Jesus wants your heart and mind. Just one, won’t do.
I love to sing in the choir. It’s like praying, but in a different way than just using words. I recently did a little research on music and how it affects the brain and I learned some fascinating things.
People who are not trained to read music, those of us who just love to belt out a song, primarily use our right brains. It’s a completely creative endeavor for us.
Trained musicians, on the other hand, use their left brains. Reading music is very technical. It’s a language of its own. But, the best musicians, the ones who are the most successful, the ones that we enjoy seeing perform, are the ones who can learn to engage both sides of their brains. They learn the technical, but they tie it in with the creative and emotional and that’s when a performance becomes pure magic.
Obviously, I couldn’t just get up there and use my musically untrained right brain to sing in the choir, if we didn’t have a trained and simply fabulous choir director. There’s no way we could have a choir without a trained musician or two. But, perhaps having the untrained, gives it an interesting slant.
I suspect that’s why praise music is so effective in contemporary worship services, especially for newer Christians. It’s just a few verses up on a wall. You don’t have to follow with your finger to keep up. It’s easy to be more worshipful and less technical.
If you have sung the hymns from the hymnal your entire life, I’ll bet a CAT scan would show that you use both sides of your brain, like the trained musician. Old hymns bring me comfort. I can belt them out like the newer ones and I know I’m not alone.
As I thought about how the brain works with music, I began to think about Christians. New Christians are often on fire for Jesus. They want to share the Good News with everyone they meet and their passion often proves to be very effective. Their message is emotional and completely from the heart. It’s more right brain dominated.
As our faith grows, we dig into the Bible and we learn more about God. We become more technical and here is where many of us stay. We can quote scripture. We attend worship regularly and volunteer. We go to, or maybe even lead a Bible study.
Like that trained musician, we can read the notes. We can dot our i’s and cross our t’s and that’s a good thing. We need to learn all we can and we need training in our faith. But, we also run the risk of being too legalistic, like those Pharisees back in Jesus’ day.
If we want to be effective, we also have to remember that Christianity is a faith of the heart. Jesus wants our minds and our hearts. Just one, won’t do.
When we ask the Holy Spirit to help us combine the two, we can become world changers.
Have an awesome day!
Wendy 🙂
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