Love songs

There are certain songs and artists from my teen years that I still cling to through IPOD purchases I made at least eight years ago. I listen to my IPOD, which I've never updated, while walking and jogging. The artist on my playlist with the most songs is Cat Stevens.

He was a favorite of mine for sure and I remember never thinking his lyrics about Jesus, the Bible, God, etc., were insincere in any way when I was growing up. My memories of first learning his true beliefs are vague and I do remember being saddened and real disappointed in him. 

I used to always say Simon & Garfunkel was my favorite group. To me, Bridge Over Troubled Water, written by Paul Simon, is one of the most beautiful love songs.

Here is one by Cat Stevens that I truly love:

How can I tell you

That I love you
I love you
But I can't think of right words to say

I long to tell you
That I'm always thinking of you
I'm always thinking of you
But my words just blow away
Just blow away

It always ends up to one thing, honey
And I can't think of right words to say

Wherever I am girl
I'm always walking with you
I'm always walking with you
But I look and you're not there

Whoever I'm with
I'm always, always talking to you
I'm always talking to you
And I'm sad that you can't hear
Sad that you can't hear

It always ends up to one thing, honey
When I look and you're not there

I need to know you
Need to feel my arms around you
Feel my arms around you
Like a sea around a shore

Each night and day I pray
In hope that I might find you
In hope that I might find you
Because hearts can do no more
Can do no more

It always ends up to one thing, honey
Still I kneel upon the floor

How can I tell you
That I love you
I love you
But I can't think of right words to say

I long to tell you
That I'm always thinking of you
I'm always thinking of you

It always ends up to one thing, honey
And I can't think of right words to say

******

I have a new article to post later today. In the meantime:

A favorite Bible passage pops in my head often: "For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land."

I think of the lines from a favorite old hymn Fairest Lord Jesus: "Fair are the meadows, fairer still the woodlands Robed in the blooming garb of spring . . . Fair is the sunshine, fairer still the moonlight . . ."

The other day I listened to a Christian videoblogger's commentary about why do you think there are endless, endless song lyrics and song titles referencing light. He argued something like, "Do you think that's because they're being paid off by Philips or Westinghouse? Is Thomas Edison their hero? No, they are paying homage to their guy, Satan; Lucifer the light-bearer. They are worship songs, love songs, and they can put you under their influence."

*****

Jordan says, “Your music influences your spirit, your soul and your body. You don’t have a choice about that; it does it and it controls. It controls you and you respond to it.”

In what has to be one of the dumbest observations of all in Rick Warren’s Purpose-Driven Drivel, he writes, “God loves all kinds of music because he invented it all—fast and slow, loud and soft, old and new. You probably don’t like it all, but God does!”

To make matters worse, he then observes, “Christians often disagree over the style of music used in worship, passionately defending their preferred style as the most biblical or God-honoring. But there is no biblical style!”

All through the Bible are references to music—the kind that pleases God and the kind that doesn’t.

We know from the Book of Genesis God was the one to set up music and it degenerated with the fall of Satan. Exodus tells us how God restored music to its original purpose when He called the nation Israel out of Egypt. It later degenerated. From I Chronicles 16, we know God rescued music once again with David, and then it degenerated again.

“The world you live in, if you’re under 30 years old today, you have never have been fed a steady diet of music that pleases God. And if you’re over 30, it was way back when when you maybe heard it.

“By the way, the melody makes you think something and harmony makes you feel something. Rhythm makes you do something. Each one’s designed to affect your spirit, your soul and your body, in that order. The melody impacts your spirit (Phil. 3:3), harmony impacts your soul (Eph. 4:16) and rhythm impacts your body or your flesh (Rom.13:14).

*****

From Isaiah 51:3, a passage about the future kingdom when God redeems Israel,  we know there’s going to be a pure music restored by God and it will be carried in the melody.

The verse says, “For the LORD shall comfort Zion: he will comfort all her waste places; and he will make her wilderness like Eden, and her desert like the garden of the LORD; joy and gladness shall be found therein, thanksgiving, and the voice of melody.”

By contrast, Amos 5:21, in which God tells Israel He despises their idea of “feast days” and “solemn assemblies,” contains the sharp rebuke, “Take thou away from me the noise of thy songs; for I will not hear the melody of thy viols.”

“They’ve got a melody that God says is nothing but noise. Now, it is a melody, but God said, ‘It’s not a melody I want; take it away!’ So their church music had degenerated from something that God designed it to be into noise and into violating the rules of the language of music to the extent that God said it’s just noise.”

*****

Oriental music or Islamic music is not tied to any science.

Jordan explains, “The Greeks back before the time of Christ developed modern music, and they developed the seven-note scale based upon the physics of the universe and the science of timber and sound.

“In the Orient, they actually had 20 or 22 notes, none of which are tied to anything except what the guy who wrote the note wants it to be. That’s why you get all these goofball sounds. I mean, they’re real sounds but there’s no science to the way they’re put together like in the music you’re used to.

“That’s the reason modern music . . . it’s fascinating to study . . . you start with the Greeks and you go through the Dark Ages. Well, people weren’t allowed to sing in the Dark Ages—if you weren’t Catholic priests, or in academia, you couldn’t sing just like you couldn’t have a Bible.

“But when the Reformation and the Renaissance came along, what did people do? They got a Bible and you know what else they got? They got a song book. You know who designed the hymns that you sing—the structure of the hymns?

“Martin Luther invented the chorale, and in your hymn book the way our hymns are structured . . . the meter structure of hymns is designed according to the chorale.

“By the way, did you know rock music is the structure of your hymn book with a pagan beat to it? One of things you have in chorales is repeats; they’re called chants where you repeat it.

“I was with some kids the other day listening to stuff and I said, ‘What are they saying?’ They couldn’t understand the words either and you know what it was? Just noise.

The beat, the rhythm was in the melody, which makes the melody something carrying your flesh, not your spirit. You see how that stuff can degenerate and not be good for you?

“After the Reformation, that was the time of the King James Bible and the founding of America—the time of the greatest evangelism period the world had ever seen during that period socially. Musically, it’s called the baroque and early classical period, which is the romantic period.

“Music reached structurally its highest form in the late baroque and early classical. That’s the time of Handel and Bach. When you get to the romantic period, that’s Beethoven and Beethoven hated God.

“Beethoven used all of the baroque structure but emphasized the emotion and you can listen to some of his sonatas and literally see in your mind the leaves falling out of the trees he’s so effective with it! Because the melody puts thoughts into your mind; makes you think. But what’s he making you think about?

“Every one of (Bach’s) chorales is something about the Lord Jesus Christ and the truth of the Word of God. Beethoven hated God but he used the music and that’s when it began to degenerate. And after the romantic period comes the modern period and that’s the Big Band era—Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey and those guys; they took that structure.

“You go out into the jungles and in primitive cultures and they’ve got musical instruments—most of them are drums—and occasionally they’ll take different sizes of chords and have a few little different sounds to it, but the most primitive form of sound is not melody; it’s not the complicatedness of a chord and the physical structure of the chord, it’s the thump, the rhythm.

“That’s the simplest, most basic form of music, and what the Big Band did in the modern period is they added the beat. Do you know what made the Big Band sound? They took the saxophone out from the back and put it in the front row. And then they added the beat to the melody. And now the beat is in the melody, so whatever the words are, the harmony’s carrying the beat and melody and now you’ve got the thing inverted.

“Out of modern period came what’s called ‘popular music,’ which is just a totally disintegrated form of music."