on the rich tradition of hymns and church music today.  
Christians have good reason to commemorate this event. After all, ours, like Judaism, has always been a singing faith. The longest book in the Bible, and the one at its center, is the Psalms, a word that means “songs.” David’s plans for the Temple included clans of Levites whose entire job was music. Choirs, soloists, orchestras, and antiphonal singing were prescribed parts of Temple life and practice, and an entire class of Psalms, the Songs of Ascent, were sung by the people as they traveled to Jerusalem for the annual pilgrimage festivals.  
Throughout the biblical texts, music is also connected to prophecy and to dealing with evil spirits. Jesus and the apostles sang a hymn after the Last Supper, according to two of the Gospels. The Apostle Paul specifically associates singing with being filled with the Spirit in his epistle to the church at Ephesus. And, in John’s Revelation of what is constantly happening around the throne of God, there is lots of singing, sometimes accompanied by harps.  
Music also is part of the culmination of the creation story. When Eve is taken from Adam’s side, Adam awakes and exclaims, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.” Many scholars believe this to essentially be a celebratory song.  
Eliminating the musical element from the text of Scripture would be to gut them and the practices that have emerged from them. Monks chanted the Psalms daily, in some cases covering the entire Psalter in a week. Medieval thinkers thought of the human heartbeat, respiration, and daily cycle of sleeping and waking as “music.” They also believed the motion of the heavenly bodies was regulated by the “music of the spheres.” 
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The construction of the new Tower is happening on multiple levels. That work is financed in no small part by wealthy organizations willing to outsource their thought and conscience by enriching activists and promoting their ideological agendas. 

Politics today seems to have crawled out of some Hobbesian muck. It is a nasty, brutish little runt wherever it appears, which is almost everywhere. Its act—for these days everything is performance art—is a tragic farce. On the streets, its watchword is riot; on the Internet, abuse; in the academy, the boardroom, and the media, a coordinated equalization of attitudes that borders on the totalitarian. At the highest levels of government, it is too lazy or stupid to persuade, preferring rather to manipulate, bully, spy, and punish.
Hobbesian man is moved by powerful passions of pride and fear. His vainglory and the joy he takes in standing above others give rise to war. The horror of anarchy and the fear of death make him seek peace. The ugly and ubiquitous politics of the Left is now channeling these passions into a massive project of social engineering: the construction of a new Tower of Babel.
Fear and pride raised the old Tower of Babel, built by anonymous wanderers who sought to “make us a name, lest we be scattered over all the earth.” Their anonymity is fitting, for there was then only “one language, one set of words. . . . one people” in the world. The Babylonians formed bricks out of the soil—adamah in Hebrew, the same stuff God breathed life into to make the first human being (ha’adam)—and began to “build a city and a tower with its top in the heavens.” These hard-baked bricks, all cut to the same measure, are images of human beings from whom the breath of individual life and particularity has somehow departed.
Modern attempts to construct the Tower have unfolded before, most notably in the Soviet Union and China. Today an inhumanly univocal tongue, asserting itself as the measure of all things, once again threatens to swallow the rich particularities and multiple languages of individual thought, speech, and creative expression.
The foundations of the new Tower have already been laid. In a recent interview, the Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei was asked if he thought that Donald Trump was an authoritarian. He did not:
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Your pastor has in mind the decades old addict who turns up each week who he’s sure is about to receive faith for the very first time, the struggling saint who feels incapable of giving up their nightly gossip, and the bleary-eyed suffering servant who has gone through great pain to be here. Preaching is for the one closest to God, furthest from him, and for the preacher himself. Preaching is for the congregation, for a sinful choir who needs to be led to worship God once more.

Once every three weeks I serve in the kid’s service at church—a huge blessing that allows me to share the gospel regularly with the youngest in our midst. The main hall and the kid’s hall sit parallel to one another and share a hallway, so when we take the kids to the toilet, we ask them to stay silent. One day, returning to our hall, I turned to the kids and said, “We need to be quiet now, because the sermon is happening.” They all agreed, zipped their lips, and followed me back. Just before we went entered though, one of the girls turned to me and whispered, “Mr. Adsum, may I ask a question,” to which I nodded. “What’s a sermon?” she asked.
It was a fair question. One I’m sure is shared by members of churches around the world, both young and old. It reminded me of a story I heard a few years ago, of a new Christian turning to the pastor and asking why they sang “Group-Karaoke style” during the service. (In fairness, Karaoke was the new believer’s only experience of seeing words on a screen set to music.)
To many Christians, both new and old, there are likely to be things about the way church works which remain a mystery simply because they feel it’s too awkward to ask a question. Whilst there are hundreds of books on preaching for the edification and education of pastors, these books are usually inaccessible for laymen, and so the question marks remain. Perhaps that’s you?
If so, thank you so much for reading this article. This is the first of three articles, which I hope will help to clear up some misconceptions about preaching, explain how we as church members can support and uphold the work of the preacher, and offer some practical advice on how to get the most out of the sermon each Sunday.
This is the Word of the Lord
Preaching and prayer are intrinsically linked, the former is fed by the latter and fails without it. The preacher must submit himself to the Lord and take seriously the responsibility he has to deliver the word of God faithfully. His work isn’t about feeding his own thoughts and opinion, but rather inviting you to feast on every word which proceeds from the mouth of the Lord (Deut. 8:3). A wonderful example of this pastoral submission is the following prayer from eighteenth-century preacher Augustus Toplady.

Your pardoning voice I come to hear,To know you as you are:Your ministers can reach the ear,But you must touch the heart. (Augustus Toplady, modernized by the writer of the article)

Depending on your denomination or church background, these words—“This is the Word of the Lord”—may be familiar to you. Often spoken after the reading of the Scripture and followed by the sermon. Though some will inevitably become numb to the repetition of these words, their potency, as well as their use in explaining the purpose and practice of preaching, is invaluable.
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