Amen. Thank you, Aaron. That was great. A little bit different this morning. I know some of you who have been coming to Grace for a while are freaking out right now because it's way too early for the sermon and you don't know what's happening. That is on purpose. We're doing that on purpose because this is a series that is focused on worship. And so we are flipping around the way that we do things in some of the services so that we can respond to the sermon about a song or about worship in worship. This is a series that we've been wanting to do for, I've been wanting to do it since COVID. And when I say since COVID, I realize in preparation for this that I say things like in COVID and since COVID as if it doesn't exist anymore. And it would stop existing if we would just quit testing. But I think we're far enough removed now that I can make that joke and nobody thinks I'm making any statements. What I learned in COVID, and when I say in COVID, that is from 2020 to halfway through 2022. That's in COVID. Okay, so what I learned in COVID about church, one of my biggest takeaways was how important it is that we sing together. There was a lot about that season that I didn't care for. I was coming in here on Thursdays, one o'clock in the afternoon, preaching to that camera with two other people in the room, and then Sunday morning I would watch myself with my family, and my daughter would tell me that I was boring. And I would agree. I would agree with her. And it just made me realize that singing together when we come is maybe the most important part about Sunday morning. When Aaron was interviewing, we were searching for a worship pastor. He asked me, he said, I have a question just for Nate. What does Sunday morning worship mean to you? Why is it important to you? And I said, well, you know, the service lasts an hour and I'm only going to speak for 30 to 35 minutes, so we need an effective filler to get to me. And he laughed, which is what you're supposed to do when your potential boss makes a joke in an interview. You laugh at it, even if it's not that funny. And I said, no, I think it's the most important thing that happens on Sundays. Besides being together, besides what happens in the lobby before and after the service, besides going out to lunch together afterwards, besides being around each other and seeing each other, I think the most important thing that happens on Sunday morning is singing together. You can listen to this sermon anytime. You can download the best pastors in the world every week. But what you cannot download is singing with your family of faith. What you cannot download is the experience of praising God together. So I think it's the most important thing that happens on Sunday morning. And it occurs to me that as I was visiting other churches in sabbatical, and then as I was thinking about this idea of worship and worship in the service, we do it every week. It's my favorite part of the service. My favorite noise in the world, one of my favorite noises in the world is to sit in the front and listen to you guys belt it out. At the end of last week, I don't know what happened, the spirit was moving, but that last song we sang was powerful. And I just listened to y'all sing it because I like hearing my family of faith praise God together. But as I was getting ready for this series, doing research on worship and thinking about it, I think someone wrote it somewhere and I thought about it a little bit more and found it to be true. You know that every church everywhere sings? Every church service that's happening in the city this morning, there's going to be singing. I know of no traditions or denominations that do not sing in their service. It's a mandatory part of all services, which is really kind of crazy because so many different traditions have so many different things that they include in their Sunday morning liturgy. A read, a call and response, an altar call, a message, or a homily. But they all sing. And we do it every week. And so this series is called The Songs We Sing. And we're going to look at a few of the songs that we sing as a body, and we're going to ask where they come from in Scripture. We're going to ask what they can teach us, and we're going to really spend time as a body of believers focusing on the importance of worship. Because I really did come out of COVID thinking that the most important thing we do when we gather on Sunday morning is we sing together. Now, why do we sing? That's a natural question to ask. Some of us don't like it. Some of us wish we could skip it. But why is it a part of all the services? Why is it so ubiquitous? I think it's simply this. I think we sing because God designs and commands us to do so. We sing because God designs and commands us to do so. He designed us to sing. There is something, I believe, in your very soul, in your nature, that is knit into you, that longs to praise, that longs to sing. We're told in Scripture that if we don't praise God, that the rocks will cry out on our behalf, that creation itself will praise God if we refuse to do it. I think we were born to praise. I think we were born to sing. I honestly think that when you go to a concert and it's not a Christian artist and they're singing the song and the whole crowd sings the song and it's a really powerful thing when a whole venue or a whole arena is singing a song together. And I honestly think that's probably a spiritual moment. That's just a moment that's being misappropriated to sing something else and