Why contemporary Christian music is a sin Counseling Solutions |  |
| Why contemporary Christian music is a sin Posted: 25 Oct 2011 09:05 PM PDT 
When I read it I cringed. That is not a true statement. The church sign guy may want to think about what Paul told the Corinthians in 1 Corinthians 8:1-13.[1] Your conscience can be wrong. The non-meat eaters in Corinth thought it was a sin to eat meat, according to their consciences. Paul said it was not a sin to eat meat. Their consciences were wrongly informed by culture and tradition. They were legalist who had been given some bad information and that information shaped their consciences into believing something was wrong while the Scriptures said it was okay. My friend Jenna had been raised to believe that dating was biblically wrong. Her daddy said it was wrong. Her church preached that it was wrong. She believed it was wrong. When Jenna arrived at college she began dating within six months, caving to the peer pressure of her friends, who believed it was okay to date. Jenna, whose conscience was in conflict with college culture, was sinning by dating. The main issue for Jenna was not the dating, but going against her conscience. If you were counseling Jenna, the first place you would need to begin would be at the level of her conscience, not whether it was right or wrong to date. There is an implication in God’s Word, as we see in Paul’s writings, that suggests to us that the conscience is our highest level of morality. We see this in Paul’s words to the Corinthians. We also see this in Paul’s understanding of the conscience in Romans 14, where he is interacting again with the wrongly informed meat-eaters. Here is what he told them:
Paul is persuaded that nothing is unclean in itself. He has a proper view of the conscience, sanctification, eating meat, and the Bible. Paul got it. His conscience was clear. However, there were a group of people who did not believe as Paul did. They believed that eating meat was a sin. These people had an authority outside of Scripture. It was their consciences and Paul responded to them regarding this other authority, by saying that if a person thinks eating meat is unclean, then it is unclean. In short, if this is how you have been trained and you believe this is a sin in your conscience, then it is a sin in your conscience. This should be your first point to discern with Jenna. She had been informed all of her life to believe a certain way. She cannot sin against her conscience. The issue here, at least at this time, is not what does the Bible say, but what does her conscience say, according to how she has been shaped. Bottom line - Paul says it is not a sin according to the Scriptures, but the weak believer says it is a sin according to their consciences, so Paul agrees that it is a sin for the weak believer to eat meat because their consciences says it is so. In this case the believer's weak conscience trumps the Bible. The weak believer's conscience becomes a higher level of morality than the Bible. When in doubt, please don’tIs Jenna’s conscience right? Of course not, but that is not the first question you should be asking in such a case as this. The real deal is that she cannot–or should not–sin against her conscience. The real issue that is being addressed is a person’s faith. That is how Paul’s concludes his argument and it is how he wants us to think about the decisions that we are making, e.g. to date or not to date or to eat meat or not to eat meat.
A modern paraphrase of this verse is, “When in doubt, don’t. The weak believing meat eater cannot eat the meat that is placed before him in faith. What I mean by the term in faith is that he cannot eat that happy meal believing or trusting that this is the right thing for him to do before God. He cannot do it in his heart of hearts–the conscience–and he should not be forced or mocked into doing it. He is not in faith and he would be sinning against his conscience. This is a huge deal. This is why it’s such a big deal to carefully walk Jenna through whether it is wrong for her to date at this time. It would be a sin for the stronger, non-bound Christian to force his biblically informed conscience onto his weaker believer friend…even though the non-bound Christian is right, according to the Word of God. In short, Paul is teaching us to let our consciences be our guide. Here are some examples of this from our culture: Wearing make-up - Sarah moves to a new job in another part of the country, working with new friends who do not have strict beliefs about make-up. She wants to be like them, but she has been told all her life that wearing make-up is a sin. According to Paul, if she puts make-up on and her conscience condemns her for doing so, then she would be sinning to wear make-up. The sin is the condemnation that she is experiencing in her conscience. In this case, her conscience becomes her highest level of morality. I think most of us would agree that Sarah’s conscience is wrong on this matter…at least I do. What Sarah needs is for a mature believer to come alongside her, to patiently and lovingly help her to inform her conscience correctly. Her conscience needs to be re-trained according to the Word of God, rather than her traditional upbringing, so she can wear make-up–or not–and not be condemned by her choice. On this issue, she should be in faith to choose or not to choose. Contemporary music: John has been told all of his life that contemporary music is of the devil and that it leads to all kinds of other sins. John believes this (Read: in faith). Therefore, it is sin for John to listen to contemporary music. Like Sarah, his conscience is condemning him. I believe his conscience is weak and it should not condemn him to listen to certain Christian songs written after 1975. John needs a mature believer to come alongside him, in love and patience, to walk him through his unbiblical thinking. He needs to be released from his Christian-culture-imposed condemnation. The grass is greenerFor those of you who know better than Jenna, Sarah, and John and would love for them to know what you know, be careful about that “grass is greener on the other side” disorder.[2] Just because they have self-imposed fences, let me give out a warning. There are at least two:
