"Thy name be my theme, and thy love be my song."

“Thy name be my theme, and thy love be my song.” 

 Hymn: “I Love Thee” – from Jeremiah Ingall’s Christian Harmony (1805)

Tune: I LOVE THEE

As is so often true, we find this pithy hymnline tucked into the second half of the third-and-often-skipped stanza of this sturdy old pre-Civil War hymn. We have no idea who penned these words, but there’s a good bit of honesty woven throughout the text.

I am drawn to these sung prayers… fragments of hymn texts that speak directly to God the Creator, the Redeemer, the Spirit. This entire hymn is addressed to Christ; it is ALL a prayer.

This hymnline catches my attention each time it crosses my mind, especially as I sing it aloud in worship. It basically says that I want the nature or character of Christ to be the very theme of my life – the leitmotif, if you please – that recurring theme that is indicative of who Christ is and who I want to be.

Not to wax too music-professor here, but most of us are familiar with the music form called “Theme and Variations.” In that form, a basic theme is stated simply to open the piece; it is usually straight-forward, unencumbered, obvious. After that, the theme is presented in a variety of ways – variations on the first-stated melody.

For us Christian folk, it would be good if we took one of the attributes of Christ – his nature or character – and developed it into everything about our lives. Let’s take the characteristic of “grace” from the arsenal of those things for which Christ stands. If every thought and action were a variation on the theme of grace, our lives would better reflect the main Theme himself.

In THIS hymnline, the unknown writer set out to make “love” the theme of his/her song.
        Thy name be my theme, and thy love be my song;
        Thy grace shall inspire both my heart and my tongue.

May the very essence of who Christ is be the theme of my life, and may love be the song my comrades “hear” through my words and deeds. That’s a prayer worth verbalizing…singing… and living by.

“No more we doubt thee… life is naught without thee.”

“No more we doubt thee… life is naught without thee.”
 

Hymn: “Thine Is the Glory” – Edmond Louis Budry (1854-1932)
Tune: MACCABEUS

Did you see the movie DOUBT with Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Viola Davis, etc.? Based on a stage play, the film gave us just about as good a dramatic definition of “doubt” as could be expressed. Basically, as long as there was a sliver of doubt remaining, we could not trust the priest – or ultimately anyone else in the cast! We left the theater unsure on just about every level.

This hymn gives us the opportunity to express our full trust that Jesus is who he claims to be… and that trust leaves no room for doubt – even a fragment. Implied is the possibility that we may have had our uncertainties before, but now that he has risen from the bonds of death, with great conviction we join the long-held confession “Jesus is Lord!”

Without him, life is worthless. A later-scribed gospel song says, “Without him I could do nothing… I’d surely fail… I would be drifting, enslaved, hopeless, lost.” If Christ were stolen from us – yanked away – our lives would be depleted, and we would calculate our existence at zero.

In my growing-up years in east Tennessee, my elders used the word “naught” instead of zero. Even while giving you an address or a phone number, they inserted naught. To them, I’m sure James Bond was called “Naught, Naught, Seven.”

Without reservation, without misgiving, without a shadow of a doubt: this is how we must come to Christ. No qualms, no hesitation. We place our faith in the One who when we know him personally leaves no room for doubt. Confidently we consider our lives worthwhile, never even pondering the possibility of being a zero… a naught-y nobody.



Exciting Use of This as the Closing Easter Hymn
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kw9eB5LP3FU

 

 

“In seasons of distress and grief, my soul has often found relief.”

Hymn – “Sweet Hour of Prayer” – William Walford (1772-1850)

Tune: SWEET HOUR

From an earlier era, many of us recall the radio/television commercial break “How do you spell relief?” The answer, of course, was not “R-E-L-I-E-F”; it was rather “Rolaids.”

This hymnline is not about gastrological distress and grief necessarily; it points more toward that kind of commonly-held malady which confronts most of us at varying degrees. Some are greatly distressed while others are simply stressed out. Some are truly dealing with deep-seated grief while the rest of us may with Charlie Brown be uttering “Good grief” in exasperation for one more seemingly unnecessary distraction.

Nonetheless, we believers all have found in prayer a certain relief from our distress and grief. You may have considered it more “release” in that you finally felt freed from the fettering – pardon my alliteration! As the following line of the hymn continues [“and oft escaped the Tempter’s power by thy return, sweet hour of prayer.”], our prayer life has often allowed us to escape the traps set by the Tempter along our pathway through uncharted territory.

These ‘old gospel songs’ often get us back to the basics of our faith experience; in this case, the hymn-writer is reminding us that the sweet time spent in prayer at the throne provides us with much more than merely the answers to our made-known wants and wishes.

How do I spell relief? Sometimes I spell it P-R-A-Y-E-R.


Vance Perry Multi-track

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KwuYo3Wm5I

 

“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 deep lack of understanding. We are truly puzzled by the way our life is going. We seem to ask “Why?” more often than we 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… 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
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7gMDXylzW8

“(Jesus) threw his loving arms around me, drew me back into his way.”

 Hymn: “I Will Sing the Wondrous Story” – Francis H. Rowley (1854-1952)

Tunes: WONDROUS STORY, HYFRYDOL

 

This hymnline picks up on the Good Shepherd image:

            “I was lost, but Jesus found me,

            Found the sheep that went astray,

            Threw his loving arms around me,

            Drew me back into his way.”

A stray lamb: that would describe most of us at one time or another… maybe now. We’ve wandered off from the fold and find ourselves lost and alone – maybe wet and cold – for sure, miserable. We may have moseyed off accidentally, made a wrong turn, suddenly realized we were detached from the flock. We may find ourselves in this condition because we made an attempt to escape; we are like the prodigal. Perhaps we felt forced out because we didn’t fit in anymore. Whatever the reason, we are aware that we are strays.  

The beauty of the Good Shepherd analogy is this: we are find-able.

The Ever-searching One cleans us up, dries us off, throws a blanket around us to be sure we are warm, feeds our hunger, makes sure we are well again and that we find our way “back into his way.”

Even as a young child, this stanza of the hymn caught my attention and seared into my brain the beauty of the picture it painted… long before I knew the John 10 passage or appreciated the great artworks based on the metaphor.

The next time we are estranged, let’s try this hymn/prayer:

            “I am lost. Jesus, find me.

            Find this sheep who’s gone astray.

            Throw your loving arms around me,

            Draw me back into your way.”