find joy in other places. But that's a response that we have to this natural desire to sing and to cry out that God knit into us. I believe that we were designed to worship. And I believe that we were designed to worship because I don't know if you've ever thought about this or realized this, but all of creation is bracketed with praise. All of creation is bracketed with song. There was singing going on in the heavens before earth was a thing, and there will be singing at the end of the story when the new heaven and the new earth becomes a thing. I know this because of what I see in Job 38. Job 38.7 very simply says, look at it with me. When the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy. In the preceding verses 5 and 6, God is asking Job, where were you when I was doing these things? And so he's saying, where were you when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy? The stars of the story, Revelation 19. Bracketing all of time, all of creation, is the song of creation and the song of praise. Right now, in the throne room of God, there are angels surrounding him saying, Right now heaven is filled with choral praise. It's happening in this moment. And so when we sing we are joining that eternal echo of praise. There's something in our soul that wants to do that. And then we are commanded to do it. It's not just a natural thing to want to praise our God. Why do we do it? Well, we do it because we're designed to. But we also do it because God commands us to. God tells us to all through Scripture. He tells us that we're to praise Him, that we're to sing songs to Him, that we are to make a joyful noise. Did you know that in 2 Chronicles you can find a listing of the worship pastors at the tabernacle? That God actually invented Aaron's job? It's in the Bible. These are the ministers of praise, the ministers of song for the nation of Israel. We start to see songs in the Bible as early as, I think, Exodus 15, when God moves his people across the Red Sea, when he parts the Red Sea. There's a song of Moses immediately following that, where as a nation, they praise their God. A few chapters later, there's a song of Miriam. We see songs all through Scripture. We have a whole book in the middle of the Bible, Psalms. You ever do the drop and flop where you're like, dear God, what do you want me to read today? And then you just drop your Bible. It's always going to be Psalms that he wants you to read because it's big and it's in the middle. We have a whole book of songs intended to be sung to God. I'm not going to say too much about that book because next week is on Psalm 8, and I'm very excited about that. And the week after that is Great is Thy Faithfulness. I wrote that sermon this week and I cannot wait to preach it. I literally just wish we could fast forward to that. I cannot wait to preach that to you in a couple of weeks. But all through scripture we see singing. We see praising. One of my favorite scenes is when David gets too exuberant in his praise and his wife gets on to him and says, you're being undignified. And he's like, then I'm going to be undignified. That's fine. There's this great song that starts off, I will be undignified. I'm dancing as David danced. And the line is wild and free, something in romance, but I always like to sing wild and free in my underpants because that's what he did. Isn't this funnier? Even in Colossians, I was struck by this this week. Colossians 3, verses 16 and 17. This is what Paul writes about our command to sing. It's remarkable to me, Paul is writing this letter to the church in Colossae. He's getting towards the end of it, so he's beginning to give his closing instructions. And he says, he instructs the church, sing songs and hymns and spiritual songs. And he puts it on par with doing everything in the name of Jesus. So he doesn't say this is a thing that might be good for you guys to try. It's an essential ingredient of the church that we must do is to sing songs of praise to God. And in Pauline theology, it's put on par with doing everything in the name of Jesus. And so I would say gently this morning, and I do mean gently. I don't want anyone to feel bad. But if you go to church and there's music playing and you have an opportunity to sing with a family of faith and you don't do it, that's disobedient. God tells us to sing. God through Paul tells us that we need to sing. Sing these songs. You're wired to do that. And I know there's all kinds of reasons why we don't or why we wouldn't. We're worried about being heard and maybe because our voice isn't very good, especially when Aaron is like a jerk, and he lays out, and he's like, just your voices, and you're like, oh, jeez, everyone's going to hear me, you know? You've got to forget about that. You've got to let it rip. When people, nobody sits next to me up here. I sit up here, and there's very few people that actually come and sit next to me, but every now and again we're full, and they have to, and I always look at and I'll be like, you sing as loud as you want because I'm not going to hear you. Because I let it go. And Jen has said, maybe you need to think about how loud you sing. But here's one of the reasons I sing and I sing loud. First of all, I love singing with my church. Second, maybe this thought will help you. God created you. He's a good Father in heaven and he created you. And when he created you, he created you with your voice. And he knows that some of you can't carry a tune in a bucket, but he made you that way. And you