“We, too, should be voicing our love and rejoicing with glad adoration.”

“We, too, should be voicing our love and rejoicing with glad adoration.”
Hymn: “Let All Things Now Living” – Katherine K. Davis (1892-1980)
Tune: ASH GROVE

As “All Creatures of Our God and King” calls all of creation to praise, this 20th Century hymn admonishes all living things to rally in thanksgiving. The upshot is simple: if all of creation - even the crying-out rocks - is involved in gratefulness, so should we. Like them, we also should speak our love, our joy and our adoration to the Giver of all good gifts.

When I sing this hymn (and not often enough, by the way), I mentally translate the word “voicing” to “singing”… because that’s what I’m doing at that moment. There’s nothing wrong with that interpretation, but there are other ways to give voice to our appreciation to and our association with Jehovah Jira – the God who provides.

I probably go here too often in these hymnlines, but our reluctance to speak a good word for God concerns me. MY reluctance concerns me! If indeed I am eternally indebted to this provisionary presence, why do I not openly voice my reliance upon him?

As long as you and I are among those “things now living” – inhaling/exhaling, taking nourishment (on Thursday!), with synapses snapping and blood flowing – we need to keep this hymnline in mind… and act on it! It just might be our best Thanksgiving ever!


This will make you smile!
(Notice how the choir looks at their music even when there are no words!)

“And guide us when perplexed.”

“And guide us when perplexed.”

Hymn: “Now Thank We All Our God” – Martin Rinkart (1586-1649)
Tune: NUN DANKET

“Unable to understand something clearly or to think clearly.” So says Merriam-Webster as to the meaning of perplexed. Surface perplexity happens to most of us regularly if not constantly: we are baffled by technology, by science, by the way humans treat humans in traffic or at the shopping mall. God’s guidance out of the simplest lack of understanding or clarity is a good thing to desire, but here I think the hymn-writer was after a deeper, more profound uncertainty… even one which becomes for us a state of mind.

An old gospel song says it like this:
    Trials dark on every hand,
    And we cannot understand
    All the ways that God would lead us
    To that blessed promised land;
    But he guides us with his eye,
    And we'll follow till we die,
    We will understand it better by and by.

It boils down to that I-just-don’t-get-it place in our thinking. A deeper lack of understanding. We are truly puzzled by the way our life is going. We seem to ask “Why?” more often than wish we did. We join the Children of Israel traipsing through the wilderness, for the most part following Moses’ directions and leadership, yet always wondering… to the point of complaining and wanting to give up.

This one-line prayer “Guide us when perplexed” gets at this shared human problem. The puzzlement is common to all of us; the way we handle it varies. But looking to God for guidance, even when we are totally confounded with our “why list,” will set us apart from other wondering wanderers. After all, it’s a wilderness out there.

Puzzled? Baffled? Confounded? Unsure? Me, too. I am, however, confident that with God’s good guidance “we will understand it better by and by.” For that, we can be thankful.


The MTC Sings John Rutter’s Arrangement of This Hymn

“Do not be discouraged. God is over all.”

“Do not be discouraged. God is over all.”
Hymn: “Count Your Blessings” – Johnson Oatman, Jr. (1856-1922)
Tune: BLESSINGS

Frustration and discouragement are two of our most formidable foes, and they often work hand-in-hand. Many times, frustration causes us to expend too much physical energy trying to ‘fix’ what frustrates us; discouragement consumes our spiritual/mental reservoir.

Elijah was overcome by both when he told God, “I, only I am left” on your side. It’s the way Jonah felt as he sat beneath the worm-chewed vine. This is probably how the disciples felt when they needed to feed the five thousand. This is where many of us too often find ourselves.

This simple truth drawn from the last stanza of one of those gospel songs we trip through as if nothing is worth recalling – this truth that “God is over all” is one we are prone to forget, especially on the front-end of discouragement. Eventually – as though slapped up the side of the head – we believing-types will come around to the realization that God is in control, even in overwhelming, frustrating situations.

