Letter to my Fellow Christian Musicians

I think that it is now time to discuss the sad reality of what is called "Christian music" these days and in particular, I'm referring to modern gospel music.

Like many African-Americans, I grew up listening to gospel music as a child. My mother loved to play Mahalia Jackson in my household and I remembered how my mother used to sing Blessed Assurance in my house. Although I was trained in jazz and classical music, gospel music had a very strong impact in my development as a saxophonist. As I started to play in various churches, I began to listen to singers such as Daryl Coley and John P. Kee and it was quite obvious that these individuals were not singers... they were ministers and worshipers who God blessed with a singing voice. These were people who laid before the Lord and produced songs that emanated from a mature walk with Christ. There was one song that I sung often as a younger Christian named Beyond the Veil by Daryl Coley, which mirrored my personal heart's desire toward God:

Beyond the veil is where I witness all Your glory,
seated on Your throne in majesty and power.
I lay prostrate before You, oh my King,
in this place of sweet communion;
this is my earnest prayer, 
this is my earnest plea,
and You'll bid me, 
You'll say come ye beyond the veil.

I have entered Your gates with thanksgiving,
I've entered Your courts with praise,
Yet I hear You say, 
"come closer, step into this holy place".
And because the blood of Christ for me,
it continues to prevail,
now I'm standing in Your presence face to face, 
beyond the veil.

When I was first blessed with the privilege to minister through song, I played the song Oh the Glory:

Jesus all glorious 
Create in us a temple 
Called as living stones 
Where you're enthroned 
As You rose from death in power 
So rise within our worship 
Rise upon our praise 
And let the hand that saw you raised 
Clothe us with Your glory 
Draw us by Your grace

Oh the glory of Your presence 
We your temple 
Give you reverence 
Come and rise from Your rest 
And be blessed by our praise 
As we glory in Your embrace 
As your presence now fills this place

As I became older, I began to listen to hymns more and more often, as I realized how rich in truth they were. A song that I've sing often is How Great Thou Art:

And when I think, that God, His Son not sparing;
Sent Him to die, I scarce can take it in;
That on the Cross, my burden gladly bearing,
He bled and died to take away my sin.

Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee,
How great Thou art, How great Thou art.
Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee,
How great Thou art, How great Thou art!

When Christ shall come, with shout of acclamation,
And take me home, what joy shall fill my heart.
Then I shall bow, in humble adoration,
And then proclaim: "My God, how great Thou art!"

Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee,
How great Thou art, How great Thou art.
Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee,
How great Thou art, How great Thou art!

Other songs that come to mind are Rock of Ages, What a Friend We Have in Jesus, and All Hail the Power of Jesus Name. These hymns have such profound meaning in their simplicity and with many of the hymns, it is clear that God breathed on the artists as they penned. The sad truth is that despite the great legacy and heritage that our past Christian artists have laid down for us, we have forsaken them to produce popular, easygoing, spiritually shallow (and sometimes doctrinally incorrect music). As each generation of Christian artists before us continued to hand off the responsibility of bringing others to a place of worship before our Holy God, we have dropped the baton, so to speak. 

As I have observed, the most pervasive problem these days are that praise and worship leaders are singing about a relationship with God that they do not have. In an attempt to lead others into worship, many have realized that they are constantly lying to God. Many claim that they love God, but the reality is that they love the attention and reputation that comes with being a gospel singer. Many claim that they are doing God's work, but the reality is that God didn't establish their ministry... they decided to do a good, religious deed and prayed for God to bless it. For some, they spend more time doing Christian work than ministering to God. 

Instead of deepening our worship for God, we have decided that we would make the musical quality greater. So these days, we have huge Christian bands and professionally trained singers with top notch production, but God's presence is visible absent. Many of us have acknowledged this and the solution that many have come up with has been to make the music louder. These days praise and worship in churches is more like a concert... the songs stir up our emotions and send us to a fit of frenzy, but in the midst of all of the noise, the presence of God is no nearer than when people walked into the building. I mean, even if our musical quality has improved over time, how can we expect anything different if our worship songs are as follows:

Bless me, Bless me 
Oh Lord, Bless me indeed 
Enlarge my territory 
Oh Lord, Bless me 
I pray for increase 
Bless me indeed, I pray for increase

Keep Your hand upon me 
So that evil cannot harm me 
Sunshine and rain, sickness and pain 
God I humbly come to You 
Enlarge my territory 
Oh Lord, Bless me

Or

We're all a part of God's body. 
Stand with me, agree with me. 
We're all a part of God's body.
It is his will that every need be supplied.
You are important to me, I need you to survive.
You are important to me, I need you to survive.

