Men Singing
What is repentance? How do you know it has actually taken place? This is both an easy and a quite difficult question to answer. Fundamentally, repentance is our heart’s turning away from sin, self, and idolatry, and toward God. It’s our soul’s disgust and hatred toward prior disobedience to God’s commands and the embrace of obedience to God’s commands. Ok, simple enough. But how do we know this has actually taken place in us? Well, then it gets a little more complicated.
Because true, biblical, full-throated repentance is often very specific to the sin in your life. It isn’t about just stopping the sin, it’s about turning away from it and toward its opposite. When the Apostle Paul, for instance, calls the thief to repent in Ephesians 4, he doesn’t just say, “Thieves, stop stealing”. He actually says, “Thieves, no longer steal, but instead do honest work so that you can give and share.” That’s complete repentance in Paul’s mind. To repent completely of the sin of lust isn’t to simply stop lusting, but rather as we’re commanded in 1 Tim 5, to treat younger women and men as sisters and brothers in all purity, honoring them and protecting them. To repent completely of the sin of gossip isn’t to simply stop gossiping, but rather to obey the command to outdo one another with honor, encouraging one another as fellow saints.
What would complete repentance look like with regard to the specific sins in your own life? It may look like a lot of different things for you individually, depending on what specific sins plague you right now. But I want to bring to us one area where we might consider the completeness of our repentance corporately.
Psalm 51 is David’s famous prayer of confession and repentance after his sin with Bathsheba, and it’s often read as a quintessential prayer of repentance for Christians. And one of the marks of completed repentance that David gives us in this prayer that I want us to see and consider is our loud and joyful singing. He says in verse 14: Deliver me from bloodguiltiness, O God, O God of my salvation, and my tongue will sing aloud of your righteousness. One of the ways that true repentance works its way into and out of your life unto completion is through the joyful and loud singing of praises to God among his people.
It’s been observed by many before that the two sounds of a healthy church are babies crying and men singing… I think we got the first one covered. And so I want to specifically address the men here for a second. Our singing is more than just something we do when we go to church. It’s a sign that God’s salvation is working in us and spilling out of us to those we lead and care for. And as the God-ordained leaders of our families, marriages and more broadly in the church, our people need to hear the men singing loudly. They need to see complete repentance at work in our lives and in our church, and not just half-hearted mumbling. They need to hear of the Lord’s deliverance from sin and pride in your loud singing of his righteousness. It provides the necessary cover and encouragement to all within earshot to also open their mouths and hearts to the Lord, and to trust him and turn away from sin. Ask any woman here, and she’ll tell you that she absolutely would love to be standing in the middle of men around her drowning out her voice in worship. Think of how encouraging that would be to hear. You don’t sing well? So what! You don’t know the words or the melodies very well? Learn them! Commit them to memory!
I’m convinced that boisterous singing in a church can transform a place. Not because there’s anything magical about our voices, but because when we sing like David describes here, it’s often a clear sign that true and complete repentance is happening in the lives of God’s people. And when God’s people truly repent, we begin to experience the Lord’s grace in ways we never thought possible.