This song makes me think of heaven and what joy it will be.

In high school, Matthew Smith was a faithful church attendee, active in his youth group, and eager to grow in his faith—but despite all of this he felt like a failed worshiper in his congregation.

“In the church I grew up in, I felt like I had to drum up an emotional experience for myself in worship,” said Smith. “The praise choruses we sang were centered on me: ‘I give you praise God,’ ‘I give you my all,’ ‘I want to worship you.’ But I often didn’t feel those things—or even mean those things—when I sang them, so the whole experience felt dishonest.”

When he began attending college at Belmont University in Nashville, Tenn., Smith started visiting Reformed University Fellowship (RUF) meetings, and for the first time began hearing old hymns set to new music. “These hymns weren’t about me—they were about Jesus. They didn’t say, ‘I want to worship you.’ They described what Jesus has done, and that is what made me say, ‘I want to worship you.’ Singing these hymns, along with the teaching I was hearing, completely changed my perspective on worship. And ironically, when I stopped focusing on myself and my emotional experience in worship, that’s when my heart began to feel.”

A little more than a month ago I discovered some of Matthew Smith’s music and the Indelible Grace CDs mentioned in the article – all old hymns set to new music. I have listened to those songs over and over and over again. They are like cold, clear water to my soul. They are not about me or about my feelings or about what I think I am going to do in the future – they are about Jesus and about His saving work on the Cross, and about His mercy and grace and love and how He saved a wretched sinner like me, helpless to save myself. How salvation is all of God and none of me.

And that is why I love hymns.

HT: (Take Your Vitamin Z)

Give me songs that are God-centered. Songs that are centered on Christ and His Cross. Songs that focus on who He is and what He has done. Songs that highlight His beauty, His holiness, His goodness, His faithfulness, His saving work, etc., not what I feel or what I think I’m going to do for Him in the future.

One of my pet peeves has long been the type of song that says in one way or another “this is what I am going to do for You, God” or “this is how faithful I am going to be.” There are certain songs I have difficulty singing without feeling presumptuous in some way. It’s always like this voice is in my mind saying, “Really … isn’t that what the apostle Peter thought before he denied Jesus?” What can I do for God that He does not enable me in some way to do? Or how faithful can I be without Him in some way enabling me to be faithful?

I’ve only recently realized that this is part of a trend in Christian music to focus on ME. And this isn’t necessarily a recent trend – there are a lot of hymns that do this too. This is what I’m going to do. This is how I feel about You, God. Look how faithful I am. Look how much I love You. Etc, etc, etc. But really, what is any of that? Of course we should seek to serve the Lord and to do His will, and to be faithful and to love the Lord with all our hearts. But should focusing on our ability to do these things be the center of our worship?

Our response to God’s amazing and undeserved grace should be obedience to His commands. But should the center of our worship be our inevitably imperfect obedience, or should the center of our worship be the perfect, sinless One, Jesus Christ, who gave His life for us on the Cross so that we might be declared righteous in the sight of a holy God?