We Will Follow

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Yesterday I preached the morning sermon at a Mennonite church in Hartville, Ohio. That’s the town where I grew up. They’ve asked me to write a history book about the congregation.

At the end of the worship service, we sang, “We will follow, we will follow Jesus, we will follow everywhere he goes.” A simple Zimbabwean traditional tune, the song gave congregants the chance to affirm our desire to be followers of Christ.

The message was entitled “Called to Remember,” and I used Exodus 17:14 for my thoughts. Moses had been called to write down Israel’s stories in order to remember them.

I won’t soon forget the simple affirmation and conclusion in song after I preached. With instruments and congregational voices, we affirmed that we want to follow Jesus everywhere he goes.

O Worship the King

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The first song we sang in worship yesterday morning was “O Worship the King.” I traveled to a remote town on the western Virginia border, near West Virginia, to a small church to preach the morning sermon for them.

We began with the early nineteenth-century lyrics from Robert H. Grant, used countless times in opening worship. And rightly so. The lyrics soar and invite the singer and those in worship to enter into the very presence of God.

God is our Shield and Defender, the Ancient of Days, pavilioned in splendor and girded with praise. Some twenty folks in that small church yesterday morning lifted their voices in praise, surrounded by the hills of western Virginia, nestled back in a little-traveled region of the state.

In our singing, we told of God’s might, we sang of God’s grace, we celebrated God’s bountiful care. Finally, we proclaimed that in God we do trust, nor find Him to fail; God’s mercies how tender, how firm to the end, our Maker, Defender, Redeemer and Friend!

Come Let Us All Unite To Sing

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An anonymous hymn writer from the early 1800s calls us to unite in the singing of God’s incredible love. Come, let us all unite to sing, the writer begins, and praise the blessings of God’s love.

Yesterday we began our outdoor covid worship service on the church parking lot with this great hymn. We couldn’t hear others much because we were outside and it was cold. Nevertheless, we sang of God’s incredible love, a good place to begin any worship service.

The unknown hymn-writer acknowledges our human condition, our sinful nature, and our dependence on the divine. We are mortals, the song reveals, and we are best to sing in the glory and wonder and strength of God’s good love.

The last verse begins with an affirmation of our good condition here, on this planet. The promises of God our spirits cheer, and we rest in the sun and shield of God’s care. God is our help, our hope, and our stay. Let us sing of God’s love today!

Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing

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One of my favorite hymns comes from lyrics penned by Robert Robinson in 1758. A British songwriter, Robinson’s “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing” became popularized by an American folk tune known as “Nettleton.”

A catchy and much-loved tune, the lyrics have survived for two-and-a-half centuries because they convey vibrant theological and Biblical themes and because they express a heart language of faith toward a merciful God who sustains, keeps, and protects those who trust in Him.

Just as a strong creek or river channels water for centuries and even millennia, so have God’s streams of mercy sustained and nurtured those who put their trust in God.

Joseph Funk included Come Thou Fount in his Mennonite Hymn Book of 1847, an English language songbook created in Singers Glen, Va. In the first edition of Genuine Church Music of 1832, later known as Harmonia Sacra, Funk included the much-loved hymn. Most hymnals today include the favorite gospel song. Our prayer should always be, “Come thou fount of every blessing, tune our hearts to sing thy grace.”

God of Our Strength

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Fanny Crosby’s great hymn God of Our Strength expresses the Christian’s confidence in divine inspiration and hope for daily living. God’s strength comes to us as the source of life and the fount of love.

In the assurance of God’s love and infilling Holy Spirit, we can draw strength for the living of our lives. God’s power is enthroned above yet available to humans as the very source of our living.

For this strength, we wait on God, our sure defense in whatever life brings our way. God is our fount of love, and may our devotion’s sacred flame awaken our souls to praise God’s name.

God of our strength, on thee we call, God of our hope, our light our all; thy name we praise, they love adore, our rock, our shield, forevermore. This hope in God’s strength is the Christian’s prayer, hope, inspiration, and bedrock assurance.

Zion Mennonite Church worship singing God is our Strength

We Are One in the Spirit

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We are One in the Spirit reminds us that as Christians work together in love, they can change and positively impact the world. Written in the 1960s, I first learned the song in the early 1970s. I chose to lead this wonderful song as a congregational response song following the sermon yesterday.   

