The power of song (to our children)

The Bible continually teaches us about the power of song.

Music can move even the hardest heart to both tears of joy and sorrow.

 

But here's what I also know:  Music learned as a young child never ultimately leaves us.

Last Sunday, I busted out in the song, "Sweep over my soul," a song that I learned when I was a little boy.  Not many knew the song, but it just came to me as God was moving - and came from the smallest part of my memory - one of the songs that I learned as a boy growing up in church.

Here's what I offer you today - especially parents of small children:

Sing to your child (children).

There is power in song. 

 

Evelyn Knowles writes about this.  She writes that the very first time she held each of her newborn grandchildren check to cheek and heart to heart, they heard their grandmother softly sing - "Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so."

Why?

Because she wanted to be certain that they would never remember a time when they hadn't known Jesus.

 

Listen to this story form the book "Prison Memoirs of a North Korean Women.":

 

"Soon Ok Lee grew up in North Korea and devoted herself to its communist party, only to be “rewarded” with 6 years of brutal, inhumane prison life. When she was released and escaped to South Korea, she was aided by a kind, Christian gentleman.

 

She heard him sing songs that were somehow familiar to her, and was puzzled that she knew these songs well enough to sing along. One of those songs was “Amazing Grace.” These hymns were certainly not sung in godless North Korea!

Ah, but a faint and long forgotten memory was triggered—a memory of her own mother singing these very songs when she was a tiny child.

 

So tiny, in fact, that she hadn’t realized they were hymns. But gospel seed had been planted in her wee heart—her mother’s secret way of teaching little Soon Ok Lee of God’s love.

 

Secret, because under their North Korean government, children were taken away from parents who taught them the Bible. Yet after years of trying to live up to Communist ideology, the message of her mother’s songs comforted her and brought her to Christ."

 

Good stuff....I would add, moms and dads, sing to your children!  Even or especially as they are babies.  I firmly believe that God's Word (as the Bible tells us) will never return void - but neither will the tunes of the Spirit that are ingrained in our children's hearts.

 

Just a thought for a Thursday.