GYC Conference 2023: But If Not

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Generation. Youth. Christ. (GYC)

The Sweetest Song I Know: Authentic Musical Worship Deepens Our Experience with Christ

Daniel Cerna

What Heavenly Music

I'm going to introduce myself and then I'll tell you a little bit about the seminar series and what we're going to be talking about.

My name is Daniel Cerna and I am a student studying music education at Andrews University.

And, yeah, I'm absolutely passionate about the connection between music and theology, between music and ministry, between music and mission work.

And I think that for as much as we as Adventists love our music, we don't actually talk about it that much, and we kind of only focus on the same maybe like 3 topics.

And so what Kelly and my hope is for this seminar series is that yes, there's going to be things that you're probably familiar with, but also our hope is that we can kind of broaden our discussion and our understanding about music and to really just get into it.

And the other thing that I will say, too, just to give you a little more info about me, is that I am the president of the Institute of Young Musicians for Christ, and we're a music ministry.

How many of you have been to our booth so far?

Anybody in here been to our booth so far?

It's geared towards young, but it's young and young at heart.

And so 1 of the things that we do is we actually train and send musicians to be missionaries for a year or longer overseas.

And to my knowledge, I think we're the first and only 1 that provides specific music missionary type training to be able to send musicians to do music missionary work through music education.

So I'll be probably incorporating some things about that too, because that's kind of a special interest of mine.

So what are we talking about specifically today?

The topic is entitled, What Heavenly Music?

But we're going to be covering quite a few topics here.

We're going to be talking about the origins of music.

We're going to be talking about music in heaven.

We're going to be talking about music during creation, music within creation, what it means to be made in the image of God as it relates to being a music maker.

And we're going to talk about creation versus recreation, although another probably better way of saying recreation would be re-presentation.

And then we're also gonna talk about the responsibilities of creativity.

And then if we have time, which I think we might, I hope we will, then I'll open it up for questions and answers and we'll just have a general kind of question session and I do not claim to have all the answers but I will do my best to answer the questions as they come.

Let's have a word of prayer and we'll get into it.

Dear Heavenly Father, Lord, we thank you so much for the opportunity to be here at GYC.

And Lord, now we thank you for your spirit that is in this place.

We invite it into our hearts and we, I just ask, Lord, that it not be my words, but your words, and that you be lifted up, and that we can come to a broader and vastly more beautiful picture of music than we had before we came here.

So, as I mentioned, I'm music education, and 1 of the things that we talk about in music education is the importance of cooperative learning.

I don't know if you've ever heard that before.

So we're going to do a little bit of an ask a neighbor.

Please make sure everybody has someone to talk to.

And this might seem like a very obvious answer, but go ahead and discuss it.

All right, would anyone care to be brave enough to share something that was interesting about what your neighbor said?

All right, my guess is that we probably had responses like God, heaven, something like that, right?

Perhaps there are other aspects of this that maybe we've never thought of before.

I'm not saying that those answers are wrong, by the way.

All right, so let's take a look at these verses because in John chapter 1 verse 3 it says, all things were made by him and without him was not anything made that was made.

And then in Colossians 3 16 it says, for by him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities, all things have been created through him and for him." Now to me, when I read that, whenever the first time I read that was, it seemed pretty clear to me that there was a connection there.

Okay, God made everything, God created music.

Okay, that seemed something that was very apparent and obvious to me.

This is an incredibly beautiful and powerful verse.

I don't know how many of you have heard it before.

It says, the Lord your God is with you, the mighty warrior who saves.

In his love, he will no longer rebuke you.

And this is the crazy part to me, but will rejoice over you with what?

So what this verse tells us is that God sings.

And I think that that's something that's really beautiful and really powerful.

And it might be something that you always thought about, or maybe this is something you've never thought about.

It says, but will rejoice over you with singing.

And in the Bible, and I'm gonna be talking about this a lot more in detail tomorrow in the seminar, it's called How Can I Keep From Singing?

We're gonna dive into the idea that song making music is something that is a response to joy by seeing the goodness of God in our life.

