Have You Sung God’s Word Today?

Would you like God’s Word to dwell in you richly?  Try singing it.

That’s what the Psalmists did. They sang the Word of God…with incredible benefits.

Just read Psalm 119. Their vital practice of singing God’s Word enlivened them (vv. 25, 50). It strengthened them (v. 28). It brought them salvation (v. 41) and comforted them (vv. 50, 76). It made them wiser, and gave them more insight and understanding (vv. 98-100). It was a lamp to their feet and a light to their path (v. 105) and much more.

Listen to what Paul said in Colossians 3:16,

“Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom, teaching and admonishing one another with psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to God.”

So in this post we’ll consider this enriching practice of singing God’s Word and introduce a simple way to implement it in your daily Christian life.

Here are a couple of examples from the Bible you might never have considered:

You’re probably familiar with the story of David and Goliath. You may know that he was a fearless Hebrew boy that killed a giant Philistine warrior with a sling and a stone.  But what gave him the boldness and faith to do it?

He let God’s Word dwell in him richly by psalming the Scriptures with his lyre—probably while he was tending his sheep (1 Sam. 16:11-17; Psa. 23).  (There is also indication that he sang the word by the fact that nearly half of the Psalms were attributed to him.) He must have sung a lot of God’s Word…even when he had big failures (Psa. 51).

I already mentioned Paul’s exhortation to “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly… singing.”

But Paul didn’t just teach us to do it. He practiced it.

Remember when he was beaten and thrown into the jail in Philippi in Acts 16. He and Silas were not there moaning and complaining. No! They were singing, even with their feet in the stocks. Verse 25 says,

“At about midnight Paul and Silas, while praying, sang hymns of praise to God; and the prisoners were listening to them.”

We need to follow the pattern of David and Paul to sing God’s Word

First, build up a habit of daily reading the Bible.

Here is a simple way to get you started:

• Begin with some short prayers to turn your heart to the Lord and to open to Him.
• Then begin to read a short section of verses in a sequential way.
• When you come across a Bible verse or two that touch you, simply stop and receive that word into you by means of prayer—petitions, thanks or praise, however you feel led (This will be further developed in the second section.)
• Don’t be so rigid that you miss the Lord’s supply and speaking to you. If He is there, stay to fellowship with Him. You can finish your reading later.
• For some further help in building up a vital Bible-reading habit you may want to read this post, “12 Practical Points on Bible-reading Plus One Awesome Tool.”

 Second, practice to pray-read God’s Word.

Don’t just pray about the verses but go further to turn the words of the Scripture themselves into your pray to the Lord. We call this practice, pray-reading. It’s a great way to pray yourself into the “meat” of the Scriptures, to draw out the Lord’s instant words to you.

In John 6:63, the Lord Jesus said,

 “The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and are life.”

If we allow the words of the Bible to remain on the page, they will still be God’s sure and unchanging words. But, such words will not necessarily be “words…spoken to us”…personally or directly.

But when we exercise from deep within to pray over the words, we may sense that the words are now words spoken “to us.”

So we need to advance from merely reading the words of the Holy Bible to pray-reading them until we contact the Lord Himself in our reading and allow Him to speak a personal word to us. We can only do this by exercising our spirit to pray as we read the Word (Eph. 6:17-18).

For more development of this point, please read my post entitled “12 Tips on How to Pray-read the Word of God to be Spiritually Nourished.”

Third, go on to sing God’s Word.

Yet, there is still something further, something higher.  Singing the Word or sing-reading elevates us to another plain. If pray-reading is to exercise our spirit over God’s Word, sing-reading the Word is a super exercise of our spirit.

Here’s what Witness Lee has to say in the Life-study of Philippians,

 “In the past I lost many opportunities to be saturated with the Word because I did not know to sing the Word. I spent a great deal of time reading and studying the Bible, filling several Bibles with notes, but I did not realize I could sing or psalm the Word. It is one thing to read Ephesians 2 and another thing to pray-read it. But once again I wish to emphasize that singing the Word is even better than pray-reading. Many of today’s Christians exercise only their mind to read and study the Word. They do not sing the Word at all, and some actually oppose the practice of pray-reading. I am confident that the more we sing and psalm the Word, the more we shall be washed by and saturated with the element of Christ.” (Life-study of Philippians, Chapter 40, p. 358)

But I can’t convince you. You simply have to try it.

I have to tell you honestly. I couldn’t say this if I hadn’t practiced it myself.

 Here are some tips to get you started

• First, try it alone.
• Then try it with one or two companions.
• Only when you’ve practiced with a smaller group of believers could you expect to have a larger group strongly enter into such a practice. That’s because singing the Word is very revolutionizing and foreign to most of us.

However, it wasn’t foreign to the early church. We can see through the window of the Scriptures into the practice of the early church through verses like Colossians 3:16 (quoted above) and Ephesians 5:18b-19 which says,

 “…be filled in spirit, speaking to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and psalming with your heart to the Lord.”

 I conclude with a further quote by Witness Lee:

“By praying, singing, and thanking we are infused with Christ, permeated by Him, and mingled with Him. Many of us can testify that, as we were enjoying a certain portion of the Word, spontaneously a melody welled up from within. Then we began to use this melody to sing the Word to the Lord. By singing, we were saturated with the Word and nourished by its riches.  (Life-study of Philippians, Chapter 37, Section 3)

If this post has enlightened you, I’d challenge you bring it into the laboratory of your Christian experience and try singing God’s Word.  Reading God’s Word is profitable. Pray-reading it is even more nourishing.  But singing God’s Word, or sing-reading, will bring you even more saturation with the life-giving Spirit in the Word. So please give it a try…Then share what you experienced so that we can learn together.

 Further Resources: 

• For more appreciation of singing to the Lord you may enjoy reading  a previous post  entitled Singing with Our Spirit of Faith to Switch on the Divine Power.
• You may also  enjoy reading these inspiring ministry excerpts  from the Life-study of Philippians, Chapters 37 and 40; Life-Study of Exodus, Chapter 58, Section 1 and The Healthy Word, Chapter 8, Section 1. They can all be freely read online at: ministrybooks.org