The new Voices Together hymnal editors decided to publish this favorite tune, which is not included in many songbooks. The refrain is the strong part of the melody, in which we express that in our love, others will know Christ. 

These are days of continual discernment. At the church where I lead music occasionally, we meet outside for worship during the pandemic. We are deliberating on when and in what ways we can use our sanctuary again for worship. And I noticed that the new hymnal editors used inclusive language in the third verse, an appropriate exercise of updating terminology for a different era than when Peter Scholtes wrote the lyrics in 1966.

Not only in matters of discernment, which are ongoing in every generation for the church, but in our outreach must Christ be known in our love. The verses of this song are in a minor key, but the transition to the refrain flashes a major chord, indicative of the strength in this song’s assertion that the world will know Christ through our love.

Love Divine, All Loves Excelling

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Charles Wesley wrote a grand hymn of praise that expresses Christian affirmation for the love that comes from Christ. “Love divine, all loves excelling, joy of heaven to earth come down; fix in us thy humble dwelling, all thy faithful mercies crown.”

In the last phrase of the first verse, Wesley identifies the source of Christian love as being in Christ. “Visit us with thy salvation, enter every trembling heart.” In the second verse, Wesley penned an invitation that Christ would breathe His Holy Spirit into every troubled breast.

When Charles Wesley wrote the text for this great church hymn in 1747, my Yoder ancestors had just arrived in colonial Pennsylvania five years earlier. With the promise of Christ’s Spirit in our hearts, Wesley’s hymn conveys hope and courage to travelers and immigrants, like the Yoders and many other immigrants who sailed for Pennsylvania in the eighteenth century.

At my wedding in a small church over forty years ago, my wife and I chose “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling” as one of the congregational hymns to be sung by everyone in attendance. We sang in Charles Wesley’s English language, though many of the ancestors of those who attended our wedding spoke German when their ships arrived in the 1700s. In a flourish with the last verse, Wesley invites Love Divine to finish his new creation, true and spotless, changed from glory into glory, lost in wonder, love, and praise.

Cast Down Your Cares

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One of the lasting songs from the Jesus Music era of the 1970s is Cast Down Your Cares, written in 1977 by John Michael Talbot. This song is a simple guitar tune from the 1970s decade of musical change for the church and contemporary Christian music. Cast Down Your Cares continues to inspire and speak today.

Talbot’s lyrics encourage us to lay down our cares, to cast all our cares upon Him who loves us. Talbot encouraged us to take up the cross and so bring light to the nations. We must go, the refrain soars, as a light to the nations, take up the cross and follow where he leads. We must go as a light to the nations, prepared to wear a crown of thorns to bring his peace.

Several years after Talbot wrote Cast Down Your Cares, my wife and I recorded the song in a small studio located in a friend’s home. During the Covid era, I moved the music from a CD to the digital realm and made it more accessible. May we go as a light to the nations and follow where He leads. I hope the tune inspires you as it has me.

Cast Down Your Cares, a song by John Michael Talbot, recorded on “A Sacrifice of Praise” album, 1986, by Joy & Elwood Yoder

In the Bulb There is a Flower

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At a memorial service I attended recently for a ninety-two-year-old member of our congregation who passed away, his great-grandchildren sang “In the Bulb There is a Flower.” The tune and profound message stick with me long after the service ended.

In her lyrics from 1985, Natalie Sleeth captured the mystery of life and death, of giving up and gaining, of despair and finding hope. “In the bulb there is a flower, in the seed, an apple tree; in cocoons, a hidden promise: butterflies will soon be free! In the cold and snow of winter there’s a spring that waits to be, unrevealed until its season, something God alone can see.”

This morning when I rose from my bed, it was still dark outside. By the time I sat at my desk with a cup of coffee to study my morning Sunday school lesson, the sun had begun to peek up over the Massanutten Mountain. The light streamed in my eyes and fully awakened me for the work ahead. It was a glorious moment of rebirth, of the darkness turning to dawn and then day, of the beauty of God’s nature once again revealed.

In the mysteries of our lives, we hope and pray for the darkness to turn to the day. “There’s a song in every silence,” Natalie Sleeth penned, “seeking word and melody.” As the sun rises in the mornings of our lives, we hope and have confidence in God’s sustaining love, “unrevealed until its season, something God alone can see.”