This article warns about being legalistic when choosing worship songs. We should be careful not to come up with a set of rules that would exclude the Psalms, our original songbook, from our choices. It makes more sense to apply rules to the full set of songs that we sing, rather than any particular one, as the Psalms themselves are very diverse in their expression.

This article argues that there’s a link between the health, wealth, and prosperity “gospel” and the disappearance of the Psalms from our worship. The disappearance of lament, which is prevalent in the Psalms, from Christian worship has normalized positive feelings and attitudes while leaving mourning and desperation out of the normative Christian life. We should learn the Psalms in part to have a vocabulary and grammar of lament, but also to seek to have our prayers match a more biblical model.