And this is taken from Psalm 40 verse 3 which says, and he put a new song in my mouth, a hymn of praise.

Many will see and will fear the Lord and put their trust in him.

Before that, it says, I was in the depths.

God pulled me up out of the mire, out of the clay.

God brought me out of my dark place and put me in a good place, right?

And then right after that, he put a new song in my mouth.

So that's talking about the idea that the natural response to singing for us is, is, to joy is singing.

And we see this also in Mary's song, right?

We see this in the song of Moses and Miriam when the children of Israel had crossed the Red Sea.

That wasn't a pre-composed song, to my knowledge.

That was a spontaneous just expression of praise and it manifested itself in song.

The angels also do this and we're gonna get more into that later, but this is what was interesting to me.

So is it possible, Because, okay, let me give you this question to ponder.

Did God create a smile or does God smile and that's something we're made in his image.

We have as a, did God create laughter, or does God laugh?

So my question is, did God create singing for, Like, I'm creating this thing and I'm giving it to you, or is singing God's response to joy also and us being made in His image, being made in His likeness, we also have that attribute.

And so additionally, God's singing parallels the singing of his people in Jerusalem.

Later on it says, sing aloud, O daughters of Zion.

Kelli Daugherty

A Mighty Fortress

Well, hello everybody, how are you guys all doing today?

Good, I see a lot of stragglers in the hall.

It looks like there's a lot of people still deciding what seminar they are going to attend.

So why don't we just we will go ahead and start as the last 1 with a song and hopefully that will draw some people in.

So I do not have a PowerPoint for this presentation.

1 quick introduction to me is that I am an academic and I'm afraid that if I give you a PowerPoint you're gonna be in 1 of my lectures that I've given.

So I was like you know we're not I'm not gonna get caught in the weeds We're not gonna have a PowerPoint But if you have questions specifically regarding a lot of the information that I have I have a ton more information I have a lot of research behind it.

I don't want you to get caught up in the weeds I want us to at the end of the day focus on the spiritual component of what we're going to talk about Does that make sense?

Okay, so let's go ahead and start with singing.

Yeah, okay, well if you need the words, we all have phones, so you can look it up.

It's in the hymn notes number 506, a mighty fortress is our God.

Fortress is our God, Our bold work never failing, Our helper here amid the flood of mortal ills prevailing.

For still our ancient foe doth seek to work us woe, His craft and power great, and domed with cruel hate.

Did we in naught our strength confide, Our striving would be losing?

Were not the right man on our side, the man of God's own choosing?

Christ Jesus it is He, Lord of all his name from age to age the same and he must win the battle.

That word above all earthly powers, no thanks to them abided.

Through him who with us sided, let goods and kindreds go.

Let goods and kindreds go, this mortal life also.

The body they make him, God's truth abided still, His kingdom is forever.

Anyways, let's go ahead and get started with a word of prayer.

Dear gracious God in heaven, we thank you for the opportunity and the privilege we have to be here at this conference, Lord, to come to learn about you and to be in your presence and to be with each other.

Lord, I pray that you'd send your spirit to be upon us, to open up our hearts to hear your words.

Speak through me that they may be yours and not my own.

So I loved a lot of you guys were here from the last session.

I was really thankful for those questions because we're going to go over those things in this presentation.

It's nice to meet you all just a little bit so you know who I am.

I'm actually a graduate student in historical performance.

Basically, I couldn't decide if I liked music performance or music history, so I decided to do a degree that combined both of them.

So, hence music and the Reformation is a great topic for me because that's what I spend my research time on and I spend a lot of my performance also on 16th, 17th and 18th century music.

Also Daniel and I are the music coordinators this year for the conference.

So we really hope and pray that you're blessed by the music this year and the song services and special music.

If you have anything that you want to talk to us about that, like please feel free to come let us know.

You know, we want this to be your conference and we want the music to ultimately create a space for us to meet with God.

So, thinking back to the beginning in scripture, scripture is very much full of art.

