Raise the Song

Track two is the call to worship proper - not the invitation now, but the command. Raise the song, raise the song. Lift your voice till the whole valley sings along. It is a rowdy camp-meeting hoedown, and the structure is a delight: the band gets built one instrument at a time. Wake the fiddle up. Roll the banjo in. Set the steel to cry. Verse by verse another player is called into the song.

And the last instrument added is the best one. Now the only thing this song is missing is the sound of every hand - so the room itself comes in. Clap them like a timbrel, stomp the floorboards. The congregation is not the audience for this song. The congregation is the final and largest instrument. That is Psalm 150 exactly - every kind of string and pipe and cymbal, and then let every thing that hath breath praise the Lord.

But a command to praise is only as good as the reason underneath it, and the bridge supplies the reason. Praise Him for His mighty acts. Praise Him, for He has done it all. He went down to the grave for us, and He rose at the Father's call. He has not left one of His own behind. That is why the fiddle and the field and the whole valley can be commanded to sing - not because praise is a duty squeezed out of people, but because something was actually done. The mighty acts are real. So raise the song.