Sinclair B. Ferguson

If your church uses a screen, let me urge you today to buy a hymn book.

You owe it to your Christian growth to own one.

Now, why do I make that radical and rather counter-cultural old-fashioned suggestion?

Because I'm an old man?

Well, it's simple really.

Because in all likelihood, if you don't have a hymn book, you don't know the vast majority of the great hymns of the Christian church.

And you don't know the hymns that never go up on the screen.

In fact, you don't know if you're being fully nurtured by what you're singing, or starved by whoever chooses what goes on the screen.

But there's another reason for having a good hymn book.

It's this.

If your church uses a screen, you probably only see one verse of a hymn at a time, never the whole hymn.

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,