Testing Music In The Church - Part 2
... and now BLASPHEMOUS!
by Sandy Simpson, 3/17/09


For my previous article on testing music in the churches, go here.  Since the first article I wrote on testing music in the churches there have been developments in Christian music that are even more alarming.  Apparently the following was posted on a joke site called "Lark" but it does illustrate the problem I will detail following their spoof on Bridegroom music.

Wal-Mart rejects 'racy' worship CD

 ANAHEIM — The latest Vineyard Music worship CD, "Intimacy, vol. 2," has raced to the top of the Christian sales charts, but Wal-Mart is refusing to stock the album without slapping on a parental warning sticker. The ground-breaking — some say risqué — album includes edgy worship songs such as "My Lover, My God," "Touch Me All Over," "Naked Before You," "I'll Do Anything You Want," "Deeper" and "You Make Me Hot with Desire."

"We've had concerns about previous Vineyard CD's, but this time they went overboard in their suggestive imagery depicting the church's love affair with Christ," said a Wal-Mart spokesman. "It would be irresponsible to sell this to 13-year-old kids."

A Vineyard Music Group (VMG) spokesman defended the album.

"We felt this was the next logical step in furthering people's intimacy with the Lord, as the title implies," said Sam Haverley, director of VMG public relations. "People aren't content with yesterday's level of closeness. They want something more. We feel this album gives them that."

Wal-Mart represents a third of all CD sales, which has forced VMG to try to negotiate a deal. VMG proposed adding a heart-shaped warning sticker rather than the black-and-white label more often seen on raunchy rap albums, but Wal-Mart refused. VMG is considering issuing a censored version of the album.

"If Christians want to make R- or X-rated music, that's up to them," said a Wal-Mart spokesman, "but we don't have to carry it." (LarkNews, http://www.larknews.com/april_2003/secondary_exclusive.php?header=header&page=walmart_cd)

However, real lyrics from real albums are just as blasphemous as the above spoof.
Bridal Identity teachings are a strong influence for an abundance of intimacy worship songs. 1 could fill these pages with pages of examples. Here are the lyrics from one worship song:

"You are my everything, my hearts delight
You are my obsession; I wait for you through the night
In the morning when I rise I ache for you."
(from "Obsession" by Nathan Shaver and Eldon Stump).

Heather Clark is a very popular charismatic singer made famous for her "worship warfare dance at Todd Bentley's meetings in Florida. Here from her album "Dark But Lovely" we encounter these lyrics in the song "Kisses of Your Mouth":

"Kiss me with the kisses of your mouth
Your love is better than wine
Pleasing is the fragrance of your perfume
No wonder the maidens love you
Take me away with you, let's hurry
Let the king bring me into His chamber"

Other tracks include: "All Night Long," "My Lover," "Faint with Love." (Orrel Steinkamp, The Plumbline, Volume 14, No. 2, March/April 2009)

There are many more songs out there that bear the Bridegroom teachings.

Burning

I have found the love of my desire (Jesus)
I'm caught up in the passion of an ever-flaming fire (We're lovesick)
Captured by a pure and holy gaze (You're beauty ravishes me)
Frightened by your beauty but I just can't look away
Burning, oh I'm burning
My heart becomes and instant flame
At the very mention of Your name

(Burning Desire CD, Live Harp and Bowl Worship, Executive Producer Mike Bickle, Recorded live May 2000 at the Friends of the Bridegroom Conference in Kansas City, Featuring Mike Bickle and worship teams from the International House of Prayer. Includes artists: Mike Bickle, Misty Edwards, Julie Meyer, JoAnn McFatter, Carol Oosthius and Monty Poe, (spoken voice portions by Mike Bickle in brackets), http://www.worshipmusic.com/fotb-bdcd.html)

You can hear Mike Bickle adding to the song with disgusting references to God in sexual terms.  These ideas are misapplications of the Song of Solomon.  JFB Commentary states in introductions to the Song of Solomon:

