Sunday Service 5th October

alvaparishchurch
Oct 4
7 min read

Sing to God a new song

5/10/25

Call to worship

Hymn 62: Sing a new song to the Lord

Time for all

Hymn 252: As a fire is meant for burning

Reading: Psalm 96 Liz

Prayer

Hymn 198: Let is build a house

Sermon

Prayer

Hymn 173: Sing to God new songs of worship

Benediction

Welcome to our meditation for 5^th of October.

One of the many writers of the book of Psalms says, ‘Sing a new song to the Lord.’

Yet often if any worship leader tries to do introduce a new hymn or new styles to a congregation then they get resistance?

Why is that?

And what should our response be?

We will look at that after listen to that Psalm and a prayer from Liz.

Sermon

If I was to announce last week that this week ALL the hymns would be brand new; I wonder how many people would have thought of not turning up.

You wouldn’t believe how many times I have been told that we don’t want these new fanckled hymns, we don’t; want happy clappy praise hymns.

And yet when the session gets together to look at areas that we can improve often one of the first things that get said is that we need to get some new hymns in, we don’t want those old fuddy-duddy hymns all the time.

As someone who organises worship it is really confusing.

Now you might say that the smart thing would be to have a mixture.

Have new hymns but in-between old hymns.

Trust me, I can tell you from experience, that no one is happy with that.

The ones that like the new hymns feel that the old hymns spoil the service.

And those that like the old hymns feel that the new hymns spoil the service.

It’s a bit like going on a journey with lots of people, and some people want to walk the journey, and some people want to run the journey.

But the problem is that we all have to do the journey together at the same pace.

Well by the logic of congregations the obvious thing to do would be if everyone walked a mile then everyone sprinted for a mile...and we did that for the whole journey, walked a mile, sprinted a mile.

At the end of the journey everyone would hate the organisers.

The youngsters that wanted to sprint the whole way would feel that they were held back and that the journey could have been finished ages earlier.

The old folk would hate you because they are exhausted, why did they need to run all that way, they were happy looking at the scenery as they walked along.

I know of churches that have a praise band and for half the service the praise band plays modern hymns, then the organ plays for the other half and it plays older hymns.

The minster is trying to accommodate everyone and you know who is happy...no one.

And yet the Psalmist instructs; doesn’t ask, doesn’t suggest, INSTRUCTS, ‘Sing a new song to the Lord!’

A lot of the Psalms are just stuck in the book and we have no context.

Fortunately for this Psalm there is a wee notation at the top of the Psalm (in the Good News version), it just says ‘God the Supreme King’ and underneath a Bible reading 1 Chronicles16: 23-33.

And if we look that up we see that this psalm was part of a psalm that was used on a very specific occasion, a significant moment in Jewish history.

David had been made king, and he had created a palace for himself in Jerusalem.

Having centralised the political power, David doesn’t want the religious power somewhere else,

David wants the faith to be centralized nearby so the religious leaders can tell him what God would want him to do...well that would be the religious thing that David tells the people,

but also, if they are nearby, David can make sure that the religious leaders aren’t working against him the way Samuel worked against Saul undermining his kingship..

So David has constructed a resting place for the Covenant Box,

the box that holds the Ten Commandments,

possibly the most religious artefact of the Jewish people.

Things are changing, politically and religiously, and to celebrate that new hymns are being created, new hymns are being sung.

So what does that tell us?

I think it gives a reality that we may not want to hear.

And it is not that our worship needs to change.

It is that our worship needs to change because we change.

What is suitable in the past is not suitable now.

Sometimes we need something new because what is old doesn’t help us.

Even in this hymn it doesn’t talk about the congregation singing...it talks about the whole world singing.

That means that our worship needs to be inclusive, so that the whole world can sing.

If we are only worshiping in one style then we are excluding a lot of people, and that is not what God wants.

Once a year we have a service called the Blue Christmas, and it is for those who have lost someone dear to them over the year.

We don’t stand during the hymns, and there is only two hymns, and often we don’t even sing all the hymn.

It doesn’t have a sermon as such.

It has candles. And if people want they can light a candle to represent the person they miss.

Last year I think we had four people come to it.

Now here is the thing.

If we didn’t have that service there would be no place, especially during the Christmas season, for them to acknowledge their struggles.

They would be surrounded by a society that says, ‘You have to be happy because it is Christmas.’

And their sorrow would be all the harder to cope with because they have to hide it all the time.

If we didn’t have that service then for those four people our church would not be inclusive, for we would not be including their sorrow, their pain, their loss.

Their hearts are not in a place for them to sing, ‘Ding dong merrily on high.’

We need to sing new songs because the world is changing, and we need worship that can reflect that.

We need to sing new songs because we change, and instinctively we know that new situations need new worship, new songs, to reflect that

or our worship is meaningless to us.

I have told you this before, but when I went to Castlemilk West, my first official ministry, they had solidified their worship.

The church was less than 40 years old. Most of the people there had started when the scheme was first built and they had been there in their 20’s. Everything was new, everything was vibrant. They were singing all the new hymns of the day.

And they got stuck there.

The people had grown 40 years older.

Their children had moved away to East Kilbride.

Most folk were in their early to mid 60’s. And the range of hymns had shrunk and shrunk and shrunk with each proceeding minister.

New ministers had tried to introduce new things and each time they had been fought down. The people liked what they had liked.

The trouble was that by the time I was there they sung the same 20 hymns every month, except at Easter and Christmas. The rest of the time they sung the same 20 hymns.

I am sure they chose me to be their minister because as a young minister I would be easily susceptible to not rock the boat and just keep things the way they had always been.

Safe to say that wasn’t going to happen.

But here’s the thing.

Although they were always resisting my changes, they weren’t resisting very well.

Now I admit part of that might be because my emotional intelligence wasn’t very well developed so I probably didn’t notice all their complaints

But also part of it was that they knew their worship wasn’t helping them.

They were no longer the kids in their 20’s full of life and hope and wanting God to join them in their next celebration.

They were older, some of their friends had died, some of them had gotten divorced, some of them were in strained relationships with their children.

They wanted services that acknowledged their suffering, and wanted a God who walked with them in that suffering.

In the past it was OK singing all the time, ‘Come and join our celebration.’

But now, maybe they needed to hear the words, ‘O God our help in ages past, our hope in years to come.’

Our worship cannot be static.

It cannot just be for us, because God wants us to include others in our life, in our worship.

Our worship cannot stay the same because the world changes and our worship, if it is to help us, needs to adapt so that it acknowledges the way the world is now, and how God is working in that world now.

Our worship cannot stay the same because we change, and our worship, if it is to help us, needs to adapt so that it acknowledges the way we are now, and how God is working in our life now.