I’m free, I’m free indeed,” as the song you just heard. “And it is my privilege to be with you this morning. We had discussed in the previous Help for Today, the importance of our music in threefold, speaking to ourselves in psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs. I’d like to bring this to you today. Why do we sing songs that cover these three areas – the psalms, hymns, spiritual songs? Why do we have them in our church? Why do we use the songbook? Why do we use the hymn book that we use? One of the reasons, the very first reason today I’d like us to see is because the songs have a testimony. There’s a testimony that you can find in there. For example, the song we just heard, ‘I’m free. I’m free from the guilt of the past. My shackles,’ as the song says.
There’s other songs. And I’d like to see two quickly. That is Fanny Crosby. We know that she was blind. Yet, she wrote a lot of different songs that spoke about being able to see. One of the songs was ‘Face to Face’. ‘Face to face, I’m going to see him.’ One of the things interesting about that song is I was reading the entire, all the lyrics, all four verses. And it’s really neat because not one time does she ever mention, ‘It’s about me.’ It’s always about, ‘I want to see him.’ And so these songs – psalms, hymns, spiritual songs, they all give a testimony, in this case, to the Savior. ‘I can’t wait to see him,’ as Fanny Crosby would commonly say. There’s other songs that also give a testimony, such as songs like from Horatio Spafford. For example, ‘It is Well of My Soul’. How can he say ‘it is well of my soul?’
I don’t know anything about what happened tragically to his family. It’s hard to be able to say ‘it as well with my soul,’ but the truth is, when you’re in the center of God’s will, come whatever may come, the Bible says to rejoice in everything, ‘to rejoice, and again I say rejoice.’ The Bible emphasizes it to say multiple times, that’s the importance, and so I hope today we understand that the music, the Psalms, the hymns, spiritual songs, all give a testimony.”
Share this post
Caleb Galvan serves as North Valley Baptist Church’s pianist for services. He also teaches many music classes and gives personal piano lessons at Golden State Baptist College.
Stay connected