I’m not sure how many of you guys watched the “American Idol Gives Back” program on Fox last night, but if you did you probably were shocked at the song they chose to close with. They sang, “Shout to the Lord.” Now, I’m a pretty cynical guy, so when I watched it on YouTube, I sort of rolled my eyes during the first minute or so. Especially when I noticed that they changed the opening line from: “My Jesus…” to “My Shepherd…”
“Here we go”, I thought, “Now the song could be acceptable to Christians, Jews, Muslims, heck, anyone who believes in a supreme diety.” However I kept watching, and the rest of the song remained unchanged, the words were still unmistakeably Christian; the song sounded like it was being sung in a church. Not like my church, maybe more like a mega church like Saddleback, what with all the lights and the big choir in the back and the full band, but it sounded like part of a church service none the less. And this was on prime time, national television, not TBN. I decided to watch it again.
This time the irony of it all hit me. Ryan Secreast announces the song this way:
“Now, singing Shout to the Lord, once again here are your American Idols!”
And then, “America’s Idols” took the stage and sang:
My Shepherd, my Savior, Lord, there is none like You;
All of my days I want to praise the wonders of Your mighty love.
I don’t know if any of these guys are saved. I don’t know if they even cared what they were singing, or if they were just doing it because they were told to. Maybe some of them were really, actually worshiping God. But the remarkable thing to me is that here we have on national TV, these people that are supposed to represent all that America Idolizes, and worships: the fame, the fortune, the talent, the lifestyle of rock stars that we as a country lust after, and these eight peple are in a contest that is supposed to give them all this – and here they all are singing that there is none like God, that all day they want to sing God’s praises, that there is something more than what they are pursuing. And that, in itself, is something to take notice of.
Now, God knows their heart, and that is the most important part of this. Clearly Christ said in Mark 7:6-7 that worship is in vain if the heart is not in it.
And he said to them, “Well did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites, as it is written,
“‘This people honors me with their lips,
but their heart is far from me;
in vain do they worship me,
teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.’
Maybe that was all that happened last night. Maybe all we watched on TV was a bunch of hypocrites pretending to worhsip God with their lips while their heart was set on fame and fortune. That part we don’t know. What we do know is that in front of the whole country these guys truthfully proclaimed that there is none like the Lord, and that He should be worshiped by all the earth, that nothing compares to the promise we have in Him. And with that I’ll rejoice as Paul did when he said in Phillipians 1:18
What then? Only that in every way, whether in pretense or in truth, Christ is proclaimed, and in that I rejoice.
The “idols” may or may not have benefited from their worship last night, but who knows how many people throughout country may have been startled by the thought that there just may be something greater than all that they currently idolize.