I still remember the day I got my very first CD player and my very first CDs. it was Christmas. The summer before, I had heard DC Talk's Jesus Freak at summer camp, and I had asked my mom to find out what it was. That Christmas morning, I awoke to find, on the chair reserved for my presents, several books; On top of the books were two smaller, thinner objects, wrapped in paper; And on top of them was an object of unfamiliar shape.
It was a CD player. My first CD player. And below it was DC Talk's "Intermission: The Greatest Hits" and the O. C. Supertone's "Loud and Clear." Although that was years and years ago, I have no doubt that to this day, they remain among my most-listened-to CDs.
I grew up listening to Christian music. I grew up on DC Talk, O.C. Supertones, Relient K, Switchfoot, Toby Mac... They sunk into my head and my heart, and as Anna can testify, I can identify certain songs in as little as 3-4 seconds with my iPod on shuffle. I grew up listening to them. I grew up with Jesus Freak ringing in my ears. I grew up doing chores to Momentum. I grew up singing along in my horrible, horrible singing voice to Wilderness.
And so I grew up with all these songs echoing in my mind. And so I came to know, in my heart and in my head, that as we wander the wilderness, God has been there too. I came to know that our appeals to God merely echo Christ's more passionate and more desperate appeals to God. I came to know that while Christianity is peaceful, that is not the same as being "quiet" or "weak," and that we must refuse, at any and all costs, to merely roll over in the face of the world.
I grew up, in short, listening to theology: To Christology, to apologetics, to theodicy. I grew up listening to songs about God and Christ and the Incarnation and suffering and questions and doubt and faith. And I grew up, and I continue growing up, and who I am today I owe in large part to the music I was blessed with. I can find the roots of my affinity to Job and The Man who was Thursday in my old Supertones CDs: In Wilderness and Like No One Else. I can trace my unwillingness to compromise on scripture back to DC Talk's Socially Acceptable, and the essential "active-ness" and liveliness of Christianity to their Luv is a Verb.
These are only seeds... but they were planted early, and they were watered often. When I came to Biola and started really reading Lewis and Chesterton and a whole bunch of other really dead guys (much love to Cyril of Alexandria and John Henry Newman and too many others to list), I was ready to really think about the ideas they put forward: I'd already been thinking about them for years.
This has value. This has more value than I can say. Christian music has its detractors, even (some might say especially) in Christian circles. But done well, it can be invaluable. That is all.
Showing posts with label Music.. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Music.. Show all posts
Thursday, April 26, 2012
Thursday, February 4, 2010
Make-Believe
So, this is my first blog ever. Cool. I'm pretty sure that this blog will only ever be read by people who already know me, and only in my wildest dreams do I anticipate someone I do not know visiting this blog, except by accident. Given this, I believe an introductory blog to be unnecessary, but should it become necessary, I guess it will be done. but for now, here's...the blog.
Flyleaf, in their latest CD Memento Mori, has a song called This Close. I was listening to it the other day, and the very first lines stuck in my head.
"I had a dream that we were dead/ But we pretended that we still lived./ With no regrets we never bled/ And we took everything life could give/ And came up broken, empty-handed in the end."
The rest of this note is going to state two things: the first is that the secular life–indeed, the whole of secular history–is just one attempt after another by the dead to pretend that they are alive. The second is possibly even more sad–that all too many of us who are actually alive, spend our time acting as though we are still dead.
The first of my statements is to me self-evident. On the day that Adam and Eve ate the fruit, they died, and we have all inherited that death. We are born dead, still-born in the truest sense, and, left to our own devices, we would never know what it is to be alive. Ezekiel paints a chilling picture of mankind without God; "The Spirit of the Lord... set me down in the middle of the valley; it was full of bones. And he led me around among them, and behold, there were very many on the surface of the valley, and behold, they were very dry" (Ezekiel 37:1-2). Although God is specifically showing Ezekiel Israel, it is just as true for all of us. We are the furthest possible we can be from life–we are bones, very dry and very dead. And, like bones, we have no power to bring ourselves back to life. But that doesn't stop us from doing what we see to be the next best thing. We pretend that we still live. Can anyone argue that this is not what the world has been doing since the fall of man? All of what we ironically call life is spent merely pretending to be alive, presenting the facade of life to all the other dead, in the hope that eventually we will fool even ourselves.
