Sinclair B. Ferguson

All you see is single verses.

And that means you're being deprived of what Christians have valued for centuries, seeing and understanding the flow and logic of a great hymn as it moves from verse to verse.

It's all in front of you.

You see the whole.

The great hymn writers were students of Scripture, and some of them were not only unusually gifted poets, but also fine theologians, capable of developing an idea and illuminating biblical truth.

Yes, we're always at the mercy of whoever is responsible to choose the praise in our congregation, whether we use a hymn book or not.

And everybody, and for that matter, every congregation tends to have favorites.

But knowledge of your hymn book means you can still get to know all of the hymns, reflect on, and grow through their teaching, because often they're sermons in song.

You can follow the theological reasoning of the hymn,

And with a hymn book, you probably get almost 20 centuries of hymns, not just the last 20 years.

When you sing your way through a hymn book, you begin to appreciate that in your praise, you belong to the vast company of believers through the centuries.

And that's so important for us today, because then you'll realize that the church is far bigger than you ever imagined.

There's perhaps never been a day when that's more important, because the contemporary church's thirst is to be exactly that, contemporary in everything.

And that often means that Christians are deprived of the wisdom of the ages.

Please don't misunderstand me.

This is not an attempt to demean all modern song and hymn writers and modern songs.

But if that's all we sing and all we know, we're rejecting a wisdom practice of the church throughout the ages.

And actually, we're the first generation in 300 years to do that.

And frankly, we're not a smart enough or a spiritual enough generation to be able to afford to do that.

This week, I thought we might take up a slightly different kind of theme on the podcast.