Growing as a Christian: Learning the Song of Lament
By Timothy C. Tennent
One of the great treasures of our Wesleyan heritage is our insistence that salvation is not merely transactional, but relational. In other words, salvation is not merely an isolated decision we make (e.g. the sinners’ prayer), but an ongoing, growing, and transforming relationship with Jesus Christ. Theologically speaking, the Wesleyan movements were a strong reminder to the Reformation churches of the dangers of conflating ‘justification’ with ‘salvation.’ Justification is just the first step in grace, followed joyfully by sanctification, and ultimately, glorification into the very presence of Christ. This is not to diminish the need for conversion, even a dramatic one at the altar of a camp meeting or revival service. We all know how rich our history is in transactional, crisis events. The question is: what happens when you get up from the altar? How do we grow as Christians?
I have been a Christian for over forty years. One of the observations I have made in my own Christian journey is that my growth now occurs mostly within the context of challenges I face. When I am facing problems I cannot resolve, discouragement I cannot seem to walk through, or spiritual attacks, I find myself drawn ever deeper into the heart of Jesus Christ.
Almost eight years ago, I became the President of Asbury Seminary. Previously, I had served as a professor of world missions at another seminary. Suddenly, I found myself in a very different role with many new responsibilities and challenges. I realized I needed to lean into the Lord Jesus in new ways. About six years ago, my wife Julie and I made a decision to dive deeper into our walk with the Lord. We have always had daily devotions and prayer, but we decided to spend an extra hour per day focused entirely on the psalms. For the last six years, this has been our daily practice. Our basic practice is this: We read the psalm out loud, then sing a metrical version to a hymn tune we know (see, www.seedbed.com/psalms), and then we discuss the psalm and pray over it for the remainder of the hour. Becoming immersed in the psalms has been one of the greatest means of grace that we have encountered in our Christian lives.
Like most of you, I grew up in church knowing only the world of hymns, and later, choruses. I learned to love hymns and choruses. I still love them. I had never really embraced the psalms as a potential prayer book or worship book. However, once I took a deep and long sojourn with the psalms, I could not help but notice that the thematic scope of the psalms far exceeds that of hymns and choruses. The 150 psalms are like a collection of 150 separate spiritual journeys, which lead you through a stunning array of human experiences, including praise, lament, thanksgiving, penitence, recitation of history, wisdom for life, worldview of the wicked, questions (even accusations) directed toward God, imprecations and curses, instruction, admonition, and more.
It is precisely the breadth of this genre that makes the psalms seem, for some, so odd and even unsuitable for a Sunday morning worship service. Indeed, the more transparent, sometimes disturbing, subject matter has led the modern church to either diminish or eliminate the psalms from modern worship. Others tend to “cherry pick” a few praise and worship verses in a psalm, but rip them out of their larger, sometimes painful, context. Yet, when we only sing or recite a few psalms, or select the more comfortable portions of a particular psalm, we lose the impact of the whole journey, and, therefore, miss the transformation that would happen within us along the way. Each psalm, in its entirety, is part of the inspired word of God. The psalms are unfolding for us a vast cartography of authentic life in tension with the real world, and yet all within the larger context of unwavering trust in God who is guiding all of our journeys.
Once I began to encounter the entire psalm, I began to wrestle deeply with the pain and anguish that is there. I found it helpful to give voice and resolve to so many things which I had kept bottled up in my own life and experience before God.
The psalms also taught me the important difference between lament and despair. Sometimes the language of despair and the language of lament can seem quite similar, but the difference is the destination of the journey. The destination of despair is hopelessness. The destination of lament is hope. Despair leads us to cynicism or even suicide. Lament leads us to deeper trust and learning to “walk by faith, not by sight.” If Christians come to believe that the church is a place only for celebration, then we rob our people of the necessity of lamenting. Quite apart from any challenges we may be personally facing, we all certainly realize that our nation is in deep peril and there is much for which we must lament. However, lamenting is never holy whining. Lamenting, for the Christian, is always a song of hope. For Christians, all of life is framed with hope because our deepest lament and God’s greatest victory meet at the cross of Jesus Christ.
Thanks for the splendid article, Tim. Indeed, well written and powerful!
Grace and Peace,
Ken Kinghorn
Amen! Regular, most day reading of the Psalms has become my practice also. I agree that much of the church needs to learn lament. A few years ago, i put a few of my observations in a little book: “A Psalm-Shaped Life.”
Thank you President Tennent this great message. It is only in more recent years of my trek in the ministry that I too have discovered the depth of lament in my later years…now mid-eighties. Having been long involved in the Hymns and Chorus music of the church, I am challenged to dip into your suggestion of singing the Psalms.
Bob McDowell, Class of 1958, retired, but still very active in the life of the Gospel and the Church.
Thank you for this excellent, Biblically sound, article. Christians everywhere will profit from reading this.
I begin my week encouraged by your thoughts on lament and despair. I long to go on to ever deepening trust, and lament is the strange road ahead. Grateful.
All I can say is ,”Thank you”.