As we seek to grow and mature in our understanding of music, and we learn more about the kind of music that best glorifies God in worship, we have to be careful to balance certain things.
The first thing is that we have to recognize where we are—we are living in a time when general musical education has been abandoned for some generations, with the result that many of us know what we like, but we don’t know what we are liking. So as we have undertaken the challenging task of musical reformation, we are trying to provide something to the next generation that we ourelves did not receive. Call this the old-dog-new-tricks problem. In the formation of a child’s mind, many aspects of education are like pouring concrete—after a certain point, you are pretty much done.
But this is not a counsel of despair. In the first place, old dogs can learn more tricks than they might think. Rather than give up, sliding back into apathy, we need to accept the call to make a joyful noise the best we know how, and we don’t have to recover all the lost years. We just have to learn a little bit more—that’s all. God’s grace establishes a principle that is as true here as it is everywhere else. God takes us from where we are, and not from where we should have been.
There is another aspect to this as well, another ground for encouragement. The way God has created the human race, another generation is always arriving. Fresh concrete trucks are always rolling up, and the concrete of their education is not hardened as ours is. The next generation need not be limited the same way we were.
Think of parents who were never educated, and who were unable to read. They know their limitations, and they can accept those limitations without accepting the same limitations for their children. Wise parents in this situation will sacrifice a great deal to provide the education that they know they were never provided. And it is the same kind of thing with music. If we are wise, the real musical reformation will grow up all around us.