This does not free us up to do nothing. Instead, it frees us up to move ahead with the blessed assurance that God has it all under control, and we can ease up a little.

I had a minister friend in Denver who in response to his wife’s ranting-on in frustration would simply admonish her to “maintain.” It was his way of saying “chill out” or “keep your cool.” I have at many times brought that word to mind when trying to settle myself down because I fall prey to frustration and discouragement with the best of them!

Maintain your place under God’s canopy of oversight. There, may we all find the peace that passes understanding; and in that peace may we WITH God work through our frustrating discouragement.

A peppy little setting of this hymn!

“Come to God’s own temple! Come, raise the song of harvest home.”

Hymn: “Come, Ye Thankful People, Come” – Henry Alford
Tune: ST. GEORGE’S WINDSOR

This gathering hymn will be sung in many churches this coming Sunday as Americans head into the Thanksgiving holidays. As visions of turkey legs dance in their heads, worshipers will lift this once-per-year choice of worship-planners. Appropriately so, this is a song about the bringing in of the literal sheaves.

The “harvest home” concept is foreign to those of us who grew up in this country. We generally get the idea, but in England they had a big festival to celebrate the end of the harvesting process; they called THEIR autumn celebration the “Harvest Home.” Attached to this celebration were songs, so “raise the song of harvest home” is significant.

On this side of the pond, the farmers developed their own Harvest Home celebration calling it “Thanksgiving” instead. Beginning as a simple fete, it has evolved into a major break-in-the-action of the fall schedule; it has become the portal into the Christmas season… a la Macy’s parade.

Around this, we have adopted some harvest home songs from other nations: “We Gather Together” (Dutch), “Now Thank We All Our God” (German), “Let All Things Now Living” (Welch), and so on. “Count Your Blessings” and “Give Thanks with a Grateful Heart” sprang from American minds!

My point here pretty straight-forward: when you come to the house of God this Sunday, if they sing this hymn, realize that the “song of harvest home” is one that praises God for all his blessings of the past year, symbolized by the completion of the field-gleaning. Though many of us come from the bucolic lineage, few are still farming – planting, tending, harvesting. We can, however, join our ancestry to raise a song of great appreciation to our provisional God.

If you can’t attend a barn-raising this next week, at least you can participate in a song-raising!

Here is a gorgeous setting of this text to a fresh tune.
Thanks, Billy Coburn, for sending it to me.

“Lord, I confess to thee sadly my sin. All I am tell I thee, all I have been.”

“Lord, I confess to thee sadly my sin. All I am tell I thee, all I have been.”

Hymn: “No, Not Despairingly” – Horatius Bonar (1808-1899)
Tune: KEDRON

This is the second Horatius Bonar hymn I’ve used this week. Obviously, his texts resonate with me on a deeper plane.

To borrow a word from this hymnline, “sadly” not many evangelical churches sing this hymn any more. That is sad for me because there may be no other complete hymn in all of church history with more profound one-liners than this one. Those “ruminating” texts are why I am committed to hymns – congregational and devotional.

Two of the most introspective sentences in all hymndom are spoken here. Nothing frivolous or superficial. “Sadly, righteous Christ, I admit there are some darknesses in my life that I cannot express out loud to any human. You know about all this already, of course, but I need to tell you the whole truth of who I am and what I’ve done… who I’ve been. Here goes…” A chill should have come across you as you pondered that. If not, go back and read it again!

In the hymn, Bonar goes on to ask for purging, washing and cleansing; it is a true confession.

For me, the great mercy of this text is that I can lay it all out there – expose myself, so to speak – and my relationship with Christ will not be affected. Do you realize that? Do you really? This ability of the Savior to continue loving me in spite of the sad shape my life may have been in – I am blown away by that. Absolutely blown away.

Like any good friend, in all likelihood the response of Christ is, “I know. I know. It’s okay. We’re still okay.”

Though too often omitted from public worship, confession is still good for the soul… for THIS poor soul at least.