God’s Music Makes Me High
When it praises God,
Music makes me high ’cause it
Brings Him down to me.
Hip-Hop takes me to a place. The place it takes me to today is not the same place it took me to back in the day when The Lost Boyz dropped Music Makes Me High. That’s because, by and large, I was a lost boy myself.
At the height of my appreciation of Rap music, though Christian, when I was found deepest in Hip-Hop, I was lost to God. How so? Let me let Psalm 22:3 explain:
‘But thou art holy, O thou that inhabitest the praises of Israel.’
Have you ever heard the expression God sits high and looks low? In truth, God does sit high but He also enjoys gettin’ low with His children! There are two ways to bring God into our midst. The one surefire way to get God into our habitation is to provide Him a habitation of His own in our midst. According to Psalm 22:3, music at its best (praising God) becomes a cohabitation for a Father to dwell with His children.
Yet in my “daze” of secular rap, I was quite the prodigal son to my Daddy in heaven. I was sowing my wild oats – spending my inheritance frivolously on whatever brought me pleasure and got me high, musically. What was my inheritance, you ask? Well, in very real terms, we’re all living on borrowed breath. The very faculties we have are gifted to us from God. When we see someone who is blind or cannot walk or lacks the use of any part of his/her body, their inheritance has been taken, stolen, killed and destroyedif you will, by the enemy of God.
But the maiming I was experiencing wasn’t physical. Though I could breath just fine, every time I uttered a curse word from my favorite rapper or a verse heard with coveted clarity for the Rapper’s form, God’s breath in me was being stolen away from Him. Musical praise of God, the force of air moving from our lungs and up through our mouths and into the atmosphere, is simply giving back to God what He gave to us the moment we took our first breath.
But I have another inheritance that I was running through like an elite NFL halfback. I coveted the clarity of Rappers because God gifted me with the ability of a wordsmith when I was a freshman in college. What does it take to establish an inheritance? It takes a parent, an offspring and a bequest:
‘For in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring.’ – Acts 17:28
God had made me to be a poet – and I discovered my love of Hip-Hop soon after I discovered this gift in me. Yet though I, a lover of math at heart, instantly knew where this talent came from, I let it lead me far from the presence and will of my Father.
The music I grew to love was bereft of God’s presence. In short, it didn’t praise the God of Israel, Isaac and Jacob, hence He could not dwell there. I don’t care if DMX did include a prayer at the end of every album, the vast majority of the rest of tracks (though hot as hell… that’s a play on words from his first album, It’s Dark and Hell is Hot, there!) were indeed dark:
‘This then is the message which we have heard of him, and declare unto you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. If we say that we have fellowship with him, and walk in darkness, we lie, and do not the truth:’ – 1John 1:5-6
…I’m getting into preachy territory, though. Simply put, if I desired to be in God’s presence and for Him to come visit me, I needed to return to Him. I needed to seek out Hip-Hop music that made me high by bringing God low and into close fellowship with me. If you’re a Christian and you love Hip-Hop, I challenge you to seek God IN the music you love. It will transform your life.
This is the premise of my latest book: Defacing the Music: What Slips into the Grooves Once God Gets Removed – available NOW on Amazon. It delves into what effect music has on us when we replace the one true God for the god in/of this world who seeks nothing more than to dethrone the one TRUE Musical Chairman and King of kings.
Men were born into the world into death due to sin. Yet our story does not end there once we are reborn to God in Christ. Likewise, Hip-Hop that is devoid of God, at its best, is dead… but that’s not the end of the story. A time of refreshing is come. A time of reformation. A time of rebirth. Join the movement by asking/demanding the following of the music we’ve all grown to know and love:
‘Can you take me higher –
to a place where blind men see?
Can you take me higher –
to a place with golden streets?’ – Higher, Creed
MANU FORTI MINISTRIES, LLC
“Speaking LIFE to unlock the POWER of GOD within YOU” ™