Three notes of time occur [MOODY STUART]: (1) The Jewish Church speaks of the Gentile Church (#So 8:8) towards the end; (2) Christ speaks to the apostles (#So 5:1) in the middle; (3) The Church speaks of the coming of Christ (#So 1:2) at the beginning. Thus we have, in direct order, Christ about to come, and the cry for the advent; Christ finishing His work on earth, and the last supper; Christ ascended, and the call of the Gentiles.
Scofield states this:
The interpretation is twofold:  Primarily, the book is the expression of pure marital love as ordained of God in creation, and the vindication of that love as against both asceticism and lust—the two profanations of the holiness of marriage.  The secondary and larger interpretation is of Christ, the Son and His heavenly bride, the Church (#2Co 11.1-4, refs). In this sense the book has six divisions: I. The bride seen in restful communion with the Bridegroom, 1.1-2.7. II. A lapse and restoration, 2.3-3.5. III. Joy of fellowship, 3.6-5.1. IV.  Separation of interest—the bride satisfied, the Bridegroom toiling for others, 5.2-5. V.  The bride seeking and witnessing, 5.6-6.3. VI.  Unbroken communion, 6.4-8.14.
It is quite a stretch, in fact patently bad hermeneutics, to teach that the Song of Solomon is painting a picture of lust and love between a human individual and God rather than a picture of the relationship (not sexual) between the Church and Christ.  To profane this wonderful prophetic book, a picture of both earthly human marriage and the marriage of Christ and His Church is sickening, in fact blasphemous.  Where did these people get their inspiration for this new wave of "worshipping" God by promoting a spiritual/sexual union with God?  It comes from the same Catholic mystics that the Emerging Church people have been studying (instead of their Bibles, I might add).
The writings of mystics in the Middle Ages echo the passion of the Song of Solomon and indicate the intimacy which characterized their relationship with their Saviour.

Saint Bernard of Clairvaux
(1090-1153)

St Bernard, from France, was the compiler of the Rule of the Order of Knights Templar. He wrote eighty-six sermons on the Canticle (Song of Songs). Towards the end of his life Bernard attempted to describe how he himself experienced the coming of the Word – the Bridegroom – to the soul.

    You ask, then, how I knew that He was present, since His ways are past finding out? Because the Word is liv-ing and effective, and as soon as ever He entered into me, He has aroused my sleeping soul, and stirred and softened and pricked my heart, that hitherto was sick and hard as stone. He has begun to pluck up and destroy, to build and to plant, to water the dry places and shed light upon the dark, to open what was shut, to warm the chill, to make the crooked straight and the rough places plain; so that my soul has blessed the Lord and all that is within me praised His Holy Name. Thus has the Bridegroom entered into me.[3]
Hildegard of Bingen
(1098-1179)

