Music: God is clean. Why shouldn't your music be? - Intro: A personal testimony ...

MY TESTIMONY

This section on music is meant to help those Christians who:

• Are already interested in only having music which helps them further their walk with God.  
• Are struggling with their music collection; knowing that it is not all honoring to God, but they don't know how or what to toss.  

It is meant to exhort all Christians to ponder their own music to see if it is in line with God's Word, not just man's ideas, and consider if there is anything that they may need to purge.

I remember driving in the car with my parents listening to old cassette tapes of Squire Parsons singing “Beulah Land.”  I remember belting out, “John saw jasper walls …” with the Gold City.  I remember sitting in my bedroom at the age of five listening to “The Kingsmen Quartet” sing “What a Day That Will Be.”

I remember going to Christian book stores with my family and my brother, my sister and I would go to the Contemporary Christian aisle and laugh at the ridiculous album covers of such groups as “Petra” and “Stryper.”  We would put the demo tapes in the store cassette player and say, “Who do they think they are kidding?  This isn’t Christian.”

I also remember when I was ten years old and a new friend from church told me that she listened to “Fly92,” a local pop station.  I asked my older wiser brother about it and he told me that it was a bad station, but it didn’t “seem that bad to me.”

That was the beginning of Satan’s grasp on my life.  As I look back, I am terrified to see how his tentacles weave into the very fiber of people’s lives.  Music was created within him.  (Ezekiel 28:13-15)  He is the prince and power of the air (Ephesians 2:2) and the “air” is full of his music.

I recently went to the mall with my niece and girls.  Every store had its own style of music piped through the speakers.  Each style of music represented a different style of person.  Each genre represented an identity to which the buyer related.

What type of music do you imagine is at a rodeo?  What kind of music do you imagine is at a hockey / basketball / football game?  What kind of music do you imagine is playing in the ghettos?  What kind of music do you imagine is playing while two teenagers are alone in a car?  What kind of music plays in most heart yearning part of a romantic comedy?  What kind of music tugs the hearts of those scorned? 

We would be foolish to think that when a tool wields as much precise control as music does that it would not be used by Satan to manipulate people away from God and toward hell.

That is exactly what Satan began to do in my life as I took my first taste of  the soft stuff; pop music, and soft rock.

I remember my dad finding my walkman with a tape of BonJovi in it.  He furiously asked what I was doing with that trash and confiscated it.  I just got another copy.

I remember when I was twelve or thirteen praying to God to help me not to listen to that kind of music any more, but I knew I couldn’t do it on my own.  I had a tape in my alarm / radio / tape player that would wake me up to Mariah Carey the following morning.  That night I dreamt that the alarm went off to the exact song at the exact spot that my alarm would be going off the next morning.  I heard God say with grief, “Melissa, I am disappointed in you.”  Terrified, as Isaiah was before God’s holiness, I bolted to my parent’s room too ashamed to explain my fear.

I remember them saying that “God hath not given us the spirit of fear, but of love and a sound mind.”  They prayed with me and I went to bed.  Yet, this was not just any fear, it was “the fear of the Lord.”  I had asked the Lord for help, yet I had not followed His leading.

You would think that would have been the end of it.  I would have thrown out my tapes, gotten rid of my radio and listened to only Christian music.  Yet, once Satan has his grasps on your life, he does not let go so easily.

It was seven years later at Bible College while I was sitting the parking lot at church that I felt I hit my “rock bottom.”  I was skipping through radio stations going from one Christian station to the next when my radio landed on one of those old adrenalin pumping, heart holding songs.  I KNEW that I didn’t WANT to listen to it, but I COULD NOT change the station because I loved the FEELINGS that it stirred in my heart.  The song truly “remembers when.”  I realized that I had no control over the music, the music had control over me.

Now, this may not be your story.  Music may not affect you to the same extent, but you would be erroneous if you refused to admit that music does not affect you at all.

I am so thankful that at my college there were many students who did have good Christian music to which they listened.  While I don’t believe in stealing copyrighted music, my first step back to God was ironically a bootlegged tape of quartet music.

You see, God wanted control of my life and I wanted to give it to Him.  God just had to bring me back to cleanliness, holiness, peace, joy, comfort and encouragement. 

The same tool that Satan uses to encourage his will to be accomplished in our lives is the same tool God created for the same purpose; to accomplish GOD’s will in our lives. 

Satan just did with music what he has done to everything God meant for good.  He perverted it.

WHAT NOW?  WHERE CAN I GO FROM HERE?

Now, I would be lying if I said that I knew right away what “good” music was.  I have heard or gone through trains of thought like:

“No lyrics are good unless they speak of God, including ‘Happy Birthday.”

“Only Hymns, ALL the time.”

“Classical music must be wrong too, because it was once considered ‘worldly.”

“Wait a minute!  What about love songs for me and my husband?”

“But that ‘artist’ is a Christian!  Shouldn’t their music be okay?”

“I know that they are a bad person, but some of their songs are good.”

“Bluegrass and country music are the same.  Why should one be okay and not the other?”

“What about contemporary Christian, because ‘their rock is not as our Rock,’ (Deut 32:31) you know?”

“So long as the lyrics are good, it doesn’t matter what the music sounds like.”

“Showing emotion while singing music is sensual and therefore of Satan.”

“Any breathiness while singing music is sensual and therefore of Satan.”

“Any form of skill or professionalism in music shows pride and must therefore be of Satan.”

Get the picture?  There are a lot of opinions about music.  I wasn’t exactly sure what to choose or how to sing, but I knew that I wanted to do what was right.

HOW DOES THIS EFFECT YOU?

 

Before I continue, I want to ask you two questions.  First, if there was any inclination that something that you were listening to was not to God’s liking or was shown to lean towards Satan’s music, would you:

1. Err on the side of going the extra mile to please God and sacrificing maybe a little more than might be necessary, OR

2.  Keep your music because in your opinion it’s not as big of a deal as people make it out to be.

Second, what would you say is more important in your life: your music or God?

If your answer is the former than the steps I am writing about will aid you in peeling away layer by layer the mask that hides who really is behind your music; God or Satan.

Continued:  Music:  God is clean.  Why shouldn't your music be? - Lyrics