Losing Hymns for Him?

I may get in trouble for this post, but I've wanted to blog my thoughts on this subject for several weeks now and am finally carving out a bit of time to do so.

A while back I read a note in which the author, sharing his or her opinion about hymns, said that he or she was "afraid we are raising a generation of young people who will never be ministered to by these godly hymns."

First off, I want to say that I love the hymns.  But it isn't because I grew up with them.  I was raised in a church that reacted to the dead faith of the churches in our area by singing contemporary songs in our church service.  The adults in my church family had experienced life in Christ, and they didn't want to sing the same hymns the "dead" churches were monotonously droning out each Sunday.  Simple Scripture choruses were all I knew growing up.  In fact, as a kid I thought Keith Green had written "Holy, Holy, Holy" for his Songs for the Shepherd album.  So when I transferred my sophomore year of college to John Brown, I learned about all these great hymns I had never heard before.  And I still love to sing them today.

But with that said, I believe there is nothing "godly" about the hymns.  They are simply songs (tools) designed to help us in our worship of God.  They are not equivalent to Scripture.  They are not inerrant.  They are not God-breathed, designed to last forever.

If hymns were designed to be passed from generation to generation, then I would like for someone to teach us some of the hymns Jesus and his disciples sang.  If ever there was a godly hymn, it would have been the one Jesus sang with his disciples after the Last Supper before they headed out. (see Matthew 26).  I'd also like to learn some of the hymns Paul knew.  He mentions hymns a few times in Scripture (see especially Ephesians 5:19 and Colossians 3:16), and I think he even records the lyrics to some hymns in Scripture (as some say about Ephesians 5:14).  But where are the melodies to these hymns?  Where are the lyrics to the hymns Paul didn't quote?  Where are these hymns today?

I think the answer is obvious.  God uses the music of the time and culture to create and craft songs through his worshippers to exalt Him.  It isn't a tragedy to God to have these hymns "lost", because He is not tied to cultural forms of music.  The tragedy is when people hold the hymns (or any song or form of worship for that matter) higher than the things that truly last.

Now, if a hymn can take the heart and mind of a worshipper to the heavens and to the foot of God's throne - wonderful!  That is what it was designed to do.  But if other songs are doing the same thing and the hymn is lost, I believe God is just as glorified and the worshippers have lost nothing.  God wants our hearts, not our hymns.  Worship is about the One on the throne who died for us, not about the one in the pew longing for their own personal forms and traditions.