God Sings (And Ways We Think He Ought To) is an investigation, comparing and contrasting how God and his people sing in the Bible, and in two millennia of Church history, with how Christians are attempting to do so in recent decades--with the best of intentions--in an entertainment ethos.
It would be impossible to overstate the role of singing in the Bible. Everywhere you turn people are doing it. The book of the Bible with more pages, verses, and chapters than any other is a book of songs, the Psalms, right in the very middle of the Bible. During his earthly ministry Jesus often quoted psalms, and while dying on the cross, some of his final words were from those inspired lyrics.
Singing must be of great importance to God, whom Zephaniah tells us "exult s] over us] with loud singing" (3:17). God himself sings. If singing is so important to God, it must be of essential importance to every Christian. The purpose of this book is to explore how God sings, and how he must want his people to sing back to him in corporate worship. God Sings explores the incompatibility of attempting to express the timeless enduring gospel of Jesus Christ with a transient entertainment medium, and contrast the biblical ethos of worship (and the ethos of nearly two millennia of corporate worship practiced in Church history), with the entertainment ethos shaping congregational singing in the majority of evangelical churches in recent decades.
The author's ultimate purpose is grounded in what Paul wrote: "Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom, and as you sing psalms, hymns and spiritual songs with gratitude in your hearts to God. And whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him" (Colossians 3:16-17).