Hildegard claimed to see visions from a young age. She wrote,

    "Creation is allowed in intimate love to speak to the Creator as if to a lover. As the Creator loves the creation, so the creation loves the Creator. The whole world has been embraced by this kiss."[2]
Gertrude the Great was a nun of the abbey of Helfta in Saxony. Her devotional “Exercise of Divine Love,” uses the Song of Songs as part of a step by step progression on the road to God. The text admonishes:
    At Lauds, pray that you be taught the art of Love; At Prime, that you be led into the school of love with God as a teacher and master; At Terce, that you learn the alphabet with which the Spirit writes his law of love on your heart; At Sext, that you learn to know the Lord not only by syllables but also by theory; At None, that you be accepted into the militia of love and bound by oath; At Vespers, that you march in the armor of love and triumph over evil; At Compline, that you become oblivious to the world and be consummated in loving union with God.
She continues in a more amorous vein:
    Ah! Show me your face and let me contemplate your radiance. Lo, “your face,” which the most beautiful dawn of divinity illuminates, “is pleasant and comely” (6:3). Miraculously, your cheeks blush with “omega” and “alpha” (Apocalypse 1:8). Very bright eternity burns inextinguishably in your eyes. There God’s salvation glows as red for me as a lamp. There radiant charity sports merrily with luminous truth. The scent of life breathes forth from you to me. “Honey and milk drip down from your mouth” (4:11) to me.” [3]
John of the Cross wrote "The Spiritual Canticle of the Soul and the Bridegroom Christ" in the 16th century.
    O you soul, then, most beautiful of creatures, who so long to know the place where your Beloved is, that you may seek Him, and be united to Him, you know now that you are yourself that very tabernacle where He dwells, the secret chamber of His retreat where He is hidden. Rejoice, therefore, and exult, because all your good and all your hope is so near you as to be within you; or, to speak more accurately, that you can not be without it, “for lo, the kingdom of God is within you.” So says the Bridegroom Himself, and His servant, St. Paul, adds: “You are the temple of the living God.” What joy for the soul to learn that God never abandons it, even in mortal sin; how much less in a state of grace! …Courage, then, O soul most beautiful, you know now that your Beloved, Whom you desire, dwells hidden within your breast; strive, therefore, to be truly hidden with Him, and then you shall embrace Him, and be conscious of His presence with loving affection. [4]
The "Friends of God"

Henry Suso (c. 1295-1366) was a part of the “Friends of God”, a loosely constituted and informal but wide-spread spiritual and mystical movement. In his written answer to Elizabeth Stäglin who begged to be told more of what God is, he wrote:

    Ah, gentle God, if Thou art so lovely in Thy creatures, how exceedingly beautiful and ravishing Thou must be in Thyself. … … Come, daughter, thou hast now found thy God, whom thy heart has so long sought after. Look upwards, then, with sparkling eyes and radiant face and bounding heart, and behold Him and embrace Him with the infinite outstretched warms of thy soul and thy affection, and give thanks and praise to Him, the noble Prince of all creatures.
One of his contemporaries, Flemish mystic Jan van Ruysbroek (1293-1381), author of the “Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage”, also explored the inward life and described:
    The pure soul feels a constant fire of love, which desires above all things to be one with God, and the more the soul obeys the attraction of God the more it feels it, and the more it feels it the more it desires to be one with God.[4]
Developments in the Reformation

Madame Guyon (1647-1717). French mystic. Her written works include, “The Song of Songs of Solomon.”

    VERSE 1. Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth.
    THIS kiss, which the soul desires of its God, is essential union, or a real, permanent and lasting possession of its divine object. It is the SPIRITUAL MARRIAGE.
    … This, then, is the lofty and intimate union that the Spouse so pressingly demands at the hand of the Bridegroom. She asks it of Him as though she was addressing another; an impetuous sally of love, giving vent to her passion without particular thought as to whom she was speaking. Let Him kiss me, says she, since He can do it, but let it be with the kisses of His mouth; no other union can content me; that alone can satisfy all my desires, and that is what I demand.[5] (Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridal_theology)
Looks like Heather Clark and the others whose lyrics are detailed above got their ideas from Madame Guyon, a mystic and pantheist.

As I just stated, these people are some of the influences and mentors for Emerging Church leaders such as Brian McLaren, Leonard Sweet, Richard Foster and a whole host of others.  John Wimber, whose CORE group that initially implemented his Vineyard movement, was teaching Bridal theology. Today many others in the New Apostolic Reformation such as Mike Bickle (IHOP and Bridegroom Movement), other Kansas City Prophets, C. Peter Wagner and his New Apostolic "apostles" are following the ideas of the above heretics and mystics of the Catholic Church.  They are leading the churches further and further into apostasy.  If these people are promoting some kind of sexual relationship with their so-called "Jesus" we need to rebuke them and if they refuse to discontinue their adherance to this music and the false teachings of Mike Bickle, then we need to mark and avoid them.

Those promoting this movement and its music are a leaven that is leavening the whole lump.  If your church has not been leavened yet I suggest you get the leaven out before it activates and you have no choice but to leave your church.