Since the primary role of the church’s music-making activity should be to raise one another up in a collective admission of God’s sovereignty, the church’s primary musical push should be toward congregational participation rather than proficiency.

Love has become a slippery and cheap term in modern culture. People speak of love to describe their feelings toward kittens, romantic partners, tacos, God, sports, or the weather. The word is rendered almost useless unless a speaker couches the term in a specific way to clarify the intent.

There is a tendency among many Christian groups to emphasize cultural homogeneity and superficial unity to the diminution of the spiritual vitality that comes only through joining Christ and identifying with Him in His selfless death and triumphant resurrection.

Flashes of lightning split the morning sky; peals of thunder shiver the air; tremors and aftershocks roll and boil in the earth beneath and trouble the slopes above; the mountain, clad in dark, fiery clouds, glowers ominously at the multitudes cowering at its feet.

The callous mystic could have been conservatively described as a turgid amalgam of various forms of grotesquerie. A malnourished sapling, a misshapen rock, a shriveled root in a desert – these are just a few of the appellations by which this undesirable individual was known.