What I am trying to do here is really just share with you, through the picture of my love for music, my love for the Psalms, my love for them as prayers, as worship songs. Really they're the best prayers, the best worship songs you could ever ask for and they're all sitting right there for us in our Bible. All you have to do is open them up and start to pray them. But that can be tough sometimes because, like vinyl records, they're kind of old and dusty and they don’t seem very up to date. You may not even know how to use them, they seem kind of cumbersome and whatnot. It’s the same experience we've had with probably vinyl records because they're not really of today, but even though they're not of today, we're discovering that vinyl records offer something that today's stuff can't. Which is a deeper, richer experience. And one of those things about experiences is that vinyl records really are hi-fi. That's a word that was used with vinyl records and it holds to be true. Because hi-fi, what that means is “high fidelity”. Or it's very very true to the original experience of what it was to hear the music live. Not all music is as hi-fi.
Here’s an example. This is a lo-fi recording and this is a hi-fi and they're actually the same song shown side by side. But one you can see all the little peaks and valleys, the highs and the lows. Whereas here, it's all been crammed to the outer edges and you lose the peaks and you lose the valleys. Really this is kind of more of a one dimensional experience while this is very three dimensional.
What does that have to do with the Psalms? Well, the Psalms are hi-fi as well. They offer us the fullness, the richness of what our experience with God is on the day to day. Whereas, to be truthful, not all our prayers or worship songs do that. For instance, take the top 50 songs that are sung in churches. I took those top 50 songs and I did a little experiment with them. I went through each song and I marked on the feelings wheel the emotions that those songs speak to. You can see over here in the yellow, this is happy, purple is surprised and blue is sad. And if a song sat there for any amount of time in that emotion, it would get a little check mark and you can see there's a lot in terms of thankful, there's a lot in terms of confident, free, this big purple one is awe. These are all great things to feel, but as you can see they only are about 30% of what the lived experience of what any human would be. Really any Christian as well. We feel all these things.
But the Psalms, they do it differently. You open up the Psalms and you open up the pages and already you're bombarded with twice as many emotions as anybody has ever written in a modern worship song, honestly. I went through the first 50 Psalms, I did the same thing and put a check next to any emotion and I think this chart speaks for itself. There's almost not a single emotion that's untouched by the Psalms. And that's a good thing.
The Psalms speak to what it is to follow the Lord in all the highs and lows and we’re not cramming our worship into a one-dimensional realm of emotional thought, but we're embracing the fact that to follow God is hard. Sometimes it's painful. Sometimes we don't know where God is at. And it's ok to bring that to God. Jesus brought it to God. “My God my God, why have you forsaken me?” He said that in his lowest moment, when he felt completely abandoned. And he brought it to God with a Psalm. That's from a Psalm! And there are so many more Psalms out there, for every emotion, for every moment of your life, there is a Psalm. So if you haven't yet, open up the Psalms. Get to know them, start to pray them, come to love them because as you do, you'll get to know and you'll get to love our God better because you’ll be able to bring every aspect of your life, the whole hi-fi picture to him.
About the Author
Winston Arblaster
Winston is an Oregonian whose favorite things include the “3 C’s”: coffee, craft beer, and writings of the Church Fathers. As Music Director, the highlight of his week is when he sees others open their hearts to God in worship.
He and his wife, Stephanie, live with their cat, Jerome, and love to travel.
Fun fact: Winston is a dual citizen to the UK and was named after Winston Churchill.
