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It's a sad day indeed when a music professor of a major Christian university records a solo album featuring traditional hymns and contemporary praise music with a soprano saxophone.

According to the professor, "This puts the saxophone in a vocal position. It’s based on what people tell me when I play — that ... those (instrumental) sounds go to places in their beings that words have not touched before. ... They can’t identify what it is, but they know what they feel."

How wonderful that this professor has supplied what the first-century Christians never experienced, a special feeling in their beings that words do not touch.

If others cannot identify it, let's do it for them: instrumental music directly manipulates the emotions. It bypasses the mental function and produces emotional states consistent with the type of music. And when the effect of the music subsides, so does the induced emotional state. This temporary feeling has no relation with the Christian walk and deludes people into thinking that they are communing with God, when, in fact, they are merely swooning.

The administration of the Christian university apparently looks on benignly as their professor sells his music.

With one commercial praise group, the voice imitated the sounds of instruments. So now the seed has borne its fruit, with the instrument being put "in a vocal position."

What do the Scriptures say about this?

"... speaking to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody with your hearts to the Lord" (Eph. 5:19, NASB).

"Let the word of Christ richly dwell within you, with all wisdom teaching and admonishing one another with psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with thankfulness in your hearts to God" (Col. 3:16).

The argument was that instruments were merely an accompaniment to the words. Now they are taking over completely.

Isn't it time we woke up to what's happening in the church?

Our Christian university music professors should be cultivating the singing of praise in our congregations. Instead, they are, with administration approval, leading the way in pushing the instrument into the church and in pushing the word of God out of our lives.