Last week I was forced by friends to watch American Idol. I’m not a fan of any reality show but his one is especially annoying to me. I think it comes down to the fact that I am tone deaf and I can’t ever figure out why the judges and audience pick the people that they do. What makes this one so good and other so bad? The talent just doesn’t come through to me. If I had to pick best singer, it would be my daughter when I lean over in services and hear her singing. It may not be perfect pitched but it affects me like no other. It is because she is my daughter and I love her and love when she is doing what I asked her to do. This must be why God chose for us to worship him in song. God doesn’t hear the talent or the skill. He hears the heart of His beloved children obeying His will. Many today will go to extreme (and sometimes unscriptural) ways to “improve” worship in human terms. Those terms don’t matter to God. Worship to God has always been those who love God showing God their love by going to Him in the way He commands.
Let’s say you travel back in time six hundred years or so. Luckily, you happen across a fellow that speaks English. Upon hearing your tale, he describes you as nice, smart, and handsome. Wouldn’t you feel good? You shouldn’t. As Sol Steinmetz in his book, Semantics Antics , explains; Nice originally meant someone who was foolish, ignorant, senseless, or absurd (middle English 1300). Smart for the first 300 years of its use meant causing pain, sharp, cutting, or severe, a sense that survives in the idiom "smart as a whip.” Handsome wasn’t complimentary. When coined around 1425, it just meant easily handled; it didn’t have its current positive connotation until 1590. You might think he said you were a kind, intelligent, good looking bloke, when in reality he said you were a foolish pain easily dealt with. Words have an annoying habit of changing meaning over time in the same language and it becomes even more compli...
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