Singing a New Song to the Lord

The Psalmist encourages us to sing a new song to the Lord.  There is a lot that we can learn about discipleship and about God solely through this single phrase in Psalm 98

The metaphor of the believer as songwriter itself is instructive.  The metaphor could be tax accountant and the believer could be encouraged to create for the Lord a new tax shelter.  Songwriting is fun, joyful, and exciting.  It requires enormous creativity and insight.  God wants our discipleship to be like this.

And God wants us to sing a new song, rather than sing the songs that we have sung before.  God loves new expressions of discipleship; new ways of being God's people.  God wants the Church to be a living, organic thing filled filled with excitement and wonder

To put it mildly, the Church often acts exactly the opposite of the image of discipleship that is suggested by the Psalmist.  We make discipleship about as exciting as the creation of a new tax shelter.  Rather than celebrate new ways of being God's people, we stick to the old.  We are terrified of change and want things to stay the same.

Being Easter People means that we understand the nature of the God in whom we believe and have our Being, and then model ourselves after this God.  God is a God of endless creativity; a God whose nature is unchanging, but God's unchanging nature is to incessantly create something new.