There is a very common idea that is prevalent in sacred and secular society that God sung the worlds into existence.

You see him creating things that are good, creating things that are beautiful.

And then as you continue to go on in later chapters of Genesis, you see the introduction of the creation of musical instruments by the sons of Cain.

You see, we see singing, we hear about poetry.

In fact, over a third of the Bible is written in poetry, and many of the words of God, especially, are written in poetry.

Perhaps suggesting that they may have been sung.

The Psalms, it's a book dedicated of music.

But yet, through all of this, we actually don't have a written record of what the music may have sounded like.

There's nothing that says what it may have sounded like.

All we have left are the words and the intention of the worship, But we'll get into that later.

We even have, as Daniel talked about, we have instances of music in heaven.

We hear about Lucifer, how he had pipes for singing.

And there are so many wonderful things that we see in music and scripture.

And as we continue to go on throughout time, a lot of people have a lot to say about music.

So for much of what we know from antiquity, of course, the farther back you go, the less information you have.

But there are so many ideas and concepts we have, and even Daniel touched on this, the idea that there is music in the spheres.

All nature sings around me rings the music of the spheres.

And we get this idea that there are these harmonies of the celestial bodies and of everything in the heaven.

Everything's kind of combining into this beautiful harmony that brings them all together, right?

I don't know if you're familiar with this, but the idea of Musica Universalis, the idea of music of the spheres, it actually came from Pythagoras.

He had this theory, or he noticed this theory, and he used it to create ratios of different intervals for different tones.

So the idea, like, we get our perfect fifth.

The interval for a perfect fifth is a 34.

We get that from Pythagoras because he was playing with strings.

Because he had this belief of music from the spheres.

But just because it was Greek doesn't necessarily mean it was wrong.

If you look in Jewish writings, you get a lot of these ideas as well.

We saw that in Daniel's presentation with the music, so we don't need to be afraid just because we see a Greek philosopher writing about it.

And then when we actually get into music, and music that we actually understand and know how to read.

We have ancient tablatures of music, we don't know what it means.

But little very much survives until the medieval era.

And then we start getting more and more and more as we go into the Renaissance.

Music in Worship, Part 1: In Spirit and in Truth

Generally Father Lord, thank you so much for everything you've done for us and the things you're doing now and the things you will continue to do.

Lord, as we talk about worship, what it means to worship in spirit and in truth and the beauty of worship, I just ask that you please let these words not be my words and Lord just give me the words to say.

Hide me behind you and I pray this in Jesus' name.

So I wanted to give a bit of a recap of the last 2 sessions because I think that, I know it's hard, right?

There's so many breakout sessions, it's like, ah, which 1 do I go to?

So I wanted to provide a little bit of what you would have heard this morning.

So the seminar 1 was entitled, What Heavenly Music?

And we talked about the fact that music existed before the world was created.

And we talked about the fact that God, in Zephaniah 3.17, it says that God rejoices over us with singing.

And there are so many places in the Bible where we see that music is a response to joy.

And what's interesting about this concept, it kind of got me thinking, and 1 of the things we talked about is this next bullet point here where it says, song seems to be as much a created thing as laughter, joy, or a smile?

But it would seem to me that while God created the trees, right, for us and those sorts of things.

And so just like I don't know the answer to the question, did God create laughter or does God laugh?

But basically, we talked about the fact that I think song is 1 of those attributes that God gifted to us.

And it's just that really changes the way that we, I think that we think about singing and about music because really just the way that we're image bearing in other ways when we make music we're image bearers as well.

Okay, so then we also talked about the fact that it is possible that music is 1 of the means by which the Trinity expresses communion.

Because if God sings, And if God is the Trinity, and we know that the Trinity is united in love, right, then doesn't it stand to reason that they are singing in beautiful harmony together, which is the next point, which We said the triad, do, do, do, we know what a triad is, 3 notes, right, played together at the same time.

It sounds like 1 sound, but it's actually 3 distinct separate notes.