Be careful how you listen to the inner voiceThe conscience is the inner voice that is in all of us. It comes from the Latin and means co-knowledge–con-science. The conscience is one of God’s many kindnesses to us. He gave us a "voice" to guide us. This was all fine and dandy in Genesis 1 and 2 when sin was not in play, but as soon as Adam went down, sin was thrown in the mix and our consciences got whacked like the rest of us. Our consciences became vulnerable to sin. While the conscience should be our guide, it can get us lost at times because of the deceitfulness of sin. John MacArthur has written a very good treatment on the conscience called The Vanishing Conscience. Also J. Budziszewski has written another excellent book called The Revenge of the Conscience. I've read both of these books and have found them very helpful in understanding how God has wired us internally. These resources have shed a lot of light on how I can mess myself up, due to my sinful thinking. I can also see how my culture and religion can shape my conscience to believe things that the Bible does not support. It happens. Three common consciencesThe biblically informed conscience - This is the person who has, over the years, informed his conscience by the Bible. His conscience and the Bible are one, for the most part. He has gone from the hard conscience–not caring about God, to living within biblically informed boundaries. He is not typically bound in his conscience by legalism. For example, he can drink a glass of wine, not get drunk, and his conscience is free, clear, and God-glorifying. He can dress like his culture, while not drawing attention to himself by either being very different in dress or by being immodest, hoping to find acceptance or significance through showing off his body. The hardened conscience - This is a person who does not really care about morality, what God thinks, or what others think. He lives for himself. He is selfish, self-centered and pursues various forms of hedonism for self-gratifying purposes. While he may give a courtesy nod to his conscience by saying something like, “As long as I'm not hurting anyone else, then I'm okay,” he is really not as sensitive as he would want you to believe. It could be that in the beginning his conscience did let him know what was right and what was wrong. However, the more he ignored his inner voice, the more his conscience became layered over by his sin. The logical and biblical course for this kind of living is God allowing him to pursue his cravings by turning him over to his sin. You can find this downward spiral beginning and ending in Romans 1:18-32. Here is how it all starts:
He begins his downward path by suppressing or pressing down his conscience. If he succeeds in pressing it down, he will head into deeper sin while hardening (suppressing) his conscience all along the way. From his perspective, he has no choice but to harden his conscience. He must silence his inner voice. People like this are usually miserable people. Though they go to great lengths to mask or rationalize or justify what they are doing, it is nothing less than spiritual suicide. It is also not unusual for them to take meds, as a way to quieten their consciences. They become hardened, twisted, medicated, and find it very difficult to discern right from wrong, even if they wanted to. The weak conscience - This typically is the Christian with a long list of rules, regs, laws, preferences, and boundaries. He can be tightly wound around the axle and very opinionated regarding his preferences. Be warned: he will not struggle with imposing his "standards" on you. Ironically, he can struggle mightily with anger related sin patterns. I say, ironically, because while his conscience truly condemns him for the things on his list that are not sin, anger is a real sin that usually does not show up on his list. He does not participate in “unbiblical sin” while participating in biblical sin. Did you catch that? He also is fear-motivated because he lives in a "comparison culture," surrounded by other legalists who are constantly comparing, watching, and judging. It is without a doubt an intense culture of fear. He regularly compares others to his standard or he compares his own standard to someone else’s. This is how he approves or disapproves others. It can be a complicated and twisted system of thinking that leads to some weird preferences and unnecessary lines drawn in the sand. In order to support his weak conscience, he has developed a "doctrine" to support his system: it’s called The Doctrine of Separation. This doctrine hinders him from having close, deep, and long-term relationships with people who are not like him, especially the lost. Counseling the conscienceIt is important for Christian disciplers to understand the conscience and how it needs to be cared for and spoken to when working with people who are in morality straits. The behavioral issue is not typically the first issue you want discern. There is always an issue under the issue. Jenna’s dating scenario is a case in point. It would not serve her well to counsel her exclusively along the line of the merits of dating. It would not serve her well to put her at odds with her dad. The real tension that needs to be carefully unpacked is what is going on in her conscience as it relates to God and the Bible. That is your starting point. Jenna has been told something all of her life. While you may or may not agree with how she has been shaped by her parents, that is not the main issue at hand. She has been shaped and she may be sinning against her conscience. If this is the case, then she is setting herself up to defile and harden her conscience. How she responds to this conscience issue could have an incalculable bearing on the rest of her life. There could be a constellation of sin issues festering in her heart, all of which need to be explored:
The first point to discern and the best way to care for her is to carefully unpack what is going on in her heart–conscience. You want to compare her thinking to what the Bible says about what is going on in her heart. If your first point of argumentation is about how it’s right or wrong to date–drink or listen to certain kinds of music–then you may not be able to help her work through the real matters of the heart, which are the issues that will determine her present and future behaviors. Quite frankly, in the beginning it does not matter what the Bible says. It matters what the person’s conscience is saying or not saying. You must figure that out first and then compassionately bring the Bible to bear on the conscience. Paul initially set aside what the Bible said about eating meat in 1 Corinthians 8 and discerned what his weak conscience friends thought about it. Then he begin to instruct their consciences according to the Word of God.[3]
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