Mark 4:21-25
Pay attention to what you hear: with the measure you use, it will be measured to you, and still more will be added to you. For to the one who has, more will be given, and from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away.
Mark 3:28-29
"Truly, I say to you, all sins will be forgiven the children of man, and whatever blasphemies they utter, but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin" —
Matthew 28:18-20
The Great Commission.
"Go therefore and make disciples of all nations,
baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son
and of the Holy Spirit,
teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you"
The great and first commandment:
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.
And a second is like it:
You shall love your neighbour as yourself.
Matthew 22:35-40
Luke 13:29-30
And people will come from east and west, and from north and south, and recline at table in the kingdom of God. And behold, some are last who will be first, and some are first who will be last.
Some are last who will be first,
and some are first who will be last.
This lesson is one which I find extraordinarily deep. Particularly the application in Matthew 20:16, which always confused me as a child.
Faith; not works.
Luke 24:18,25-27
Jesus meets two disciples on the road to Emmaus.
"Are you the only visitor to Jerusalem who does not know the things that have happened there in these days?"
Matthew 28:6
He is not here,
for he has risen, as he said.
Come, see the place where he lay.
Psalm 22:29-31
Posterity shall serve him;
it shall be told of the Lord to the coming generation;
they shall come and proclaim his righteousness to a people yet unborn,
that he has done it.
Isaiah 52:13–53:12. The Suffering Servant
He was pierced for our transgressions;
he was crushed for our iniquities;
upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace,
and with his wounds we are healed.
Romans 5:8
But God demonstrates His own love toward us,
in that while we were yet sinners,
Christ died for us.
Christ Stripped of His Clothes, 1909
Jean-Louis Forain (French, 1852-1931)
"Take, eat; this is my body." And he took a cup, and when he had given thanks he gave it to them, saying, "Drink of it, all of you, for this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins."
The Last Supper
Pascal Dagnan Bouveret (French,1852-1929)
Matthew 21:19-21
Like the empty worship of the temple - a leafy fig tree promising fruit, but bearing none to eat.
With just a few words, Jesus gave His disciples a lesson in God's power, when we put our faith in Him.
John 12:13
So they took branches of palm trees and went out to meet him, crying out, "Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord, even the King of Israel!"
When Jesus rode into Jerusalem the people wanted liberation. Crying 'hosanna' - 'please save us'. But as he entered the city gate he turned towards the Temple, not the Roman garrison. He would bring them salvation, but not in the way they expected.
A Convicted Conscience: Secular Music and Me
Christ found me when I was 48 years old.
For almost all of that 48 years music was fundamental to me, something around which I built my identity. I identified tribally with the bands and groups I listened to. I dressed in ways that were influenced by the bands I liked and I prided myself in the eclecticism of my taste, and the depth of my collection. When I wasn't listening to music, I was obsessively focused upon amassing the gear to play it. I had a reputation in certain collecting communities for my work archiving old recordings. But in my heart I knew that I was finding my meaning in all the wrong places, and that my hobby was an idol.
I want to write this down because it might resonate with others out there. The intention of this is not to get legalistic. You listen to what you like. Do not feel that you must listen to worship music only to be a 'good Christian'. Do not be embarrassed about the fact that you enjoy secular music. Do use discernment though, and ensure you don't make others stumble, if they have more concerns than you. Much modern music and modern culture hates God, either through it's obsession with hedonism and sexual themes, or through the antics of stars themselves and the culture that raises them up. There is much to be discerning about.
For me, I want to focus on some specific areas where I have been convicted. These come from the heart of real music obsessive, not a casual fan or young person with posters on their wall. That was me when I was 15. Thirty five years later, I believe that there are a number of different dimensions where a new Christian may feel conviction: Identity, Collecting, Focus and Distraction, Content, and Motivation.
I will cover all of these areas as we work through this topic together.
Identity
See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are. The reason why the world does not know us is that it did not know him.
1 John 3:1
Christians by definition should find their identity in Christ.
When I was 15 I thought of myself as an 'Indie Kid'. I grew up in the 80's and was lucky enough to live through the golden age of post-punk independent music: Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr, Pussy Galore, Godflesh, Loop, Prong, Carcass, Bolt Thrower. My Bloody Valentine, Pale Saints, House of Love, Fields of the Nephilim. The Sugarcubes, Pop Will Eat Itself, The Darling Buds, The Shamen.
For a long long time, since I first heard Dark Side of The Moon as a five year old, I was into seventies Progressive rock.I collected Pink Floyd obsessively, trading live tapes with people around the world before easily sharing music on the internet was a thing.
Bands like Consolidated were a gateway to anti-establishment politics, to the point that I went on to study politics at university, becoming very active in left-wing politics and protest. That had been another major identity for me, surrounded by like minded friends affirming the truth of our outlook, against the rest of the world. And dreadlocks.
As time went on and I settled, got a job, and had children going to Festivals would allow me to live out the fantasy of being a new age hippy, with beat-up camper van and military surplus boots. I loved 'festival scene' bands like Radical Dance Faction and Ozric Tentacles. I got into IDM, electronic dance music, bands like Boards of Canada, Aphex Twin and Eat Static.
