thanks for writing man! i appreciate and respect your openness.

my main point in the post(s) is not to critique individual songs AS MUCH AS christian radio in general. if that song, “free to be me” encourages you, i think that’s AWESOME! I would just encourage you to ask yourself….WHY does this song encourage me? that’s an important question, since you said yourself that the song does not center around the gospel. just food for thought.
I would encourage you to find a solid bible proclaiming church to be a part of.
hope this is helpful to you zach. blessings bro

matt

But the claim that one cannot ever worship without explicit reference to Scripture is… well… ungrounded in Scripture. It’s simply not there. Biblically, I can worship God without using words at all – how, then, can the Bible possibly mandate the use of Scripture?

No one’s argued Scripture is, for the Christian life, not necessary or beneficial – I’m not sure where that criticism comes from. What has been argued is that it’s perfectly possible to worship without recourse to Scripture in every single set.

For an analogy: communion is both necessary and beneficial for us as Christians. That doesn’t imply that we need to take communion in every single service, or it isn’t “really” a service.

I have to fundamentally reject your thesis here at the most basic level. The great men and women of Scripture are described to us, in part, as examples – as people for whom we can say, “When they follow God, they show us how to do so; when they fail, they show us what to beware of.” Your argument here – which would treat their experiences as something other and incomparable to ours – is at odds not only with this description but with the way the New Testament continues to call back to them as models.

Nowhere is this clearer than Paul, who likewise had a “direct, physical, in person interaction” and yet said, “Imitate me as I imitate Christ.” Would we say that it is “unfair to compare [our] experience” with Paul, because of his encounter on the road? Does this somehow give him a spiritual connection that we cannot emulate – so that while he worships in one way, we cannot? Surely not!

Where in Scripture do we find an idea even remotely suggesting that biblical figures were afforded a kind of worship that is inaccessible to us? And where, again, do we ever find the idea in Scripture that worship must contain Scripture?

(I think there’s one further problem here, though it may only be one of word choice: the Bible is not *the* basis of our knowledge of God, as Christians. Rather, it is one of two, the other being the ministering of His Spirit within us directly. The two cooperate in harmony, and together provide a witness that the patriarchs of the faith longed for.)