I have a confession to make. It likely won’t be a popular one, and I truly might just be being a curmudgeon. Part of me wants to dismiss the whole thing and say, “well, I don’t think God really cares so long as you are worshipping Him”, but in the Old Testament that attitude towards worship never went too well. So, I’m going to say it and then duck.
I look forward to every Monday morning listening to my new Discover Weekly playlist on Spotify. On occasion I’ll discover new bands or new songs that I really love. And Spotify has picked up on my love for Jesus but I don’t think they’ve quite gotten my doctrinal stances. They play lots of songs from churches that I don’t have much affinity with. And so many of these songs are directed to the Holy Spirit. And that’s where I start to duck, as I share my unpopular opinion that I’m not a big fan of songs directed to the Holy Spirit.
Don’t get me wrong. The Spirit is fully God. And as such deserves every ounce of worship that is directed to the Father, Son, and Spirit. So I’m not bothered because these “Spirit songs” are some how idolatry and worshiping One who doesn’t deserve it. But the pattern that I see in the New Testament is that prayer and worship are often to the Father, through the Son, in the Spirit.
Many of these songs are asking the Spirit to do something. Fall on us. Breathe on us. Fill us. Shape us. Come to our worship service. Rain down. Flood us. Overcome us. And I think even one I heard recently asked the Spirit to break out.
I’ve really tried to get to the bottom of my distaste on this thing. If I am just being a curmudgeon, why? What is my biblical stance here? I know I’m always a bit bothered by songs which seem to be giving God permission to do stuff—as if He really needs it. But even still, there are several places in Scripture where we see examples of believers calling upon God to do stuff—like deliver us, transform us, etc. So, I really don’t think that’s my problem.
But I do think it is connected to my problem. We just simply do not find believers in the New Testament asking the Spirit to do stuff. Consider Luke 11:13. Here Jesus explicitly says, “how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!” I mean, if we are supposed to ask the Spirit to come and join us, or to fill us, or any of the above I’d think Jesus would have just said, “Pray to the Spirit and he’ll come”. Even Acts 1 speaks of the Spirit coming as the Father’s gift to us. And lest you think this was just pre-Pentecost this same pattern is all throughout Acts. The Spirit’s reception is directly tied to the proclamation of Jesus. You don’t see any examples of Paul laying hands on someone and saying, “Holy Spirit, come and enter this person”.
Again, the pattern is to pray to the Father, through the Son, in the Spirit. And it seems like our worship is to be similar. Ephesians 5:18-21 and Colossians 3:16-17 seem to follow the same pattern.
I think why I’m most bothered by this is that it reflects a fundamental misunderstanding about the role of the Spirit. I’m always skeptical when I hear of a Spirit-driven worship service which is very light on Jesus and heavy on the Spirit. I say that because the Spirit is all about Jesus. I suppose I’m fine with these Spirit songs so long as we really know what we are singing—are we wanting the Spirit to fall upon us so that we can have great feelings and emotional experiences or because we deeply want to be rocked to our core? Do we want the Spirit to come and convict us deeply about the way we’ve been talking to our wife, and we want Him to shine the light of the Holy Christ upon our lives so we can find not only forgiveness in the Savior but also transformation through the very same Lord. Are our prayers and songs and please for the Spirit more about Christ and His glory or us?
I like the way Art Azurdia says it, speaking of seeking after emotional experiences he says one of the problems with this is “that the ministry of the Holy Spirit has become Christian-centered rather than Christ-centered. At this very point a great deal of contemporary evangelicalism steadily reveals its failure to recognize the predominant ministry of the Holy Spirit.” (Azurdia, 50)
Azurdia goes on to quote JI Packer who says this:
The Spirit’s message to us is never, ‘Look at Me; listen to Me; come to Me; get to know Me;’ but always, ‘Look at Him, and see His glory; listen to Him, and hear His word; go to Him, and have His life; get to know Him, and taste His gift of joy and peace.’ The Spirit, we might say, is the matchmaker, the celestial marriage broker, whose role it is to bring us and Christ together and ensure that we stay together. (Azurdia, 50-51)
So I’m just a bit unsettled by all these Spirit songs. And I suppose I’m bothered because it feels a bit to me like how my daughter acted in the store the other day. She was playing in the doll section at Wal-Mart and told one of the dolls that she was going to take her home, and that she’d be her new friend and all that jazz. But she was misunderstanding the way this thing works—you don’t ask the doll if you can take her home. You ask daddy who has to fork over the cash to pay for it.
It’s an imperfect illustration but the person of the Spirit and His indwelling presence is the gift of the Father who was purchased for us through the Son. As I read the New Testament I don’t see us receiving this gift by become Spirit-directed but we receive the Spirit when we plead with the Father to give us the Spirit so that we’ll be all about Jesus. We plead with the Father to give us this good gift.
I suppose I simply wish our songs reflected this Christ-centeredness a bit more…
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Thank you! I agree that too many of us who call ourselves Christians are focussed on the Spirit and getting Him to do stuff for us but ignoring God the Father and Jesus Who is God the Son. Some go so far as to tell nonCharismatic Christians that they do not have the Spirit in them because they do not speak in tongues even though Paul in 1 Corinthians 12:27-30 taught that not all Christians speak in tongues or have all of the spiritual gifts.
I attended a women’s Bible study at another church because the one I attend does not have one midweek. After a while, I noticed that they rarely mentioned the triune God, or God the Father, or Jesus, but they always talked a lot about the Spirit. They also do not have crosses on their church property because they say the cross has become an idol, but they decorate everything with doves. I no longer attend that Bible study.
We Christians must pay attention to the Spirit but in the context of the triune God and what the Bible says about the Spirit and what He does for us. He comes to live in us when we are saved because the Father and Jesus send Him, not because we call for Him to come. And the three always agree on and coordinate their actions.
Good stuff here, Mike.
I think you get it right in that it really isn’t the language itself that is wrong, as long as we actually know what we are asking for. In my own prayers, when I pray for my church, I do pray for the Spirit to “be present in power” in our worship gatherings and things like it.
We certainly aren’t asking for an emotional experience, but we are asking for an other-worldy power to be at work in obvious ways as we gather.
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