My identity was always through the music. As time went on I found new music but never left the old, resulting in a tendency to kaleidoscope between different genre based identities depending upon what I was listening to or who I was with.
There was pride in being the biggest fan with the most interesting stuff. Which brings me onto...
Collecting
Those who cling to worthless idols turn away from God’s love for them.
Jonah 2:8
Collecting by its nature elevates objects to something more. Idols. This distinction can be discerned by how you would feel if you lost that item, or if it were damaged. How would you feel. Does your collection own you, or do you own your collection.
For me I had a passion for two things. Old reel to reel tapes, and old live recordings. Both were scarce. The former expensive, the latter just difficult to find. Both rewarded patience and work to track down and obtain them. This work, and the fixation on finding them resulted in an emotional investment which is difficult to break from.
Over time there is a tendency for any effort to collect to become like train-spotting. A tick-box exercise in filling the gaps. When collecting music this is an easy trap. There are amazing online databases that tell you exactly what there is to find. Both official and unofficial. And with such things as live recordings, there is the pursuit of 'quality'. Of getting a copy closer and closer to the original recording. And once the original recording is tracked down, getting a careful copy on the best equipment is the ultimate objective. In this pursuit I may have collected 20 or more copies of the same show, all in the pursuit of the 'best copy'.
The snare of the collector is not confined to music of course, nor secular music, but the collector mindset is one that Christians should be aware of. We should be able to walk away from our collections without feeling like we are losing a piece of ourselves.
I had a friend once, many years ago, who was born again and gave away their collection. A seriously good collection of live recordings that they had invested much time in, and which they were well recognised for. I respect that. If the loss of your collection would break your heart, then your heart is not for Jesus. You need to be able to walk away.
Focus and Distraction
"What else does this craving, and this helplessness, proclaim but that there was once in man a true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace? This he tries in vain to fill with everything around him, seeking in things that are not there the help he cannot find in those that are, though none can help, since this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words by God himself."
Blaise Pascal, Pensées
When I was younger I would spend hours, weeks, months, listening to music, reading about the bands and the scenes, chasing leads on recordings or releases. In my teens, in the days before the internet I would trade tapes with contacts around the world, copying cassettes in real-time. I had 500 Pink Floyd live tapes alone, by the time I went digital. I would listen to albums obsessively, reading the sleeve notes and transcribing lyrics. Writing to fan clubs. There were admittedly worse things I could have been doing with my time, but looking back, and now, it was wasted time and focus. It was time spent looking in the wrong place for peace and meaning.
It is very easy to get fixated on a new target, a new band or acquisition and it's easy to find that this has pushed everything else out of mind. And when, finally, you find what you were looking for, the satisfaction almost immediately pales. And a new target takes its place. It is an ultimately empty pursuit. It is empty because in the end, these things will never satisfy. The hole we are trying to fill is God-shaped, to paraphrase Pascal.
Content
If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you.
John 15:19
This is the thing that most Christians seem to focus on when considering the threat from secular music, modern secular music. When I was 16 I met my father's brother for the first time. My uncle was Plymouth Brethren. I was wearing a Joy Division t-shirt and he warned me earnestly that rock music was demonic. That struck me as very weird at the time. Very little of the music I listened to was overtly anti-Christian. Joy Division had no demonic agenda. Thinking back, my t-shirt had 'Love Will Tear Us Apart' on it. I can see how antithetical that notion is to a Christian worldview. And it's that borderline that I currently find troubling.
There is an awful lot of overtly un-Christian secular music, mostly hedonistic, self-centred, hyper-sexual, or provocative in terms of symbolism, imagery or lyrics. That stuff is obvious. Christ sought out sinners but not to affirm them. We are called to be in the world, but not of the world.
One of my favourite albums was Geogaddi by a duo called Boards of Canada. They do quite chilled-out electronic music that evokes childhood and the countryside. They sample seagulls and campfires. But they also flirt with themes like numerology, and The Branch Davidians. These themes are very cleverly interwoven, knowingly clever, I think they want people to find the clues. They have a track called The Devil Is In The Details, where according to one fan-wiki "The bassline and melody of The Devil Is In The Details are an octave and a major sixth apart. The bassline/melody repeats the first note three times, yielding three consecutive "sixths" in a row, i.e. 6-6-6.". The album is 66 minutes, 6 seconds long. This has come to make me feel deeply uncomfortable. Knowing jokes or not, the devil is insidious.
Pink Floyd interpolated a rewriting of Psalm 23 into 'Sheep' on their 1977 album Animals. I understand the point they were trying to make with that song, but again, it has made one of my favourite songs by them very difficult to listen to. Their intention with that song doesn't just target establishment religion and it's place within societies control structures, it targets me and God's word.
