The Power of Story and Song: Loving God with Heart and Imagination

In my last post, Not a Diet, I spent a little time discussing the influence of good books on our spiritual lives. In my little aside, I mentioned non-fiction books almost exclusively. Today I wanted to explore the power of good stories and songs and their influence over us.

I think the church today suffers from a lack of deep and reflectinve thinking about God, His Word and His revealed will for us. So I love good theology and apologetics books and often recommend and pass them along to others. In fact, I have been deprived of many of my all-time favorite books because I lent them to someone and never got them back. If they've been read, I consider it a noble sacrifice. We are called to love God with all of our minds and good books can help us do that more faithfully.

However, we are also called to love God with more than just our minds. Our relationship with God should encompass our whole lives. God should stir our hearts and fill our imaginations. He is more than just a good idea and His truth runs deeper and is more transformative than mere intellect can capture.

I love reading to my boys (ages 8 & 5) at bedtime. My older son, Andrew, especially loves a good story and will stay awake forever as long as I'm reading a good story. Over the past few years, we have read all of the Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder, many of The Chronicles of Narnia, The Hobbit and many others. Right now, we have started reading The Wingfeather Saga by Andrew Peterson, a great series for kids of all ages.

Good stories capture our imagination, draw us into another world, another place in time, into the lives of characters who come to life and become good friends. The very best offer a vehicle for communicating the most profound truths in a way that influences us more powerfully than a logically constructed argument. On most days, I am convinced that logical arguments are better for helping understand the coherence of what we already believe than for really changing our minds.

God invented good stories, of course. The Bible is full of the best stories in the world, which are all the more compelling because they're true. Sadly, the power of stories has been captured by the enemy, too. Phillip Pullman wrote the best-selling His Dark Materials series to counter the influence of The Chronicles of Narnia and spread a hatred of God. So it matters how we populate our imagination and whether we honor God in our literary pursuits.

Like stories, songs reach us at a deeper level than our intellect. They move us emotionally and influence what we love and what we desire to do. Most of my absolute favorite songs are about heaven or touch on the glories of heaven. No one has written better songs about heaven than Rich Mullins and Andrew Peterson. Yet others - including songs by Sara Groves, Ginny Owens and Nicole Nordeman, along with the aforementioned master songwriters Mullins and Peterson - touch on the realities of everyday life. They help us see the glory of God and the sacred importance that can be found in "common" and "ordinary" life, which is really anything but.

Of course, music does not even need words to stir us toward the sacred. The best composers paint pictures and stir our souls through music itself. That's why people still listen to Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, Handel and others hundreds of years after they have passed from this life.

Life should not be lives without stories and songs, and the good life, a God-honoring life, cannot be lived without the real "soul food" of stories and songs. As I was thinking about this, I was struck by the fact that some of my favorite stories are filled with songs. JRR Tolkein's writings, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, are filled with song after song. Andrew Peterson's Wingfeather books imitate Tolkien in this regardm, with songs that are more ridiculous while still being sublime. Pilgrim's Progress is full of songs that aren't very singable but that ring with beautiful truth anyway. Even some of my favorite sections of Laura Ingalls Wilder's books have songs in them.

So here's my recommendation: Get ahold of a good story, something new or maybe something you haven't read for a few years. Enjoy a feast for your imagination. Then, get some good music to lift your heart to the transcedent. May the Lord of Story and Song use them to move you toward a deeper love of all that He is.