I need you, you need me. 
We're all a part of God's body. 
Stand with me, agree with me. 
We're all a part of God's body.
It is his will that every need be supplied.
You are important to me, I need you to survive.
You are important to me, I need you to survive.


In the New Testament, a person's ministry is an outgrowth of their private devotion to God. Just as much as a tree will not grow unless it's deeply rooted in the earth, Christian ministry does not produce fruit for God unless it's deeply rooted in Christ. When a minister attempts to grow faster than their own "root system" can support, then they are subject to fall and become unfruitful. The same is true concerning Christian musicians. No worship leader and musician can expect to develop any true fruit if their private life is shallow, but unfortunately, this is the reality of many. There are many worship leaders who live hypocritical lives and still expect the glory of God to appear in their churches. I know this because I've observed it with my own eyes and experienced it personally. When I was in college, I played with a couple of choirs on and off campus where there was sexual promiscuity among choir members. I played with choirs where some of the musicians weren't believers at all. 

For me personally, I experienced firsthand what it means to play in a church and to have a half-hearted devotion to God. I realized that although I played for a ministry throughout college, my private devotion was very shallow and had no real depth. Then God sent me to 2 passages: 1 Corinthians 3:10-15 and Hebrews 12:25-27. Whatever was not rooted in God, established in God, and finished in God will be shaken and removed by Him so that His work may be established. I realized that it was necessary for me to sit down from ministry until I was rooted deeply in God; otherwise, all of my work will be fruitless. I pray that other musicians will examine themselves in like manner.

The Love of God

For the past week, I've been doing a lot of thinking and meditating on His love for me as His son and the kindness that He continues to demonstrate towards me day after day. During this time of meditation, I read a chapter from Andrew Murray's book Abide in Christ that truly opened my eyes to greatness of God's love and I hope that it blesses you as well.

"As the Father hath loved me, so have I loved you: abide ye in my love." -John 15:9. 

Blessed Lord, enlighten our eyes to see aright the glory of this wondrous word. Open to our meditation the secret chamber of THY LOVE, that our souls may enter in, and find there their everlasting dwelling - place. How else shall we know aught of a love that passeth knowledge? (Eph. 3:19)

Before the Saviour speaks the word that invites us to abide in His love, He first tells us what that love is. What He says of it must give force to His invitation, and make the thought of not accepting it an impossibility: "As the Father hath loved me, so I have loved you!"

"As the Father hath loved me." How shall we be able to form right conceptions of this love? Lord, teach us. God is love. (1 John 4:8). Love is His very being. Love is not an attribute, but the very essence of His nature, the center round which all His glorious attributes gather. It was because He was love that He was the Father, and that there was a Son. Love needs an object to whom it can give itself away, in whom it can lose itself, with whom it can make itself one. Because God is love, there must be a Father and a Son. The love of the Father to the Son is that divine passion with which He delights in the Son, and speaks, "My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased." (Matt. 3:17) The divine love is as a burning fire; in all its intensity and infinity it has but one object and but one joy, and that is the only begotten Son. When we gather together all the attributes of God - His infinity, His perfection, His immensity, His majesty, His omnipotence - and consider them but as the rays of the glory of His love, we still fail in forming any conception of what that love must be. It is a love that passeth knowledge. (Eph. 3:19)

And yet this love of God to His Son must serve, O my soul, as the glass in which you are to learn how Jesus loves you. As one of His redeemed ones, you are His delight, and all His desire is to you, with the longing of a love which is stronger than death, and which many waters cannot quench. His heart yearns after you, seeking your fellowship and your love. Were it needed, He could die again to possess you. As the Father loved the Son, and could not live without Him, could not be God the blessed without Him - so Jesus loves you. His life is bound up in yours; you are to Him inexpressibly more indispensable and precious than you ever can know. You are one with Himself. "As the Father hath loved me, so have I loved you." What a love! 

