We all love a good sing! It’s true. We really do. There’s something healthy, wholesome, even holy about singing your heart out. And of all seasons of the year, Christmas is the time when we really sing.
As Advent begins and Christmas approaches there’s lots of opportunities to sing. We sing carols. Christmas songs. Festive melodies. In choirs. In schools. In churches. In homes. On street-corners. In fact everywhere we go, there seems to be Christmas music. And rightly so. Because Christmas is the season, above all others, for singing.
Singing is good for us. That’s why we sing when we’re happy. And when we’re sad. Because when we sing we let out our emotions and express things that are deep in our souls.
We all have a soul. It’s that part of us that exists deep within and will live on in eternity after our bodies have died. We’re to be attentive to our soul and must take care of our it. Sometimes we need to intentionally speak to our soul, telling it to sing. That’s what we’re doing when we sing a hymn like ‘Praise my soul, the King of heaven’ – we’re telling our soul to praise Jesus Christ!
Sometimes in preparation for Christmas we get bogged down in busyness. We can get so stressed that it affects our attitude to Christmas songs. We see this when we start to get cynical about the festive music in shops, or when we forget to sing, or worse still when we deliberately choose not to sing. If we’re not careful we can start to become Scrooge-like and negative. That’s why we must sing. Because when we sing, something happens. Our soul begins to stir. We become open and attentive to the things of God and, at Christmas, to the wonder of his good news: that Almighty God has not left us alone but has come to us in Jesus Christ.
At the first Christmas there was much singing. Angels sang. Mary sang. Zechariah sang. Simeon sang. And God sang. He sang a love-sing over the world he created and the people he values. That’s why we sing at Christmas.
The bible says that ‘the season of singing has come’ (Song of Songs 2:12). So let the singing begin!
Discipleship Blog 
Dear Matthew,
I like this – what you say about singing is so true. I think “Praise my soul” is a good example of how it’s good and right to exhort ourselves to praise God, particularly when we don’t feel like doing so.
Kind regards,
David
PS Regarding our souls – I don’t think it’s about our souls living on after our bodies have died, I think it’s about being given spiritual bodies as per “I believe in the resurrection of the body”.