Praise, Soul to be engaged in – Charles Spurgeon

I AM afraid that where organs, choirs, and singing men and singing women are left to do the praise of the congregation, men’s minds are more occupied with the due performance of the music than with the Lord, who alone is to be praised. God’s house is meant to be sacred unto himself, but too often it is made an opera-house, and Christians form an audience, not an adoring assembly. The same thing may, unless great care be taken, happen amid the simplest worship, even though everything which does not savor of gospel plainness is excluded, for in that case we may drowsily drawl out the words and notes, with no heart whatever. To sing with the soul, this only is to offer acceptable song! We come not together to amuse ourselves, to display our powers of melody, or our aptness in creating harmony; we come to pay our adoration at the footstool of the Great King, to whom alone be glory forever and ever. True praise is for God—for God alone.