know what he loves? He loves hearing that voice declare his praises. And sometimes I wonder if he doesn't like it more than the pretty voices. Because it's fun to sing with a pretty voice, I guess. I wouldn't know. But to overcome that and say, no, God, I'm going to belt this out for you anyways. God created your voice. What could be sweeter to a father's ears than to hear his children cry out and praise for him? We need to do it. We should be a singing people. The church for all of history has been a singing people. It occurs to me though, it is an odd on its face admonition from God. It's an odd standard for him to have that he should insist that we would praise him all the time. Right? It's kind of an egomaniacal thing to create a race of people and then instruct them and say, now tell me how good I am all the time. Praise me all the time. And if you're not doing it, that's wrong. Praise me more. You can't praise me enough. And in heaven, they're going to praise me even more all the time. It's going to be great. If you just look at it like that, it's like a six-year-old invented this whole thing. I'm going to make some people, and they're going to tell me I'm great all the time. So it's worth asking, why is it so important to God that we praise him? He designed us to do it. Why did he do that? Why does he command us? Why does he double down on that and command us to praise him? Well, as with everything with God, it's for our benefit. It's for our good. It's for our best. You'll find this the further you get into Christendom and Christianity. God never asks you to do anything that's not what's best for you. He never doesn't want you to do something because he doesn't have your best interest in mind. Every instruction, every admonition, every command, every wish, every revelation of God's will that we get is for our good and for our benefit. So is his instruction to praise him. There's an old theologian named Karl Barth that I think answers this question really well. It doesn't really matter that he's an old theologian. What matters is what he said. And if you were to ask, why does God want us to praise him? I think this quote captures it. I'm probably going to read it twice because it can be difficult to follow because it's not words we're used to. But here we go. It's words we're used to. We're just not used to putting them in this order. I'll read it again. So what Mr. Barth is saying here is that all of praise, all of praise through all the centuries, through all the years, the animals doing it, the rocks crying out, the people doing it, the angels singing it, it all culminates, it is at its best. Praise reaches its climax when it is sung by God's children in God's church. That what we do here on Sunday mornings is the culmination of all of praise. And in that culmination of praise, in that expression of praise to God, is one of the most important ministries of the church. And I really like that Carl uses the word ministry there. It's the ministry of the church. You know why I like that? Because a ministry serves us. Ministry serves. So it's not the job of the church. It's not the declaration of the church. It's not the business of the church. It's the ministry of the church. That singing songs together is one of the most important ministries of the church, which means that when we do that together, we are served. We get something out of it. We benefit. Corporate worship exalts God and serves us. It exalts God. It helps us remember who he is and who we are. It reminds us of that constantly. But it also serves us. And so I thought it worth asking here at the beginning of a series on worship, how does it serve us to corporately worship together? I have three things that I thought of and how it serves us to worship corporately together. There's more than three ways that it benefits us, but these are the three that I came up with and that I would put to you this morning. The first is corporate worship is an expression of the unity for which Jesus prayed. Corporate worship is an expression of the unity for which Jesus prayed. John chapter 17, to me in my thinking, is one of the most profound chapters in the Bible. In John chapter 17, we have what's called the high priestly prayer. It's the longest recorded prayer of Jesus'. He prays it at the end of his ministry before going to be crucified. It's one of the last times he's gathered with the disciples. And he stops and he prays over the disciples and then in turn prays over all who would be a part of the church to follow the disciples. So if you're here this morning and you're a believer, he prayed for you and he prayed for me in the high priestly prayer of John chapter 17. And the thing that Jesus prays for in that prayer, in his longest recorded prayer, is he's expressing in his heart what he wants for the church that will follow. The thing that Jesus prays for over and over and over again is unity. That we would be unified. That we would be one body. That we would be together in one body, in one spirit, in one mind. And I think that's such an important idea, and I think honestly as Christians, we undervalue that admonition from Jesus. We have a glimpse of his heart that he wants us to be unified, and yet we are really bad as Christians at being unified. We're so fractal. We have so many different denominations. We insist so much that if I'm going to worship with you, then you have to agree with me about all the finer points of theology. You have to agree with me about everything or I can't worship