How does my music glorify God? Some CCM (Contemporary Christian Music) folk seem to think that their music glorifies God, if only they sing about God. And I suppose that the proper response is: well, perhaps the word-content of your music glorifies God. (But even here, it is all too common to find shallowness and banality.)
It is, however, anti-creational to insist that the glory of God resides only in the text, not the music. We are created as embodied beings, who do embodied things. The precedent of creation means that we should not be indifferent to that which we create.
Consequently, as musicians we need to make higher demands of ourselves than merely asking the question: "Are these lyrics biblical, or biblically-grounded?" We need to ask ourselves: "Am I imitating God in my creativity?" Because God didn't create junk. He created beauty. If we wish our music to glorify God, we need to be more creational. And that means that we need to care more about the package. Not in the way CCM so often operates, where the "package" refers to image, and it means presenting yourself in a way similar to the worldly presentation. NO! I'll even go further: we have to stop thinking about music merely as a package. We're devaluing it. Music is more than a vehicle for lyrics. Music is an endeavour to reflect the creative activity of God.
The above passage is taken from Tim Gallant's excellent article "A Creational Perspective on Modern Music: Introductory Thoughts". To read some of my other posts about music, click here.
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