Wordwise Hymns

Thank you, Daniel, for your gracious note. It was a great blessing to me. Sincere sympathy on the loss of your wife after a partnership of so many years. Praise the Lord we do not “sorrow as others who have no hope.” A grand reunion day is coming!

For your comfort and encouragement, here’s a glorious arrangement of the hymn, Come, Ye Disconsolate. May we both be blessed by the truth it proclaims that “earth has no sorrow that heaven cannot heal”

I’m not quite as far along the trail as you are, at age 77. I was saved at the age of seven, so on August 14th will celebrate my 70th spiritual birthday. Lord willing, my wife and I will celebrate our 50th wedding anniversary in June. Health issues seem to intrude more as the years go by, but Beth is still able to play the piano for our church services. And, though I’m “retired”…sort of :-), I’m still able to write, to sing, and to preach, as the Lord provides opportunities.

Your comment from David Dockery hits the proverbial nail on the head. Too few Christians realize that, beyond the Word of God, the greatest devotional resource we have is a good hymn book. It’s a treasury of about 2,000 years of rich commentary on the Word, and testimony to Christian experience.

As well as serving the Lord as a pastor and a Bible college professor, in past years, I’ve also had experience as a choir director and service leader. It’s been my practice, whether choosing songs for a service where I’m to preach, or where another will do so, to select congregational numbers that follow the theme of the Bible message. I want to both enhance and reinforce the preaching, and also frame our response to it.

My son, now a church planter in Mexico City, does the same. The other day he said that he does try to use some more contemporary songs. But he finds so many of them say basically the same thing, so it’s difficult to find ones that will fit a particular theme. H-m-m! That, at one and the same time, points out a weakness of much contemporary music, and the incredible richness of our traditional hymnody. With you, I grieve that so many congregations are hymnologically illiterate. They simply do not know what they’re missing.

We are definitely a hymn-loving family. For my birthday this year our son Jim and family gave me a blanket he designed. It’s imprinted with a gospel song I love, Bliss’s Jesus Loves Even Me. And to the left of the hymn is a section of Romans 8 that assures us nothing can separate us from the love of Christ. It has certainly received a lot of amazed comment from visitors. I wanted to send along a picture of it, but couldn’t figure out how to put a picture in a blog reply.

God bless you, and keep you.

Robert