Ephesians 5:19 Speaking to yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord; The man who makes melody in his heart to the Lord will make it in his life. "Making melody." What is melody? Is it not the arrangement of notes, the sequence of the same or different sounds, so following one another as to give us pleasure? Unless there be melody in your hearts there will be no true music, neither Christmas music, nor Lenten music, nor Easter music, in your worship. Believe me, we may be able to make little music, or none at all, with our hands or our voices; but oh! what music we can make of the sweet, solemn, sacred human life of every one of us! And how beautiful is a musical life; but how many of us spoil it! "How sour sweet music is when time is broke And no proportion kept."So is it with the music of men's lives. When do we "break the time"? When there is no rhythm, no due order, no regulated sequence in our lives; when "reckless youth makes rueful age"; when we waste, squander, defile, throw away our early years, and are never able to be again what once we might have been; when we have sudden pauses and backslidings, and breaks and stoppings short in the wholesome continuity of righteous purposes and righteous actions; above all, when we sacrifice the vast future to the fleeting present; when we sell our eternity for a little hour — ah! then we ruin the melody; for we "break the time." And when is there "no proportion kept"? Is it not when some evil passion or some base desire utterly subdues and masters us, raises above the rest its dominant and screaming voice, makes of our lives a foolish and fussy egotism, or a harsh and agonizing jar? Ah! what broken music there is in the individual character of many of us. When the unruly wills and affections of sinful men snatch up in their lives each its several instrument, or when they lay their tainted and raging hands upon the sacred strings; pleasure, with its corrupt under song; pride, with its jangling cymbals; hate, with its fierce trumpet; malice, with its ear piercing fife. What horrible discord there is in the lives of the drunkard, the cheat, the gambler, the debauchee! You have all heard of that point on the strings of the violin, which, if touched, produces a harsh and grating dissonance called the wolf note. Alas! how often do we hear in our own lives, and in the lives of others, that hideous jarring wolf note — the wolf note of envy, of virulent hatred, of vile, selfish lust, from the stringed instrument of what should be a man's sacred life! Only, my brethren, if there be melody in your hearts to the Lord can you make life and death and the forever one grand, sweet, song. For the potentiality of music is everywhere. The heart of every one of you is a harp of God. Yield it to the music of furious passions, and it will disgust and horrify; but let it be swept by the Holy Spirit of God, and it will give forth Divine and solemn sounds. Then, lastly, for the music of life harmony is no less necessary than melody. We must learn the united chorus no less than the individual hymn. The sounds of our lives must not only be sweet in themselves, but they must be subordinated to each other. If melody be the due sequence, is not harmony the due inter-relation of sounds? the combination of different sounds uttered at the same time, but so related to each other as to give us pleasure? A self-willed musician, one who only cares to hear his own voice, one who from carelessness or from vanity will introduce his own eccentric or special variation, one whose voice is always ringing false or falling flat, does not he ruin the harmony and so spoil the chorus? Where there is not God's peace in the life, where selfishness rules in place of self-denial, where pride asserts itself at the expense of considerateness, where violence overleaps the barriers of law, there, for the music of life's sweet and solemn chorus, you have got the screeching discords of anarchy and an anticipated hell. As the hideous sounds of war break up the unity and spoil the chorus of nations, so the quarrels, hatreds, envies, selfishness of individual men, spoil God's choir of human society. These it is which keep us out of tune with heaven. When the breath of the Holy Spirit of God breathes through the organ of noble natures, then, indeed, the world hears music as Divine as it is rare; but when a man has nothing to offer to that high influence of the Holy Spirit of God but the "scrannel pipes" of an individuality which he has degraded by egotism and by mean alms, then all his life becomes a lean and flashy song. There can be no harmony in ourselves, no harmony in societies where there is no melody in our individual lives. Only by self-repression, by obedience, by humility, by purity, by common sympathy, can we get that music which one day shall be when the sound of every several voice, of every several instrument in God's great orchestra of human communities is dominated over by the Divine keynote — shall I sadly say by the last chord of heavenly love. So, and so only, can any one of us hope to be joined to that choir, visible and invisible — "The noble living and th' immortal dead. Whose music is the gladness of the world."But we can all strive to be like Christ, and Christ is the music of the world. In Him only do music, chorus, worship find their meaning. Only in unison with Him can you hope for individual melody or for harmony. The time for perfect music, the time when these discords which we hear all around us shall cease to be in all the world — that time is not yet. We may hope that at some day it shall be. We may hope that He who died for the world will, we know not how, in some way or other, at last make life's broken music whole. It is the nature of evil to perish, it is the nature of good to live forever; it partakes, and it alone partakes, of God's eternity. (Archdeacon Farrar.) Parallel Verses KJV: Speaking to yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord; |
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