And we talked about the fact that those 3 separate notes when they're played together perfectly in tune with singing especially, they create overtones.

They create these notes that aren't actually being sung, that aren't there.

And so the idea is that God, being the creator, he creates all of us and gives power to all of his creation and uses his power to create yet it doesn't diminish the power or the volume of the triad because a triad does not lose its volume by creating other overtones.

It just continues to create these beautiful sounds.

And then we also talked about the fact that angels make music in heaven both with voice and with instrument.

And I think there's reason to suggest that the idea of instruments, especially string plucked instrument, is a heavenly 1 and was not actually something that humans just kind of came up with out of nowhere.

Because isn't that interesting that there's harps in the body, in heaven?

Okay, All right, so then seminar 2, we talked a little bit about the music of the spheres, this concept that is the idea that all of creation is actually singing as a response to God's song.

God sings, and human and creation, we are to respond with singing.

And the music of the spheres is the concept that, I don't know if any of you have heard this, you actually, most of you have heard this, because who knows this is my father's world.

All nature sings and round me rings the music of the spheres.

So the idea is that the planets are all actually emitting a frequency and actually so is creation, is emitting frequencies, things that we can't hear.

And then that is music to God and we don't really know what that sounds like but I bet it sounds absolutely incredible and so then we talked about the idea that both secular and like or I guess you could say pagan if we're talking about things from back in history, people are capable of expressing truths.

That doesn't mean that they're holy or that they're right about everything, but it's possible that if something is, we talked about a lot of things that come from Greek origin.

If something comes from, like, was made popular because of Greeks, that does not necessarily mean that it's wrong, because what a lot of Greeks were trying to do was observe nature.

They got the idea wrong that they were worshiping these other gods, right?

But this music of the spheres idea, you can see a lot of allusions to it in the Bible.

And then we talked about that we have many misconceptions about key terms like rhythm, syncopation, baseline.

Syncopation, we kind of clarified that it's, syncopation is all about where your note is.

In the morning when I rise, in the morning when I rise, every beat goes on, or every word falls on a click right this is syncopated in the morning when I rise in the morning when I rise So syncopations can be found in hymns.

This train is bound for glory, this train, right?

This train is bound for, this train, syncopation, right?

So we talked a little bit about those things.

We talked about the fact that the heart of the performer is chiefly important.

It was not enough that David, when he made music for Saul in order to calm him and send the evil spirit away, it was not enough that he was a skilled player, but it was also important that the Lord was with him.

And so it's very important that we are always intentional about making God the center of our music making.

And also we kind of alluded to, or talked briefly about the Levites.

Does anybody know how long the Levites, by the way, had to train before they could make music in the temple?

That's more than most college degrees, right?

That you have to train in order to be able to make music in the temple.

So the excellence of musicianship in worship is important, but this is the important thing, they did not have an audition process.

They did not have an audition process for all of Israel and say those who pass the audition process are the ones that are going to make the music.

So it was the fact that they were called and they were sanctified specifically for that role.

And then we also at the end talked about how music reaches us emotionally.

This is the same thing that we really get confusion about because we wanna be very careful, right?

Ellen White talks about the dangers of being overly emotional in worship and also the danger in attributing some sort of feeling to the presence of God, because God is always present, Amen?

And the problem sometimes is that we allow music to overtake us so much emotionally that we start associating whatever feeling comes along with the music with the presence of God.

And that is incredibly dangerous because the devil uses that as a tool to be able to discourage us.

We looked at a text in the first seminar, beautiful text, very actually tragic text because it's talking about the persecution and murder of the Jews during the Holocaust.

But it says, I believe in the sun, even when it's not shining.

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Series

The Sweetest Song I Know: Authentic Musical Worship Deepens Our Experience with Christ

How Can I Keep from Singing?

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Parts

What Heavenly Music

47m

A Mighty Fortress

1h 1m

Music in Worship, Part 1: In Spirit and in Truth

41m

Music in Worship, Part 2: In the Beauty of Holiness

47m

How Can I Keep from Singing?

56m

Sound Doctrine