Worship in Spirit and in Truth

...Singing the doctrines of God in a time when demonically empowered intellectual philosophies were seeking to discredit these truths was important to maintaining spiritual understanding and maturity. People however started coming to the sanctuary to feel “lifted” instead of humbled, corrected and broken, often with little spiritual impact on personal life. This affected new compositions as demand for lighter songs increased. Later a new discovered commercial value of gospel music began to motivate more appealing styles as quartets, singing groups and new commercial beats and progressions again were introduced...these were much simpler music requiring little skill and less effort that would never have been considered suitable or befitting of God by a Handel or Bach or even the Wesleys. But the people loved it and would pay to listen to it. The new genre of church music also required much less personal sacrifice, consecration, and understanding of the word, dedication and effort and could be composed and learnt in a few minutes and everyone could sing along accompanied with joyful hand clapping. As the depth of Christian life of people involved in composing and delivering music gradually declined so also did the depth of the spiritual life it reproduced. Groups now emerged very dominantly for the first time, and it was possible for people who were not saved to put words together and create these experiences and feelings. By this time, doctrine was almost completely buried and all had a good time in the Church. The spies and the soldiers now begin to step out of the Horse. If strong doctrinal teachings had continued, a lot of the contamination could not have happened. However, it was now possible to combine some of the ways of the world selectively, and over time rock beat and worldly styles, blues etc were brought in especially by the evangelists who observed that strong feelings of “Presence” could be created by two-line songs with almost no doctrinal value but which made us “feel” somehow close to God. Strength and firmness of God in songs like “A Mighty Fortress” were also replaced with ballads and softer genre. In addition, songs became almost romantic and themes on spiritual warfare, judgment, sin, prayer, rapture, Heaven almost completely disappeared. These shifts softened stand and firmness for God. In the 60s/70s people hard on drugs step on the scene (claiming to be saved) took hard rock music in the gospel music genre and tens of thousands started coming to Jesus...still living like hippies...the men, effeminate, with long uncombed hair, the women, like men, thin in their trousers – (the blurring of the difference between genders is another symptom of the age) but the music was great. Gospel music becomes also a money spinner...the old hymns are by now considered ludicrous, old fashioned and too sad to fit into the atmosphere that has been created. In many cases the stanzas are now revised to be more comforting, many serious/grave words and entire verses removed and the combination of the piano and synthesized orchestration further helped to pick up the mood. Indeed, the original wordings of the hymns could no more be sang as they had become too socially incorrect, morbid and harsh for the new atmosphere that prevailed...