You will no doubt notice that all the songs we are singing this morning are old and familiar to us. This is because we are now at the point in our musical reformation where we want to regularly reinforce what we know, and review what we have learned just a few years ago.
This is why each Lord’s Day, for some time now, at least one of the songs has been an old friend. And now, once a month, at the first of the month, all the psalms and hymns will fall in this category as well. We encourage you to exult in this, and sing robustly before the Lord. If God continues His kindness, this is the way it will be every Lord’s Day a few years from now.
But as we do this, we want to encourage you to draw the right inference from it. It would be perilously easy to want to stay with only the familiar simply because it is familiar, and not because it is biblical. But we want the whole counsel of God to be present throughout the entire worship service.
Singing psalms and hymns that we all know thoroughly, each week, is our goal as a congregation. But our difficulty is that we cannot yet obey the apostolic injunction to let the word of Christ dwell in us richly as we sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs. We do not yet know the whole psalter, and our children are not yet growing up in a congregation in which all the revealed psalms are familiar. There is no tragedy in the fact that we have many psalms and hymns for friends. There is cause for lament in the fact that we do not yet have all of them for friends.
This is a scriptural goal, but how we get there is also important. God remembers our frame. We have much to learn, and this is why it is important not to become discouraged. And this is why you should rejoice on these “reminder Sundays” – we really have learned a great deal. And as we learn the rest, growing in the riches of Christ contained in all God’s songs, just imagine how profound the blessing will be.
Therefore you are exhorted to sing the familiar hymns and psalms as a testimony of your deep desire to learn them all. Do not grow weary in doing good.