Exodus 32:18

18 Moses replied:
"It is not the sound of victory,
it is not the sound of defeat;
it is the sound of singing that I hear."

Sometimes we get impatient with God.
Sometimes we think we know better than God.
Sometimes we do things without even realizing that what we are doing is totally the opposite of what God wants us to do.
Sometimes we do things knowing full well that we shouldn't be doing them.
Sometimes is really all the time.

Moses and the Children of Israel had been saved from death at the hands and spears and arrows and hooves and wheels of the charioteers of Egypt. They witnessed God working on their behalf by drowning Pharaoh and his army in the Red Sea. And they sang and danced and celebrated and rejoiced. But then...

They grumbled. They quarreled. They got impatient.

Quail? We only have quail to eat?
Moses! Did you bring us out into the desert to die?
Water! Give us water to drink!

Where's Moses? Why hasn't he come down from Mt. Sinai yet?

So the Children of Israel went to Aaron, Moses' brother, and asked him to fashion an idol of the god who brought them up out of Egypt. So Aaron did as they asked, fashioning the Golden Calf for them–a false god. And then they worshipped it. A false god. And they sang, and they danced. That's what Moses heard. The Israelites singing to the Golden Calf.

Doesn't that sound like us? When we think God isn't listening, when we think he isn't working fast enough in our lives, we take matters into our own hands and do what we think best, but sometimes it's not what God wants. There is a way that seems right to a man, but in the end it leads to death. (Proverbs 14:12)

Doesn't that sound like us? Sometimes we sing songs with lyrics that are so bad that it's basically like we are worshipping a false god. And sometimes we don't even realize what we are doing. A great example of this happened this week at WLA. A volleyball player came to me asking if she could use the Music Tech lab to cut some warmup music for the volleyball team. What she was doing was cutting out the "bad" parts of the lyrics so they wouldn't be heard, even if the "cleaned up" version of the song had already bleated out the bad word. She was doing the right thing!

May God help us, through His Spirit, to realize that the words we sing either praise and glorify Him, or they don't.