Instrumental worship gets treated as background — something to put on while you do something else. That is one legitimate use, and it is also the least of what it does. There is a reason Scripture keeps mentioning music without words, and a reason it keeps turning up in the parts of the Bible where something is actually happening.
It is in the text more than you would expect
The Psalms are full of instrumental direction. “Praise him with trumpet sound; praise him with lute and harp! Praise him with tambourine and dance; praise him with strings and pipe! Praise him with sounding cymbals” (Psalm 150:3-5). That is six instruments in three verses, and the psalm is the closing doxology of the entire book.
Psalm 4 is headed “with stringed instruments”. Psalm 5 is “for the flutes”. And Selah, appearing 71 times, is most often read as a musical interlude — a deliberate gap in the words.
Whatever else that tells us, it tells us the tradition did not treat wordless music as filler.
The clearest example: David and Saul
“And whenever the harmful spirit from God was upon Saul, David took the lyre and played it with his hand. So Saul was refreshed and was well, and the harmful spirit departed from him” (1 Samuel 16:23).
No lyrics recorded. No sermon. A man in torment, and someone playing an instrument in the room. Whatever is happening in that passage, it is not ambience.
There is a second one people miss. Elisha, asked to prophesy and clearly not in the mood, says “But now bring me a musician.” And “when the musician played, the hand of the LORD came upon him” (2 Kings 3:15). A prophet uses music to get somewhere he could not get on his own.
What it does that a song with words cannot
Sung worship gives you words, which is most of its value — it puts true things in your mouth. But words also direct you. You are thinking the line you are singing.
Instrumental worship removes the direction. What comes up is whatever was already there. That is why it is so often the thing people reach for when they cannot articulate what is wrong: it makes room instead of filling it.
It is also the honest answer to a real problem. Paul writes that “we do not know what to pray for as we ought” (Romans 8:26). Sometimes the reason you are not praying is not resistance — it is that you genuinely have no sentence. Music without words does not require you to produce one.
Three uses worth distinguishing
- Making room. Sitting with it and nothing else, no phone, no task. This is the use that most resembles what David was doing for Saul, and the one people almost never try.
- Under Scripture. Reading slowly with something playing underneath. It sounds like a small thing and it changes the pace of reading considerably.
- Working, sleeping, driving. The background use. Genuinely valuable — it is a better thing to have running in a house than most alternatives — but it is not the same activity, and it is worth being honest about which one you are doing.
A caution, briefly
Because music does something to the body, it is possible to mistake a moved feeling for an encounter. A swell in a track will lift you whether or not anything spiritual is occurring; that is craft doing its job.
This is not an argument against it — the same is true of a well-arranged worship song, or a well-delivered sermon. It is an argument for not treating the feeling as the measure. “In spirit and in truth” holds here too: the emotion is not the qualification, and it is not the disqualification either.
Where BlacKeys fits
This is close to why I have a piano project at all. BlacKeys is the music with the production pulled all the way back — keys and voice, and sometimes just keys. Quieter, closer, and much harder to hide behind.
The main record, Redemption & Faith, is a lyric-first album; it is meant to give people words. BlacKeys is for the other thing — the room where you have run out of them. The singles are here.