While driving to an appointment I turned on the car radio... just in time to pick up the words of the song, ‘Poetry in Motion’.  I found it somewhat sobering to realise I could sing along with just about every line of that 1960s song – word perfect... almost!  “She doesn’t need improvement; she’s much too nice to rearrange...!”  Good grief!  And those words come from an era when plastic surgery and liposuction were still unknown.

Hearing that song again reminded me why I’d rather not relive my teenage years – even if I could.  Sure, they were great years.  In some ways the words of my Dad were true, “Enjoy these years, John, they’re the best years of your life!”  But that song reminded me that those were also the years of ‘raging hormones’ when ‘skirt and flirt’ are foremost on the male adolescent mind (well, make that ‘second foremost’ – after motor cars).  Why else would I still be able to sing, ‘Poetry in Motion’, some sixty years later?  The words now sound empty and superficial but back in those days...?  Wow!

Hearing that song again was a sobering experience also for a quite different reason: It was a powerful reminder that what enters our minds through the medium of song often stays there.  When I speak here of ‘our’ minds, I’m assuming that I’m not the only one who has experienced the ghosts of the past reappearing in the words of a song.  Many of us will recall in our advancing years, snatches of a song that was sung around a campfire in our youth.  My experience of leading worship services in nursing homes has often confirmed this.  I’ve seen elderly folk - in the confused stages of advanced dementia - join us to sing several verses of a hymn – and from memory.

This, of course, is yet another reason why Christians sing.  It’s not only because God calls us to praise Him in song; nor is it just because we are joyful and have something to sing about.  It’s also because song is a good way of remembering the doing, the dying and the victory of Jesus.  And then I should add that the medium of song is also a pleasant way of letting everyone else know what is important to us as Christians.

It’s a well-known truth that song is a powerful aid to memory.  That’s why God’s people were taught a song after the exodus out of Egypt and the crossing of the Red Sea.  That song would be sung over and over so that forty years later as the Israelites crossed the Jordan into Canaan they would still remember the song they had sung by the Red Sea.  Moses made sure the song wasn’t forgotten – you can still read the lyrics in the fifteenth chapter of the book of Exodus.

That made me do some thinking!  I imagined myself preaching for a whole month of Sundays on the Bible’s teachings about grace.  But then during that time someone in my audience hears for the very first time that wonderful song composed by the ex-slave trader, John Newton: “Amazing Grace”.  Forty years later you would be a very, very unusual person and I would be a very, very unusual preacher, if you could remember anything at all from my series of sermons on “Grace”.  But it would not be at all unusual if you could still sing just about every line, almost word perfect, of the song, “Amazing Grace”.  That doesn’t mean that preaching God's Word is not important – of course it is – it is a ‘means of grace’ God uses to build us up in our faith.  But the point is that song has the power to stay with us for a lifetime.

If this is true then we need to be careful about what we sing.  “Poetry in Motion” didn’t do much to help me as an adolescent to cope with the ‘raging hormones’ of the teenage years... on the contrary, it may even have aggravated the problems.  Similarly we can uncritically learn to sing all kinds of popular songs that have made it to the top of the charts.  But how helpful will those songs be in the practicalities of daily life for the next thirty or forty years?  By way of contrast, how encouraging and comforting to know that...
            The Lord has promised good to me.
            His Word my hope secures;
            He will my shield and portion be
            As long as life endures.

John Westendorp