History of Hymns in Short

Let the word of Christ richly dwell within you, with all wisdom teaching and admonishing one another with psalms, hymns and spiritual songs, singing with thankfulness in your hearts to God. 

Colossians 3:16

Speak to one another with psalms, hymns and spiritual songs. Sing and make music in your heart to the Lord, always giving thanks to God the Father for everything, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Ephesians 5:19-20

At the very root of the word “hymns” in the Greek, used in these two verses, is the idea of celebration [the Greek, hudeo. The Greek word for “hymns” here is humnos – Strong’s #5215]. Through song we celebrate, with thankfulness, what the Father has done for us in Christ Jesus.

We celebrate with each other when we come together to worship the Lord as a community of believers, singing with one voice, as it were, of our gratitude for the gift of salvation through Jesus.  Our hearts are fully engaged with the words our mouths are singing.  We mean it!  We’re thankful. We know what we have been saved from, and we are growing in our understanding of what we have been saved to.  And through our singing of psalms, hymns and spiritual songs, we are “teaching and admonishing” each other, with our individual wills being shaped to move us along on the journey to be conformed to the image of Christ. We are being discipled through our song.  Our singing is a ministry, both to the Lord in singing His praises and expressing our thankfulness to Him, but also as a ministry to each other, as we literally testify to one another what Christ has done for all people, and what He has done for us, as individuals.  Hallelujah!

All of this reiterates just how important the content of our songs is. And that’s why, traditionally, hymns are so beloved.  They are rich in content – rich in the exaltation of Christ.

Since the early days of the Church, hymns have been written specifically to oppose heretical ideas which made inroads in the culture at large, which, of course, impacted those in the Church as well. Many Church Fathers regarded the use of hymns as an act of spiritual warfare, waging battle for the true faith. Some of those hymns have had great staying power because they are timeless in their teaching of biblical truth.  Several of the hymns of Ambrose, a Church Father from the 4^th century, can still be found in many standard hymnals today.

Over time, some error had begun to creep into the songs, and with the formalization of Church structures, various councils thought it best to lay down rules that forbade anything but the actual Scriptures from being sung in church.  Even the congregations themselves began to be silenced, and only officially designated singers could participate.

The debate about what could be sung, and who could sing it, went on for centuries in various pockets of the Church, and while it didn’t end with Martin Luther, he did open the latch of a floodgate which had held back the people and her song.  Both Martin Luther’s expressed theological point-of- view about music in the Church, and his new hymns that exalted Christ Jesus and His Gospel, produced the Reformation conviction that the singer or musician, is, in fact, a preacher of the Gospel. Luther put song back into the hands of the people so that they could rightly fulfill their place as members of the Royal Priesthood spoken of in 1 Peter 2:9.

Though John Calvin had a great reverence for the place of song in worship in the church, he restricted it to only metrical, or rhymed Psalms, the Song of Simeon, the Commandments, the Lord’s Prayer and the Creed.  He rejected the use of any instruments, vocal harmonies, and choirs.

A century or so later, Isaac Watts came along and transformed English Christian worship by introducing new songs written to specifically honor Christ. The work of Watts marked the transition from only psalm singing in the Puritan, Anglican and dissenting churches of his day, to the eventual acceptance of singing hymns. He asked his critics to seriously consider these new songs which exalted Christ, and were thus more suited to worship Him in the beauty of His holiness and to “praise Him for the wonders of redeeming grace” in accordance with the “glorious liberty of the Gospel.” In the end, his hymns helped to stem the tide of yet other error which had started to influence the English churches.

Like Isaac Watts, John and Charles Wesley wanted Christians everywhere to be able to heartily sing their hymns as a unified Church without denominational barriers. Of the hymns in their 1780 hymnbook, John wrote in the preface that they contained “all the important truths of our most holy religion… a distinct and full an account of scriptural Christianity… [to be used] as a means of raising or quickening the spirit of devotion, of confirming … [one’s] faith, of enlivening… [one’s] hope, and of kindling or increasing… [one’s] love to God and man…”

Charles was the main hymn writer, and of his hymns it was said by one of his biographers that, as a body of work, “They contain the Bible in solution”, and most importantly, that Christ was central in their work.  Christ was Charles and John Wesley’s passion and through their hymns they could teach Christian doctrine to ordinary people.

There are other Christian hymn writers through the ages who have desired this same effect of their work in the hearts and minds of their brothers and sisters.

The hymns we will be singing tonight express many Christian truths/doctrine by some of those, as well as express their hopes for an unwavering, all-encompassing life in Christ.

Through these hymns, we will declare that God is Ruler over all things, that He made the Universe – that He is faithful and gives blessings to us. We will sing of Christ being everything to us, of Jesus’ work on the cross, of His resurrection; we will also acknowledge our own sinfulness. 

We will also declare that Christ removed our stain of sin and will, one day, return to the earth in victory and take us to be with Him because we have believed and trusted in Him.

We will sing that we can freely talk to God in prayer, and that He hears us. We will testify to each other that because of His great love and agonizing sacrifice, that Christ deserves all that we are and have. We will declare that Christ lives now and lives eternally, and that He loves His Church.  In one unified voice, with our hearts fully engaged with our mouths, we will tell Him, “Thank You!”

Susan Hammond