Wednesday, April 19, 2006
Songs in the Night
The Lord will command His lovingkindness in the daytime, and in the night His song shall be with me — a prayer to the God of my life.
—Psalm 42:8
When a worship service is biblically grounded and properly done, what a powerful testimony it can be to nonbelievers. They come into the midst of it and don’t quite know what it is, but they know it’s different from anything they have seen anywhere else. It is unique to the church.
When we believers worship the Lord, other people will listen to what we have to say, especially when they know we are singing in the midst of difficult circumstances. Anyone can sing when things are going well. But when the bottom drops out, when hardship hits and we keep singing — that is something unique to the Christian.
In Acts 16, we read that Paul and Silas were thrown in prison for preaching the gospel. But at midnight, they began to sing praises to God. Instead of complaining or calling on God to judge the people who had done this to them, they were worshipping. The other prisoners listened, because they were having a real encounter with God. And when the Philippian jailer saw it for himself, it opened his heart to the truth of the gospel.
When you are in pain, the midnight hour is not an easy time to have a worship service. As the great British preacher C. H. Spurgeon said, “Any fool can sing in the day. It’s easy to sing when we can read the notes by daylight. But the skillful singer is the one who can sing when there is not a ray of light to read by. Songs in the night come only from God. They are not in the power of man.”
For more relevant and biblical teaching from Pastor Greg Laurie, go to www.harvest.org.
Copyright © 2006 by Harvest Ministries. All rights reserved.
Scripture taken from the New King James Version. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Bible text from the New King James Version is not to be reproduced in copies or otherwise by any means except as permitted in writing by Thomas Nelson, Inc., Attn: Bible Rights and Permissions, P.O. Box 141000, Nashville, TN 37214-1000.
