Pretty much everybody loves fruit. It's
tasty, sweet, juicy, and colorful. But have
you ever thought to yourself what it
would be like if all that you ever ate
was just fruit? Well, believe it or not,
there are some people out there who only
eat fruit. These people are called
"fruitarians". But what would motivate
somebody to take on such a radical diet?
Well there are a few reasons. (1) Some wish
to try and detox their body. (2) Others want
to return to a more gatherer-style diet
like humans supposedly held to thousands
of years ago. (3) Still others just want to
take on an interesting challenge. (4) But
probably the strangest reason is there
are some fruitarians who want to avoid
killing anything - even plants - because you
see, if you eat a vegetable you're
technically killing or at least severely
harming a plant, whereas if you eat a
fruit, you're just eating something that
was produced by a plant. I know what
you're thinking, "That's just crazy", and
you're right. First of all, the high sugar
content in fruits can cause tooth decay
and diabetes if that's all you eat.
Secondly, an all fruit diet will cause
severe deficiencies in essential
vitamins, minerals, and nutrients. In fact,
some children have actually died because
their parents forced a fruitarian diet
on them. Most of us can see straight away
that an all fruit diet is not a good
idea. it's completely imbalanced, meaning
the fruitarian takes in tons of one food
group - fruits - but absolutely nothing of
all the other food groups like
vegetables, grains, meat, and dairy. And the
fact that some fruitarians will try to
make up for this problem by throwing
some nuts and seeds into the mix doesn't
help their case a whole lot. You need
balance in order to be healthy; even if
all you eat is healthy food like fruits,
you will be unhealthy and even
malnourished if that's all you eat. So,
now, you're probably wondering, "Why is he
talking about fruitarianism?
What does this have to do with
worshiping God?" Well, I'll get to that but
first I wanted to say a few things about
worship. As you probably know, worship
songs are an integral part of any church
service; in fact most people would
probably rank the worship songs as
the second most important component of
any church service - after the sermon that
is. Worshiping God should be important to
us as Christians because it's clearly
important to God. In John 4:23
Jesus says, "But the hour is coming, and is
now here, when the true worshipers will
worship the Father in spirit and truth,
for the Father is seeking such people to
worship Him. We have many songs sung in
churches all around the world. Some are
the older-style hymns from the 17-
through early 1900s like "Amazing Grace",
"How Great Thou Art", and "Great Is Thy
Faithfulness". We also have the more
modern-style choruses from the last 60
years or so like "Lord, I Lift Your Name
on High", "How Great Is Our God", and "Holy Is
the Lord".
We literally have thousands of worship
songs to choose from. That being the case,
you'd think we would have plenty of
variety to satisfy our spiritual hunger.
But there's a common thread running
through each of these songs that I
wanted to highlight for you. For example,
in "Amazing Grace", we joyfully praise God
for his grace in our salvation and
protection. In "How Great Thou Art", we
cheerfully praise God for his creation,
salvation, and second coming. In "Lord, I
Lift Your Name on High", we happily praise
God for the Gospel message. And in "How
Great Is Our God", we peacefully praise
God for his all-around greatness. Did you
catch that? Every song I brought up is...
happy. We're happy because God loves us,
we're happy because Jesus died for us,
we're happy because God is good. Now, please don't misunderstand me - I'm not
saying these are bad songs. In fact, I've
sung every one of these songs in church
before and
some of them I like. But could it be that
we are missing something in our worship?
Could it be that by only singing worship
songs that are happy, that we are
limiting ourselves to a very restrictive
spiritual diet? Could it be that we are
worshiping God like...fruitarians? It's
interesting that most worship
songwriters would say that they get the
inspiration for their songs from the
Book of Psalms in the Bible. The ironic
thing is though, a lot of the psalms are
not that happy. Sure, we have some happy
psalms that praise God for all the same
reasons I already mentioned like Psalm
23 and Psalm 100, but there's so much
more than that.
We have psalms that cry out to God in
the midst of anguish, and fear, and anger
at one's enemies, and every other human
emotion. We have penitent psalms where
the worshiper cries out to God in
repentance for his sins. And what about
all the highly didactic or educational
psalms, like the ones that teach us about
righteousness and God's hatred of evil,
or the historical psalms that teach us
about the history of Israel, or the
prophetic psalms that teach us about our
future? So tell me, why do we never sing
any sad worship songs in church?