It is an eternal love. From before the foundation of the world - God's Word teaches us this - the purpose had been formed that Christ should be the Head of His Church, that He should have a body in which His glory could be set forth. In that eternity He loved and longed for those who had been given Him by the Father; and when He came and told His disciples that He loved them, it was indeed not with a love of earth and of time, but with the love of eternity. And it is with that same infinite love that His eye still rests upon each of us here seeking to abide in Him, and in each breathing of that love there is indeed the power of eternity. "I have loved thee with an everlasting love." (Jer. 31:3)

It is a perfect love. It gives all, and holds nothing back. "The Father loveth the Son, and hath given all things into His hand." And just so Jesus loves His own: all He has is theirs. When it was needed, He sacrificed His throne and crown for you: He did not count His own life and blood too dear to give for you. His righteousness, His Spirit, His glory, even His throne, all are yours. This love holds nothing, nothing back, but, in a manner which no human mind can fathom, makes you one with itself. O wondrous love! to love us even as the Father loved Him, and to offer us this love as our everyday dwelling. 

It is a gentle and most tender love. As we think of the love of the Father to the Son, we see in the Son everything so infinitely worthy of that love. When we think of Christ's love to us, there is nothing but sin and unworthiness to meet the eye. And the question comes: How can that love within the bosom of the divine life and its perfections be compared to the love that rests on sinners? Can it indeed be the same love? Blessed be God, we know it is so. The nature of love is always one, however different the objects. Christ knows of no other law of love but that with which His Father loved Him. Our wretchedness only serves to call out more distinctly the beauty of love, such as could not be seen even in heaven. With the tenderest compassion He bows to our weakness, with patience inconceivable He bears with our slowness, with the gentlest loving - kindness He meets our fears and our follies. It is the love of the Father to the Son, beautified, glorified, in its condescension, in its exquisite adaptation to our needs. 

And it is an unchangeable love. "Having loved His own which were in the world, He loved them to the end" (John 13:1).  "The mountains shall depart, and the hills be removed, but my kindness shall not depart from thee" (Isa. 54:10). The promise with which it begins its work in the soul is this: "I shall not leave thee, until I have done that which I have spoken to thee of" (Gen. 28:15). And just as our wretchedness was what first drew it to us, so the sin, with which it is so often grieved, and which may well cause us to fear and doubt, is but a new motive for it to hold to us all the more. And why? We can give no reason but this: "As the Father hath loved me, so I have loved you." 

And now, does not this love suggest the motive, the measure, and the means of that surrender by which we yield ourselves wholly to abide in Him? 

This love surely supplies a motive. Only look and see how this love stands and pleads and prays. Gaze, O gaze on the divine form, the eternal glory, the heavenly beauty, the tenderly pleading gentleness of the crucified love, as it stretches out its pierced hands and says, "Oh, wilt thou not abide with me? wilt thou not come and abide in me?" It points you up to the eternity of love whence it came to seek you. It points you to the Cross, and all it has borne to prove the reality of its affection, and to win you for itself. It reminds you of all it has promised to do for you, if you will but throw yourself unreservedly into its arms. It asks you whether, so far as you have come to dwell with it and taste its blessedness, it has not done well by you. And with a divine authority, mingled with such an inexpressible tenderness that one might almost think he heard the tone of reproach in it, it says, "Soul, as the Father hath loved me, so I have loved you: abide in my love." Surely there can be but one answer to such pleading: Lord Jesus Christ! here I am. Henceforth Thy love shall be the only home of my soul: in Thy love alone will I abide. 

That love is not only the motive, but also the measure, of our surrender to abide in it. Love gives all, but asks all. It does so, not because it grudges us aught, but because without this it cannot get possession of us to fill us with itself. In the love of the Father and the Son,it was so. In the love of Jesus to us, it was so. In our entering into His love to abide there, it must be so too; our surrender to it must have no other measure than its surrender to us. O that we understood how the love that calls us has infinite riches and fulness of joy for us, and that what we give up for its sake will be rewarded a hundredfold in this life! Or rather, would that we understood that it is a LOVE with a height and a depth and a length and a breadth that passes knowledge! How all thought of sacrifice or surrender would pass away, and our souls be filled with wonder at the unspeakable privilege of being loved with such a love, of being allowed to come and abide in it for ever. 

And if doubt again suggest the question: But is it possible, can I always abide in His love? listen how that love itself supplies the only means for the abiding in Him: It is faith in that love which will enable us to abide in it. If this love be indeed so divine, such an intense and burning passion, then surely I can depend on it to keep me and to hold me fast. Then surely all my unworthiness and feebleness can be no hindrance. If this love be indeed so divine, with infinite power at its command, I surely have a right to trust that it is stronger than my weakness; and that with its almighty arm it will clasp me to its bosom, and suffer me to go out no more. I see how this is the one thing my God requires of me. Treating me as a reasonable being endowed with the wondrous power of willing and choosing, He cannot force all this blessedness on me, but waits till I give the willing consent of the heart. And the token of this consent He has in His great kindness ordered faith to be - that faith by which utter sinfulness casts itself into the arms of love to be saved, and utter weakness to be kept and made strong. O Infinite Love! Love with which the Father loved the Son! Love with which the Son loves us! I can trust thee, I do trust thee. O keep me abiding in Thyself.

