1 Timothy 3:16 Being Godly
How many of you have ever suffered from an "earworm" (a song that gets stuck in your head). It's sad to say but I still take a great deal of (wicked?) pleasure in implanting songs into people's minds and then watching them struggle to get rid of it. I've found that it works best with old show-tunes and snippets of songs which are otherwise almost entirely forgotten.
But what if you could put a song in your head that should stay there? One of the methods of the early church was to put doctrine to music so that the hymns they sang were full of meaning. To a certain extent we do the same thing today but not all of our songs are as doctrinally rich.
Before his death in about the year 220 A.D. Clement of Alexandria described the constant worship of Christians this way:
"We cultivate our fields, praising. We sail the seas, humming. Our lives are filled with prayers and praises and Scripture reading before meals and before bed, and even during the night. By this means, we unite ourselves to the heavenly choir."1
Not much remains of some of those early songs. No doubt the early church sang from the Psalms, but they also began to write new hymns which specifically testified about Jesus. There are a few instances where some of the early hymns of the church made it into