First with the no. One of the guys made the point that music is a gift from God. The main difference between a Christian and Non-Christian musician is that one is thankful for the gift and the other is clueless as to the fact that they have a gift. God blessed humans with this crazy thing called music but He also graced our population with minds that are creative. Skyscrapers, art in the Louvre, a beautifully handcrafted desk (no, not just the one I'm typing on) are all things that God has given to people through their creativity. It is the job of Christians to be thankful for that gift and to lead others to the same conclusion.
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When people are given a plethora of choices when it comes to music, when they are not guided to the quality of good musicality, they just pick something that makes them feel. Not feel good or bad--just feel. People want to have the connection of feeling with others am I right? When someone commits suicide, it's because they lost feeling and lost hope and a connection with their world around them, thus they end their connection to a "feelingless" society. With music, if someone wants to feel happy or upbeat or just plain alive, they turn on the tunes, whether or not it is "good". The point was also made that even before you've heard of an artist, people might say you remind them of that artist. That is because music is a universal gift. Reminiscent of the "nothing new under the sun" thought process. While I totally agree with this, I have a slight twist on this which may cause a dilemma in your soul.
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When I was a sophomore in college, I decided to major in speech communications. To this day, I still do not know why I did this. I knew that I enjoyed it and I had a passion about almost every class that I took in this major. At HBU, we had to have two majors so the second may come as a slight shocker. I went from music to english to...Christianity (boring churchy answer I know). I knew that God had called me into ministry of some sort, but I didn't know what kind of ministry. I still struggle with that today, but I knew I needed to develop everything I could in order to be most useful to God.
In Homiletics (preaching class), I learned how to research scripture, how to deliver a meaningful and power sermon, but also that different people have different ways of getting a message across. Some of the students would be very factual, to the point of near boredom. Others would be so funny that I would almost miss their point. But the majority would have a passion for the scripture that they were preaching on. This passion was displayed through their homilies either by the tone of their voice, choice of words, detail of research, or simply by the unashamed love of the Lord that shone brightly on their faces!
I was reminded of this tonight in our chat that, while different genres of music may provide a different feel for a song or evoke a certain emotion, music is, in essence, an expression of passion. Being exposed to different kinds of music may give you a varied background stylistically, however, the ultimate goal of music should not just be to give thanks to God for the gift, but to grab a hold of someone's passion and raw expression of this blessing!!