After reading through this and meditating on His love, I began to ask myself a number of questions. If His love is so amazing, then why do I fear and doubt anything? Why do I live my life without full assurance of His promises? Why do I seek self-preservation when He is the one who preserves and upholds my life? His promises are quite clear: from eternity past, He has loved me with an everlasting love and nothing can separate me from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus. If this is the case, where is the room for doubt? He held back nothing from me and sacrificed everything for me... He's redeemed me when I desecrated His name. In all of these things, why do I resist His will? I realized more and more that this love is not something that comes through simple observation, but it comes through the pursuit of God as He reveals Himself to His children. I realized that my weakness was His design: just as sin made grace to abound more and more, my weakness made His love to abound. The depths of His love allows Him to be patient and forgiving as His love proves to be much greater than my weakness. And as my eyes are opened to His love, I become compelled to give all to Him. What man can resist the One who has demonstrated an immutable love towards him? I've learned that the measure by which I understand His love will be the measure that I surrender to Him. Truly, His love satisfies me when everything else fails. The strivings for earthly things are akin to desiring garbage when a feast has been placed in front of me.

His love remains irreplacable in my life and it is my prayer that all will have their eyes opened to see how great a love our Father has for us.

Pursuit and Passion

Recently, I have just gotten back from a much needed vacation in Atlanta. Because of the inner frustrations that I was dealing with while living in Colorado, it was very much enjoyable to go home and to visit my loved ones. While on this vacation, I had the time to do a lot of thinking about my life, my walk with Christ, the ministry that God has entrusted me with, and my relationship with other people and what I've discovered is that there is something that is missing in my life. For the first time in my adult life, I was faced with the dilemma of not enjoying my work, and what has troubled me has been that I wasn't sure why my work is enjoyable.

From an outsider's perspective, I have everything that a person could want as a young man: high quality friends who continue to keep me accountable, a great family that support my endeavors, great prospects for a future career as I pursue my doctorate in one of the top institutions in the country, and having a growing relationship with Christ that is producing fruit. In spite of all of this, there was much restlessness and a strong lack of enjoyment and fulfillment in the work that I have been given to do. I have begun to see my passion and desire for things to wane significantly: my desire to study Austrian economics and political theory has become nonexistent as well as my personal desire to play my saxophone. These two things have always been my core hobbies, and, at times, a source of relaxation for me, but they have faded much in my life. However, it is not very unusual that a person's hobbies change over time, but what has been most surprising has been that my passion for my profession, atmospheric science, has been rapidly declining over time. This has shocked me because to me, I've always believed that this would be a permanent interest of mine (after all, I've been interested in this field since I was a child).

So at this moment, I began to seek after God and asked Him: have I lost the joy in my profession willingly or is God systematically removing certain desires from me? What desires are God exchanging for my own? At this point, I would describe this meditation as a groaning in my heart. On one hand, there's a great desire to passionately serve Christ and throw myself on Him completely and to have the walk that is fitting for a believer...much like how Adam walked with God before the Fall, where he heard the voice of the Lord walking beside him.However, on the other hand, I feel like the majority of the work that I'm doing is unfulfilling and the motivation is quickly leaving me. In my heart, I believe that many believers can relate to this experience: what do you when God places you between two different realities- the reality of your current dissatisfaction and the reality of His calling?

As always, whenever we ask God anything in faith, He always provides an answer and in my situation, it was answered in two ways- through my girlfriend and through the words of C.S. Lewis. I described this to my girlfriend first and she mentioned several things that brought clarity, but one statement stuck out the most. She stated that:

"...God has withheld the satisfaction you received before from the things that you used to do and He is releasing satisfaction for the things that you don't always get a chance to do, like minister directly to others and now your desires are aligning with your calling or better yet, your passions are aligning with your purpose."

