The purpose of music

You know, I've been thinking a lot lately. One thing I've been thinking about is the whole music pirating issue. Why does it not feel like stealing when I download music that would normally cost me a small fortune?

Why does it naturally seem so right that music should be shared? And without putting holes in our pockets...

Why is music pleasing to our brains? What possible reason do we have to enjoy music - rythmic beats and melodies?

Music exists for worship. We are supposed to play music for our God and others, and the feelings we get are a side-effect blessing of listening to the music ourselves. What other possible reason do we have to enjoy music so much, and even depend on it in our lives sometimes? Why does our conscience tell us that music should be a free thing, and that music companies shouldn't be making billions off sales? I agree that some people take up some process of producing music as a job, and they deserve their pay, but is a new album really worth $30NZD+ for a copy? Shouldn't we be free to sing or play songs that others have written? What's with all the copyright crap? Would you pay money to listen to the radio? Why does everyone wish they could sing if they don't think they can in their eyes?

I believe something has gone wrong with music over the centuries. Instead of worshipping the Lord with our music, we have turned it around and we now worship good musicians as idols.

Taking the most popular two views of existence, the reason we are able to connect with music so well doesn't make sense for either of them except in the circumstance of worship:

Evolution: How could we evolve to enjoy music? Or better yet, why?? If you follow natural selection, why would the better of us be the ones who can understand music? Is music really that critical to our survival?

Special Creation: If God created us in his image, why would he create us to enjoy music? Does God enjoy music?

God enjoys the music of our hearts. Audio is one way of expressing our love for God, and as mentioned in the bible it is an important one. Why do we sing at every church service no matter what sort of church it is? It's just normal right. Imagine if we had to pay to worship Jesus at church. Hah! The bible has hundreds of verses about people singing to the Lord; singing with all their voice and all their heart. There's even a whole book (Psalms) in the bible containing just songs in the original hebrew language it was written in. But there's no book in the bible about selling music.

There are so many verses I could list to sum up this post, but I'm going to just pick 1 - one of my favourite. It's Ephesians 5:19,20 from the NIV:

"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."

So let me encourage you. If you are singing for God, it doesn't matter if you don't sound perfect in your own eyes. If your heart is right with God, then to Him it sounds just like what you were made for. The longer I live, the more I come to the conclusion that the reason for our existence is to glorify God.

I'd love to hear your comments on this. If you agree, please let me know by posting a comment. If you disagree, I'd love to hear too!

Upcoming Free Accountability Software

Hey all you men out there. I'm writing some free accountability software for Windows. Basically it collects all the urls you visit on the net & the time and user who visits them and emails them to a trusted friend each week. This keeps your computer one step closer to a public computer so that someone can hit us up if we fall into the devil's snare.

I need everyone to keep replying to this or messaging and texting or emailing or even calling me or talking to me in person to ask how it's going and to tell me they want to see it finished. Even if it's not something that would help you, imagine how many first year uni guys or high schoolers it would help - I just need to finish it! This will be the first free software of it's kind that I know of. Cheers.