with you. We're really, as Christians, we can be a very divisive people, which is so antithetical to what Jesus prays in John chapter 17. Can I tell you, I got off, I quit scrolling Twitter back in February. It's not on my phone anymore. The big reason, the biggest reason I got rid of Twitter in particular in that instant is because every time I would scroll it was just Christians getting mad at other Christians for not being Christian the way they wanted them to be Christian. It was so stupid. Just as an aside, I have a feeling that this particular thing that I'm about to say is going to come up in a later sermon when I can articulate it a little bit more. But how can we possibly be obedient to Jesus' prayer and be unified as a global body of believers or even a local body of believers if we insist on a homogeny of theology and thought and doctrine? How can we possibly exist in unity if we have to have all the same ideas about all the same things and believe all the same implications from all the same verses? That's why we're not unified is because we've insisted on that for so long. But for the purposes of this morning, when we sing together the same words, the same songs, it unifies us as a body. In that moment, in that place, we are unified. We are together. We are one voice living in obedience to the prayer of Jesus in John chapter 17. You come in here Democrat or Republican, you lay it down, you praise God together. We are God's children here. Those are the only labels that matter. You're in your 70s, I'm in my 20s, doesn't matter. We lay that down and we praise God together. We are unified. Later in the service we're going to ordain Kyle, hold your applause. Which means that his family and his wife's family, they're all here. And they all go to different churches. Two of them work at other churches that are almost as good as this one. And they go to other churches and other places. But they come here and they lift their voices with us. And for this morning, they're a part of our family. As we praise together, they can go anywhere to any church and sing with them and be unified. I remember vividly being in Cape Town, South Africa, in a townage called, I think, Masa Pumaleli. And I went to church, and they were singing. And they were singing in Masi. And I don't remember what they were singing, but I knew that song. And I went outside, and I remember just looking up at the sky. And I remember they had these, it was the weirdest things, they had these things that they held that looked like throw pillows and then when you hit them they made a drum noise. It was wild. The women are dancing around, hitting these drum pillows, singing a song, and I went outside and just sang it to the sky, feeling completely unified with the church in South Africa, with where I was from, understanding that the global church sings too. When we sing together, it unifies us in Jesus in that moment, no matter what labels we brought in. And when we sing together as a church, it joins us with all the other expressions of God's faith and God's body all over the city who are singing this morning too. It's a unifying thing to sing together. The second thing, the second way it ministers to us when we sing together is when we sing, we participate in heaven. I don't know if you've ever thought of it that way. But I believe that heaven's not so much a location and over there a location as a different realm that's going to collide with ours when the fullness of time occurs. It's going to crash into our physical world. It's going to take us over and we will exist in heaven. And when we do, we will sing. There will be joy. And I think that there are times in life, moments of deep love or appreciation, times when God stirs your soul, times when you feel God speaking to you. Times when you're moved. That God allows us to experience just a little glint of heaven here in this dirty place. And I think that when we sing together, God moves in these moments. That if we lose ourself in that praise, and we can corporately lose ourself in that praise together, that we experience a little glimmer of heaven right in this room this morning. I think when we sing, we participate in what's already going on in heaven. And if singing unifies us, and if singing allows us to participate, then maybe it's even possible that we're singing with the ones that we've lost and that we've loved too. I think singing corporately allows us to participate just a little bit in what heaven is doing right now. And the third thing I would mention in the way that singing ministers to us, and this is not something that had occurred to me until I ran across a quote, and I'll read you the quote in a second. Singing teaches us theology. The songs we sing teach us about our God, about how our God views us, about our need for him. Singing songs teaches us about theology. I had never thought about it before, but as I was prepping, I was reading some guy's, I think, blog post on worship. I don't know. And I saw this quote, and I immediately sent it to Gibson because I thought, this is so important and so impactful. You need to be aware of this. And then I realized, I want to share this with the church, too, because it is important. So like I said, it's a quote. I don't know from who, some guy who wrote a blog. So some guy who wrote a blog said this. Since people tend to remember the theology they sing more than the theology that is preached, a congregation's repertoire of hymnody is often of critical importance in shaping