Another of my favourite albums was Arif Mardin's musical interpretation of The Prophet by Kahil Gibran, with Robert Harris reading the text. Harris' voice is sublime and Arif Mardin was a master arranger, who assembled a stellar cast of 70's jazz musicians for the project, but I find the concept troubling now, as if in defiance of Biblical truth. Mystical works such as Gibran's risk replacing God's truth. I find that difficult.
A lot of the music I now listen to is instrumental. I love jazz. Music is a gift of God. It is a universal language and can speak directly to our emotions in a very profound way. This is not an accident. Just as God made beauty in the rules of mathematics, he made beauty in music. The first for the head, the second for the heart.
It is interesting how some of the most beautiful music is created by some of the most troubled, and flawed individuals. Conduct for me becomes a problem when it is held up as an example to follow. We all have aspects of ourselves that we would prefer others did not know about, and the lifestyle of the musician puts them in temptations way more than many occupations. One of my favourite musicians is the jazz pianist Bill Evans. Bill died tragically at the age of 51 after what one friend called 'the longest suicide in history'. He first used heroin in the late 50's, and this, plus cocaine addiction was the blight his life until the end. But he never glamourised it. Few outside his circle knew about it and he remained prolific, performing has last show 5 days before his death. It is a dreadful shame that he didn't live into old age, particularly as the shows of his final year are amongst the best of his career.
Motivation
And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.
Colossians 3:17
Just as we give glory to God through how we do, not what we do - as a cobbler gives glory in the quality of his stitching not simply by putting a cross on each shoe - we can use our love of music, whether secular or not, to reach others. We do not do this by assimilating to the world, excusing the excesses of modern culture, and holding on to our passions like wooden gods, but by being a light to the world, an example to others. Pointing to the cross.
My experience since accepting Christ is that I no longer yearn for the sanctuary I found in music, collection and tribalism, like I did. It just stopped being that all-consuming passion that it once was. My heart turned to Christ, to understanding God's word and how it applied to my life.
Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new
2 Corinthians 5:17
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That 'infinite abyss' that Pascal wrote of no longer demands it be filled with the work of human hands.
As with all things of this world, we must use discernment to ensure we keep our eyes focused on what is right, and what is good. We cannot hold on to the old idols. But there is glory in all of God's creation, whether nature, or music, both secular and non. It is possible to give Him that glory without removing ourselves completely from the world He has created. We must ensure though that our hearts are pointed towards the right place.
Then Jesus said to His disciples, 'If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross and follow Me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it; but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it.'
Matthew 16:24-25
Christ's humiliation on the cross confounded Jewish expectations of a triumphant Messiah, and for the Greeks what hope was there in a man who could not save himself. But for believers, the Cross's saving grace is beyond measure.
Micah 4:1
It shall come to pass in the latter days that the mountain of the house of the Lord shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and it shall be lifted up above the hills; and peoples shall flow to it...
Micah 3:11
"Is not the Lord in the midst of us? No disaster shall come upon us."
Just as the Temple was no protection to Israel when it turned it's back on The Lord, it is our hearts not the symbols and outward signs of piety, that justify us.
Joel 2:28-29
No priests in the future Kingdom... all God's people will prophesy, dream dreams, and see visions.
Kings and servants, sons and daughters, old and young.
As Luther paraphrased 1 Peter 2:9: You are a royal priesthood and a priestly kingdom.
"Behold, the days are coming," declares the Lord, "when the plowman shall overtake the reaper and the treader of grapes him who sows the seed; the mountains shall drip sweet wine, and all the hills shall flow with it."
The Harrower, c.1890-95
Horatio Walker (American, 1858-1938)
Joel 2:25 (ESV)
I will restore to you the years that the swarming locust has eaten, the hopper, the destroyer, and the cutter, my great army, which I sent among you.
God's promise to those who turn to Him -
He will restore to you the years which the locusts have eaten.
Hosea 6:1-2
Let us return to the Lord; for he has torn us, that he may heal us; he has struck us down, and he will bind us up. After two days he will revive us; on the third day he will raise us up, that we may live before him.
Hosea 5:11-13
Ephraim is oppressed, crushed in judgment, because he was determined to go after vanity.
Therefore I am like a moth to Ephraim, and like dry rot to the house of Judah.
When Ephraim saw his sickness, and Judah his wound, then Ephraim went to Assyria, and sent to the great king. But he is not able to cure you or heal your wound.
Daniel 12:2
And many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.
Daniel 12:3
And those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky above; and those who turn many to righteousness, like the stars forever and ever.
Daniel 7:13-14
"I saw in the night visions, and behold, with the clouds of heaven there came one like a son of man, and he came to the Ancient of Days and was presented before him. And to him was given dominion and glory and a kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him; his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom one that shall not be destroyed."
Daniel 4:30
The king reflected and said, 'Is this not Babylon the great, which I myself have built as a royal residence by the might of my power and for the glory of my majesty?'
Daniel 4:33
Immediately the word concerning Nebuchadnezzar was fulfilled; and he was driven away from mankind and began eating grass like cattle, and his body was drenched with the dew of heaven until his hair had grown like eagles’ feathers and his nails like birds’ claws.
Nebuchadnezzar's hubris is rewarded.