This is a vain hope. We are dead, and we know ourselves to be dead, and all our pretense otherwise is just that; pretense. We are like children pretending to be adults, doing what they think are adult things, drinking their coffee and driving to work, except that even children know that make-believe cannot last forever. We think that, if we feel pleasure, it will be like being alive, and so we fill our lives with every kind of pleasure we can think of–and afterwards, when the pleasures are gone, we find our bones still just as dry.
I am a Christian. As a Christian, I have been brought to life by Christ; sinews and flesh have covered my dry bones, and life has entered into me where before there was only death. As Christians, we are the only ones who are alive in this world, and God wants to use us to bring still more people to life. How tragic, then, that many of us, myself included, spend so much time acting as though we are still dead. We have access to the only truly lasting and fulfilling pleasure in this temporary, disappointing world, and we turn away from it. We leave the land of the living and willingly enter back into the valley of death, seeking pleasure where we should know there is no pleasure to be found. We are like the prodigal son, only instead of leaving the pig pen and running back to our father, we leave our father's house to dine with swine.
But we don't have to be like this. We are alive in Christ–we are new creations. We are no longer slaves to sin–let's live like it. Let God use us to bring life to the dead, and in doing so let us live more fully in Him who died for us.
I know that if I was able, in my heart of hearts, to fully believe what I am writing, I would sin a lot less. So I ask for prayer. To everyone reading this, I ask for your prayers to open myself more fully every day to the life that is in Christ, and every day to let more of my dead, sinful self go.
Flyleaf, in their latest CD Memento Mori, has a song called This Close. I was listening to it the other day, and the very first lines stuck in my head.
"I had a dream that we were dead/ But we pretended that we still lived./ With no regrets we never bled/ And we took everything life could give/ And came up broken, empty-handed in the end."
The rest of this note is going to state two things: the first is that the secular life–indeed, the whole of secular history–is just one attempt after another by the dead to pretend that they are alive. The second is possibly even more sad–that all too many of us who are actually alive, spend our time acting as though we are still dead.
The first of my statements is to me self-evident. On the day that Adam and Eve ate the fruit, they died, and we have all inherited that death. We are born dead, still-born in the truest sense, and, left to our own devices, we would never know what it is to be alive. Ezekiel paints a chilling picture of mankind without God; "The Spirit of the Lord... set me down in the middle of the valley; it was full of bones. And he led me around among them, and behold, there were very many on the surface of the valley, and behold, they were very dry" (Ezekiel 37:1-2). Although God is specifically showing Ezekiel Israel, it is just as true for all of us. We are the furthest possible we can be from life–we are bones, very dry and very dead. And, like bones, we have no power to bring ourselves back to life. But that doesn't stop us from doing what we see to be the next best thing. We pretend that we still live. Can anyone argue that this is not what the world has been doing since the fall of man? All of what we ironically call life is spent merely pretending to be alive, presenting the facade of life to all the other dead, in the hope that eventually we will fool even ourselves.
This is a vain hope. We are dead, and we know ourselves to be dead, and all our pretense otherwise is just that; pretense. We are like children pretending to be adults, doing what they think are adult things, drinking their coffee and driving to work, except that even children know that make-believe cannot last forever. We think that, if we feel pleasure, it will be like being alive, and so we fill our lives with every kind of pleasure we can think of–and afterwards, when the pleasures are gone, we find our bones still just as dry.
I am a Christian. As a Christian, I have been brought to life by Christ; sinews and flesh have covered my dry bones, and life has entered into me where before there was only death. As Christians, we are the only ones who are alive in this world, and God wants to use us to bring still more people to life. How tragic, then, that many of us, myself included, spend so much time acting as though we are still dead. We have access to the only truly lasting and fulfilling pleasure in this temporary, disappointing world, and we turn away from it. We leave the land of the living and willingly enter back into the valley of death, seeking pleasure where we should know there is no pleasure to be found. We are like the prodigal son, only instead of leaving the pig pen and running back to our father, we leave our father's house to dine with swine.
But we don't have to be like this. We are alive in Christ–we are new creations. We are no longer slaves to sin–let's live like it. Let God use us to bring life to the dead, and in doing so let us live more fully in Him who died for us.
I know that if I was able, in my heart of hearts, to fully believe what I am writing, I would sin a lot less. So I ask for prayer. To everyone reading this, I ask for your prayers to open myself more fully every day to the life that is in Christ, and every day to let more of my dead, sinful self go.
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