the faith of its people. Do you get that? The songs we sing teach us who our God is. And so one of the most important things that can be done in the development of your theology and your children's theology and how you view God and how you think he views you is for Aaron to prayerfully and thoughtfully select the right songs to put in front of you to teach you more about your God. When we sing, we are learning. And as I processed this, I realized it was true. I realized it was true because I grew up Southern Baptist and we sing hymns and we sing Amazing Grace. And it was Amazing Grace that taught me that I was a wretch, which is a difficult truth for a six-year-old. But it was Amazing Grace that taught me that I was a wretch. Remember that word? And it wasn't until years later that I saw it in Romans 7, where Paul declares, Oh, wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death. Amazing grace taught me that theology before I encountered it in Scripture. Amazing grace taught me that it was grace that saved me. That it was God's grace and goodness that was chasing after me to save me and that was providing for my salvation. I didn't learn the theology of that until years later. I had no idea about from his fullness we have all received grace upon grace. I had no idea about the theology of grace and what that word meant and why God gives us his son and that is that he is a personification of grace. I didn't know that. I just knew that God was gracious and that his grace was amazing. Turn your eyes upon Jesus. Turn your eyes upon Jesus. Look full at his wonderful face and the things of earth will grow strangely dim in the light of his glory and grace. Before I ever encountered Hebrews 12, 1 and 2, because we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us throw out the sin and the weight that so easily entangles and run the race that is set before us. How? By focusing our eyes on Christ, the founder and perfecter of our faith. It was years later that I learned those verses. And I learned that to be obedient to Jesus, all I need to do is focus on him and that the things of the world will fade. But my little spirit had been singing that for years because of what Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus taught me. So when we sing, we learn theology. And that's one of the big things I want to do in this series. This morning's a little bit different because I thought we needed kind of a theology of worship, why we worship, why we understand it the way that we do, why it's so very important. But the rest of the series, we're going to pick songs. We're going to go through them. And we're going to look at where they come from in the scriptures so that hopefully that can imbue them with more purpose and more meaning so that when we sing them, we know what we're singing. We're singing God's scriptures back to him. And I hope that as we walk through these, that some of the songs, I wish we could do all of them, but at least some of the songs that we do corporately, when we do them you'll know what you're singing and you'll know why you're singing it and you'll know what it means and I think it'll make the moment more sacred for you and for us. So this morning we're about to sing Graves into Gardens. Graves into Gardens is such a good example of this. There is so much in this song that comes straight out of Scripture. The very first lines, I searched the world and it couldn't fill me. Every desire and the man's empty praise, that's Ecclesiastes. Man's empty praise is from Proverbs. That the crucible is for silver, but praise tests a man's heart. That comes right out of Scripture. There's some others that I wanted to show you more pointedly. These words aren't going to be up on the screen, but there's a segment of the song where we say, because the God of the mountain is the God of the valley. That's Psalm 104.8 where it says that God set the mountains and the valleys in place. Right after that you sing these lines. There's not a place your mercy and grace won't find me again. That's Psalm 23. Mercy and grace will follow me all the days of my life. It's coming right out of Scripture. I like at the end, there's this part that we repeat. You turn graves into gardens. You turn bones into armies. Ezekiel 37, the valley of the dry bones, when God makes an army out of skeletons. You turn seas into highways. I mentioned that earlier, the parting of the Red Sea. So much scripture. But the one that I didn't know about that I want to point your attention to this morning as we sing is found in Isaiah 61.3. Look how closely these mimic one another. The scene is pulled right out of scripture. One of the reasons I wanted to do this series is I wanted you to see the Bible you've been singing without even knowing it. But look, Isaiah 61. To all who mourn in Israel, He will give a crown of beauty to ashes. You give beauty to ashes. A joyous blessing instead of mourning. You turn mourning to dancing. Festive praise instead of despair. In their righteousness they will be like great oaks. We're going to start with graves into gardens. We're going to sing God's Word back to Him. And then we've got two more songs to do after that. So sometimes in this series we're going to start with Graves in the Gardens. We're going to sing God's Word back to him. And then we've got two more songs to do after that. So sometimes in this series, we're going to preach up front and then respond in a prolonged period of praise after that. So join me in Graves in the Gardens.