This is a very true statement because before any person can walk in their calling, their heart, will, and passion must align with the heart and passion necessary to complete their calling. In Christianity today, there are too many individuals who complete the work of God without having God's heart; there are many individuals who do God's work out of obligation and duty, but not out of the passion and joy that God desires for us to do. As a result, we see very spiritually dry ministries where the power of the Holy Spirit is absent. For me personally, when I accepted my calling as a pastor, I was grateful for being called to do such a work, but since that time, God has continued to reveal to me that I do not have the heart of a shepherd yet. My heart still has a number of other passions that are not in line with my calling, and until all of these other passions are counted as less than nothing, my heart will continue to groan for something that it cannot reach. 

After hearing this from my girlfriend, I continued to meditate on these things and search my own heart to determine what other passions are conflicting with His calling for my life. After these meditations, I asked a more fundamental question: if God is my supreme delight and treasure, then why am I unsatisfied at all? This question fell in line with a book that I'm reading named Desiring God by John Piper. In the introduction to this book, Piper quotes C.S. Lewis:

"If you asked twenty good men today what they thought the highest of the virtues, nineteen of them would reply, Unselfishness. But if you asked almost any of the great Christians of old he would have replied, Love. You see what has happened? A negative term has been substituted for a positive, and this is of more than philological importance. The negative ideal of Unselfishness carries with it the suggestion not primarily of securing good things for others, but of going without them ourselves, as if our abstinence and not their happiness was the important point. I do not think this is the Christian virtue of Love. The New Testament has lots to say about self-denial, but not about self-denial as an end in itself. We are told to deny ourselves and to take up our crosses in order that we may follow Christ; and nearly every description of what we shall ultimately find if we do so contains an appeal to desire.

If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith. Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased."

To me, this is a profound statement which lead me to repent for my attitude towards Him. It is not that my passions are dissipating, but rather God is drawing me in pursuit of a higher and complete satisfaction only found in Him. My problem is not that I have so many interests and passions, but my problem is that I'm satisfied and comfortable with my surroundings to the point that it has caused me NOT to pursue Him as my highest satisfaction. This is the marvelous work of God: He draws our heart to the point where we begin to desire a satisfaction in Him and His work to a measure that we never could experience previously. Our heart craves Him and can only be satisfied with Him, but for whatever reason, I was more concerned with being satisfied with my ambitions. As John Piper writes in His book:

"...it [the pursuit of joy in God] is the key to breaking the power of sin on our way to heaven. Matthew Henry, another Puritan pastor, put it like this: “The joy of the Lord will arm us against the assaults of our spiritual enemies and put our mouths out of taste for those pleasures with which the tempter baits his hooks.” This is the great business of life—to “put our mouths out of taste for those pleasures with which the tempter baits his hooks.” I know of no other way to triumph over sin long-term than to gain a distaste for it because of a superior satisfaction in God...God remains gloriously all-satisfying. The human heart remains a ceaseless factory of desires. Sin remains powerfully and suicidally appealing. The battle remains: Where will we drink? Where will we feast? Feast on God."

I believe that my experience speaks to the current circumstance of many. If you feel your heart and your passion drifting away from your current way of life, know that this is the work of God, pushing you to never be satisfied with anything outside of God. He will continue to place frustration in your heart until you seek Him as your reward and your treasure. Remember that in His presence, there is fullness of joy and only in Him (not His gifts) will you be satisfied. Know that He longs for you to delight in Him fully as your portion and that everything else is secondary and inferior. Know that your delight in Him reaches its consummation as your fulfill His will for His life and everything else leads to frustration and vanity. The words of Isaiah says it plainly:

"Everyone who thirsts come to the waters; and you who have no money come, buy and eat... why do you spend money for what is not bread and your wages for what does not satisfy? Listen carefully to Me, and eat what is good and delight yourself in abundance." Isaiah 55:1-2

If you come after Him with this mindset, you will find that nothing can compare to Him and the peace that you have in Him will erase your previous frustrations. You will realize that your only true possession is Christ. I leave you with this quote from A.W. Tozer:

The way to deeper knowledge of God is through the lonely valleys of soul poverty and abnegation of all things. The blessed ones who possess the Kingdom are they who have repudiated every external thing and have rooted from their hearts all sense of possessing. They are `poor in spirit.' They have reached an inward state paralleling the outward circumstances of the common beggar in the streets of Jerusalem; that is what the word `poor' as Christ used it actually means. These blessed poor are no longer slaves to the tyranny of things. They have broken the yoke of the oppressor; and this they have done not by fighting but by surrendering. Though free from all sense of possessing, they yet possess all things. `Theirs is the kingdom of heaven.'