Brian Sauve’s most recent album, Hearth Songs, has been my life’s soundtrack for the past several weeks. I still get teary-eyed when thinking about my own wife while hearing:

Oh she’s awesome as a mighty host.
She’s an army with its banners flown.
Now who is this who shines forth as the dawn,
clear as the moon and bright as sunbeam songs?
She’s honey-sweet, and oh, she’s red-wine strong!
Many waters cannot quench this love!

Or thinking about my wife and daughters as he sings:

Weren’t we as fruitful as a plum tree?
Better than trips to sandy shores.
Give me the sound of all our children.
These rough and tumble afternoons.

Since Tiff and I first started dating, I have kept a running playlist of songs that stir up my affections for her, and I quickly did the same after my first daughter was born. I often use music and the lyrics together to rouse my often sluggish heart into remembering the wondrous beauty and mighty privilege that the Lord has granted me as being a husband to my wife and a father to my daughters.

And isn’t that one of music’s greatest benefits? It has a unique way of not simply engaging the mind but directly plucking the strings of the heart. Indeed, God designed it to be so, breathing out a collection of songs as a part of Scripture to be sung and prayed back to Him and then commanding us over and over again to sing. Doctrine instructs and catechizes our minds, but music places those doctrines within the heart, catechizing our affections.

While a Christian is certainly free to listen to ‘secular’ music, we should take care that our affections can easily be shaped by the songs that we sing.

Indeed, here is a question for our age: which came first, the break-up/divorce and love-equals-affirmation culture or the proliferation of break-up and self-affirmation songs?

Does it really matter? Either way, a negative feedback loop has clearly been established.

In much the same way, predominately listening to worldly-themed music is both a sign and a catalyst of worldly affections within a person’s heart.

If our desire is to be a people who love God and our neighbors around us, let us take care that our musical consumption strengthens rather than hinders those loves.