Sing to your neighbours
Martin Luther once said, “God doesn’t need your good works, but your neighbour does.” The same is true of congregational singing. Although God commands Christians to sing, he doesn’t need our singing in order to be God. He has an eternal choir of living creatures that never cease to sing his praise (Rev. 4:8). And yet he’s designed us to experience joy—and encouragement—when we lift our voices in praise. Though we often conceive of corporate worship vertically, there’s a rich horizontal dimension too. Your neighbours need your church’s singing. Which neighbours? Consider four. 1. Your Doubting Neighbor Some believers barely make it to church each week. They have doubts about God’s goodness, about whether he loves them, about whether showing up to the church is still worth it. Singing may be the last thing on their minds. But in congregational singing, we teach and admonish one another (Eph. 5:19; Col. 3:16). In his excellent book Corporate Worship: How the Church Gathers as God’s Peopl