A Righteous Release

By Pastor Dan Hickling

“Oh, sing to the Lord a new song! For He has done marvelous things; His right hand and His holy arm have gained Him the victory.”—Psalm 98:1 (NKJV)

Have you ever considered the place that singing has in our lives? As a race, we humans like to sing and be surrounded by songs. These desires are universal and undeniable. It doesn’t matter how old we are, what our ethnicity is, which gender we are, how many or few tattoos we have, or what our income is . . . singing is an instinctive response in all of us!

Where does that come from? It comes from our Creator. When God designed and fashioned humanity after His own image and likeness, it included an inherent ability and desire to sing. (Let’s not forget God sings according to Zephaniah 3:17.) And as we look at our earliest ancestor, Adam, we see that he sang in response to God creating his wife (Genesis 2:23). 

Singing has been a part of us from the very beginning; we’ve been divinely wired to sing. It’s a normal function of our human existence, and we prove it every day with every song we sing and listen to. Just as oxygen, food, water, and shelter are essential to our physical survival, so singing is essential to our soul. It serves as a “righteous release” that allows us to give voice to what’s stored up in our hearts. Singing to the Lord is a necessity within our relationship with Him.  

We need to understand this as we look at Psalm 98. It calls us to sing a new song to the Lord. Given the nature of singing, we see this is really more of a need than an option. God doesn’t call us to sing to Him just for His own pleasure (though it does please Him), but because it’s good for us, as well! Only by singing to Him do we experience the fulfillment of that for which we’ve been created. 

The fact is, we are prone to sing to other things, which isn’t always wrong. But unless our song is offered to its intended object, we’ll always sense something is missing, and we’ll continually search for fulfillment where it can’t be found. It can only be found in singing to the Lord. With this new perspective and with a new year upon us, let’s sing a new song to Him!

DIG: Where does our desire to sing come from?

DISCOVER: Why have we been divinely wired to sing?

DO: What competes with the Lord for your “song”? Spend time considering how you can sing your song to Him each and every day.