Hymns
A couple of weeks ago I bought Chris Rice’s album Peace Like a River: The Hymns Project. I have been listening to it repeatedly since I bought it. 
Growing up in a very conservative church where we sang mostly hymns, I became acquainted with many of the great ones. As a child I couldn’t appreciate the sentiment or power of the words in many of those old songs, so I decided they were boring and antiquated. How can you understand God’s great faithfulness, amazing grace, how mighty He is, and how enduring His love is until you have lived life awhile? We need time to learn to trust Him with something precious, time to rebel and transgress to understand grace, time to see miracles only explained by God’s providence, and experience suffering to the point of needing to rely on Him alone. I am so thankful for a God that allows us the freedom to learn to trust Him. I am thankful that He is faithful even in our questions, fear and doubt and that He unfailingly pursues us.
My favorite Hymn on the album is Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing. The depth and beauty of the lyrics captivate me. It embodies what my soul feels yet cannot as eloquently express.
Come Thou Fount of every blessing
Tune my heart to sing Thy grace;
Streams of mercy, never ceasing,
Call for songs of loudest praise
Teach me some melodious sonnet,
Sung by flaming tongues above.
Praise the mount! I’m fixed upon it,
Mount of God’s unchanging love. The Mutant Chronicles movie download Fear of the Dark film
Here I raise my Ebenezer;
Hither by Thy help I’m come;
And I hope, by Thy good pleasure,
Safely to arrive at home.
Jesus sought me when a stranger,
Wandering from the fold of God;
He, to rescue me from danger,
Interposed His precious blood.
O to grace how great a debtor
Daily I’m constrained to be!
Let that grace now like a fetter,
Bind my wandering heart to Thee.
Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it,
Prone to leave the God I love;
Here’s my heart, O take and seal it,
Seal it for Thy courts above.
O that day when freed from sinning,
I shall see Thy lovely face;
Clothed then in blood washed linen
How I’ll sing Thy sovereign grace;
Come, my Lord, no longer tarry,
Take my ransomed soul away;
Send thine angels now to carry
Me to realms of endless days.
After a few days of listening to this song I began to wonder what an “Ebenezer” was. The reference is from 1 Samuel 7:12. “Then Samuel took a stone and set it up between Mizpah and Shen. He named it Ebenezer, saying, ‘Thus far the LORD helped us’.” All throughout the Old Testament the Israelites would set up stones of remembrance as a testimony to God’s mercy and presence for the generations to come. In Genesis 26:18, Jacob gives the name Bethel, meaning House of God, to the stone which he had used as a place to rest his head while receiving the dream of the ladder. He says, “Surely the LORD is in this place, and I was not aware of it.” Later, that very same place is so defiled and misused that it was renamed by the prophet Hosea, Beth Aven, which means House of Nothingness.
In Joshua chapter four, there is another example of stones being set up in remembrance of God leading. God tells Joshua, “Go over before the ark of the LORD your God into the middle of the Jordan. Each of you is to take up a stone on his shoulder, according to the number of the tribes of the Israelites, to serve as a sign among you. In the future, when your children ask you, ‘What do these stones mean?’ tell them that the flow of the Jordan was cut off before the ark of the covenant of the LORD. When it crossed the Jordan, the waters of the Jordan were cut off. These stones are to be a memorial to the people of Israel forever.” The place was named Gilgal, because it was the place where God rolled away the reproach of the Egyptians.
In Amos chapter five there is a call for repentance of Israel.“This is what the LORD says to the house of Israel: ‘Seek me and live; do not seek Bethel, do not go to Gilgal, do not journey to Beersheba. For Gilgal will surely go into exile, and Bethel will be reduced to nothing. ‘Seek the LORD and live…” Alone in the Dark divx The Children of Huang Shi video
Sadly, many of the sacred symbols of God’s faithfulness later became idols. No longer were people remembering and seeking the Faithful One; they began to worship the monument and even defile the sacred. As awful an appalling as that thought is, I find I struggle with this very thing. I sometimes supplant the worship of God Himself with the praise for the outcome that results from His work, or, even worse, I complain about where God has rescued me to. As time passes and I get further from my crisis, my memory of God’s help thus far fades and I forget to continue to “seek the LORD”.
The line “Prone to wander, Lord I feel it, Prone to leave the God I love” breaks my heart every time I hear it. How true it is. No matter how many times God demonstrates His love to me and no matter how much I love Him in return, I am “prone to leave the God I love”. Not necessarily by an act of rebellion or anger but by distraction or laziness.
I desire to leave a legacy of faith and faithfulness for my family. I want the “stones of remembrance” in my life to always point to God alone and serve solely as a reminder of His goodness. I do not want what God has intended as a place of remembrance to become a stumbling stone of pride or an idol. I am beginning to understand that this kind of heritage does not come about accidentally, it has to be an intentional decision made daily. I cannot will it to be and it is impossible for me without God’s help.
“On that day, freed from sinning, I shall see Thy lovely face
” — I can hardly wait!The Accidental Husband video
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