How about fearful worship songs? Angry
worship songs? Penitent worship songs? Historical worship songs? Prophetic
worship songs? Where are they? Let me put
it this way: if worship is like food, then
we Christians have a seriously
imbalanced worship diet. Now, you may try
to counter this by bringing up the
handful of partial exceptions to the
rule. You might say, "Well, what about
"Blessed Be Your Name" or "It Is Well with
My Soul", which both talk about praising
God in good and bad circumstances? Well,
first of all, these sorts of songs are
quite rare, especially among the more
modern worship songs. But more
importantly, even these songs don't
plunge nearly as far into the depths
of human brokenness and despair as the
Psalms do.
Just think of Psalm 22, "My God, my God, why
have you forsaken me?", or Psalm 13, "How
long, O LORD? Will you forget me forever?
How long will you hide your face from me?
When was the last time you sang
something like that in church? And
thirdly, this still doesn't even touch on
the entire lack of songs dealing with
fear, anger, repentance, and the historical
and prophetic songs. So to try to deal
with this problem by pointing out the
handful of minor partial exceptions to
the rule is kind of like when
fruitarians try to compensate for their
horribly imbalanced diet by just throwing
some nuts and seeds into the mix. Sorry, I
don't think that's going to cut it. So,
what could be the consequences of
sustaining such an imbalanced worship
diet for so long? Unfortunately, I think
all you have to do is take a look at the
church in the West nowadays to find out.
For one thing, a friend of mine told me
recently that she doesn't like going to
church anymore because she finds other
churchgoers incredibly shallow; that is,
they only seem to want to talk about
what's going well in life and they never
open up about the trials they're going
through. Granted, not every church is like
this, but it's certainly a growing trend.
Could this be because we Christians have
conditioned ourselves by the worship
songs we sing to think that the
Christian life is supposed to be
perfectly happy all the time, and so we
just put on a happy face at church?
Theologian Carl Trueman puts it this way:
he says, "A diet of unremittingly jolly
choruses and hymns inevitably creates an
unrealistic horizon of expectation which
sees the normative Christian life as one
long triumphalist street party". I think
he says it well. Another thing - and let's
be honest here - the church in the West is
by and large not reaching the culture
and as a result the church is shrinking
around us. Now, there could be many
reasons for this, but could it not at
least partly be due to our worship? Now,
you may think that by only singing
happy worship songs in church that we
should attract unbelievers into the
church. But ironically, this shallowness
in worship actually does the opposite: it
keeps people away from the church
because it doesn't satisfy their
spiritual longing for something real, and
deep, and authentic. Think about it: even
the world's music has far more emotional
variety than contemporary Christian
worship music, so why would the world
come to us? Also, if all the worship songs
you sing are happy, then your expectation
will be that God is going to give you a
happy, easy life. Then, when trials
inevitably come, you'll be surprised and
unprepared to deal with these issues,
much less take on the world's problems.
Weak Christians make weak churches, and
weak churches are irrelevant to the
world. Sound familiar?
Furthermore, millions of people believe
that God is basically just a God of love,
and forget that he's also a God of
justice. As a result, these millions of
people are on their way to hell because
they don't realize that they will be
judged for their sins if they don't
repent. Could this be because we
practically only ever sing about God's
love and never about his anger at sin?
What if we sang things like Psalm 7,
where it says in verse 11, "God is a just
judge, And God is angry with the wicked
every day. The last thing I'll bring up
is that Christians in the West are
pretty much biblically illiterate
nowadays, for the most part. That is,
they're unfamiliar with things like
biblical morality, symbolism, history, and
prophecy. And again, our modern worship
songs don't really touch on these issues
hardly at all. So here's the million
dollar question: what do we do about
these problems?
I mean, how on earth are we ever going to
find a perfectly balanced selection of
worship songs that cover every single
range of human emotion and instruct us
about righteousness, our spiritual
heritage, and our future? It seems like an
impossible task!
But you know what? God made it very
simple for us. He provided a song book
just like this already. It's in the Bible.
Can you guess? It's the Book of Psalms.
And you know, another beautiful thing
about the Psalms is that even when you
do start off singing a psalm that's sad,
or fearful, or angry, by the end it nearly
always transitions into a positive psalm
of praising God for having delivered you
out of your trials. In this way, God
actually takes our negative emotions and
channels them into positive praise. With
uninspired worship songs, you can sing to
God when you're happy, and that's about
it.
With God's inspired worship songs, you
can sing to him no matter how you feel.
So, I say it's time we stopped worshiping
God like fruitarians. It's high time we
started a psalm-singing movement. Thanks
for watching.
