Hymn Stories (Ryan Bush) | The Whole Counsel

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Welcome to the Whole Council Podcast, I'm Jon Snyder, and with me is Ryan Bush. Ryan is the director of a missionary agency that trains pastors in Kenya and in Ecuador.

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How many years have you been doing that? Six years now. And Ryan also wears the hat of having a podcast dealing with hymn stories.

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So Ryan, tell us how that came about, and then we want to talk about hymns today. And by the way, any information you would like on International Church Planters, which is the mission that Ryan leads, you can find that in the show notes and see that in the link.

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So Ryan, tell us something about the podcast. Yeah, so it kind of stumbled upon it, or maybe it fell in my lap.

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A few years ago, I became interested in the songs of our faith.

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Really, the Lord was doing something in my own life in terms of my seriousness about shepherding my family and guarding what they were taking in for their spiritual nourishment, as well as myself, what

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I myself was consuming. And it set me on this sort of journey to learning to appreciate hymns and seeing the value of them.

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And kind of a side effect of that was learning these stories behind the hymns and about them.

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So why a certain hymn was written, and then how hymns were used in the lives of Christians over the past hundreds of years and how they've ministered.

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And I was so encouraged. Honestly, at first I fell in love with hymns.

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I just so moved by the songs of our faith that have stood the test of time, how they minister to me.

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And then as I saw their background, I fell in love with the hymn writers and their suffering, their faithfulness, their love for Christ was very meaningful to me.

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And so I thought, I want to share this with others. That's maybe a downfall of mine.

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I tend to take on probably too many projects, but I thought this is worth it to try to put something together to share with others the rich history and meaning behind these hymns so that they too could be moved by them, encouraged to listen to them and drawn closer to Christ.

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So Hymn Stories, the podcast, was born because of that. Well, one of the things we want to talk about is that in spite of the extra work that sometimes is required with hymns, so you mentioned family.

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I think a lot of the church scene, being a pastor, when we first planted the work here 21 years ago, one of the initial questions is, well, what kind of hymnal would we use?

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Or are we going to even use a hymnal? Are we going to do like an overhead projector with just choruses? And I was 21 years younger then, so I think that some of the people expected it would just be a lighter approach.

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And so I said, no, actually, I have a great hymnal in mind, but we're not gonna have a church vote on it.

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And you can kind of get away with this in the first weeks of a church plant. I said, I'm gonna pick the hymnal and we're not gonna have a vote, but here's the deal.

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If after five years, you don't love this hymnal and you want any other hymnal instead or anything else,

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I'll buy all those hymnals back from the church, but it'll never happen. So we used a hymnal that I found in Great Britain that is now out of print and the church loves it.

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The people love to use it for family and for individual quiet times and as a church.

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And if I ever mention adding a few new songs that we haven't sung before,

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I get this up rising. I get this mob rise up and say, how dare you adjust our hymnal?

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This is the way Paul did it. So I laugh to myself sometimes because I sometimes feel like I created a monster that loves the hymnal as much as I do.

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So in spite of the fact that archaic language and sometimes complex thought and older style tunes do require extra work, why would we think that it's worth it?

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So what are some areas that you find that hymns are particularly beneficial for?

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Yeah. So for me, I, and in my family, as we began to implement the use of hymns and we began to...

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Of course, we knew a good number, but as I exposed my family to more of those, we learned new ones.

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And of course, they're not new, but they're new to us. One thing that I began to see is that my kids and myself, my wife, we were learning theological concepts from these songs and we were grappling with theological issues that we hadn't expected to grapple with.

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But as you sing, you know, I ask the Lord that I might grow, John Newton hymn from the

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And it says that He's breaking our earthly schemes of joy. Yeah, that we may find our joy in Him.

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Yeah, yeah. You talk about being hit between the eyes and then having to talk to your kids about, here's the ways that the

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Lord has broken my earthly schemes. When I was this age, this is what happened. And in fact, this is happening now.

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Are there any earthly schemes that you have that you're trying to find your own joy in something else? So, yeah, it forced us to confront the truths of Scripture in a way that we hadn't before.

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And I will say the complex thought thing, that kind of scared me at first.

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I was worried about my kids being lost in it. I was wrong.

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I was dead wrong. Kids are smarter than we think. They can handle a lot more than we realize.

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And because, you know, this is another conversation, but because the culture has put a premium on more surface level communication and thought and wording and writing, it doesn't necessarily mean that we have to conform to that as followers of Christ.

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And just because a song is more complex doesn't mean that it's not good.

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In fact, I think that the complex thought in hymns is one of the great strengths of it. Yeah, we talked before the podcast,

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Colossians 3, and there's a mirror verse in Ephesians, but in Colossians 3, verse 16,

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Paul says this, let the word of Christ richly dwell within you. Yeah. And the

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Greek there is quite picturesque. It's almost as if you throw open the front door, and it's not like the way you open a door to a neighbor that you say, hey, come on in, and you only expect them to come into the living room.

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If they walked past you and went to your bedroom, you'd go, hey, something wrong?

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What's going on? And then a friend, they can come in and they can go, I mean, they can go in your kitchen, they can go in your refrigerator if they want, but family, they go everywhere, like kids, they go everywhere.

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And we throw open the door of our soul and every door in the soul, every area of life, every compartment that we wouldn't be tempted to close.

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We throw it open to the word of Christ to have free access to. And then strangely,

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Paul says some other things about that. He says, do this with all wisdom, teaching and admonishing one another with psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with thankfulness in your heart to God.

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So Paul puts singing, and we're talking about hymns or psalms, whatever, good truth being sung is a tool for teaching.

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Charles Wesley and John Wesley, 18th century, as the movement was really getting moving over the evangelical revival, the

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Methodist movement, obviously they were very significant men. And in the early days,

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John was the author who tended to focus on writing theological books, publishing his sermons.

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Charles kind of focused on writing hymns. And in the early days of the movement,

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Charles told John that if John wanted to write all the theological works, that would be fine.

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And Charles would write the great majority of the hymns, but by the end of their life, the Methodist would believe what

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Charles wrote because people tend to believe what they sing. And we were talking about the fact that you and I almost have read almost nothing of John Wesley's works, but we know scores of hymns by Charles Wesley.

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And Charles Wesley has, the best of his hymns, have helped fashion my understanding of the

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Lord, have helped throw the doors of the heart open. So the wonderful hymn, And Can It Be, that astonishment as we see the

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Son of God take our place. And it's just so beautiful, and that was taught to me through a hymn.

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Yeah, yeah, my chains fell off. It... Hymns teach us what we sing, absolutely teaches us for good, for better, for worse.

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But I think even before that, isn't it amazing that God fashioned our bodies, our vocal chords, our minds with the ability to make music, to sing?

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And the reason for that is so that we could sing praises to Him.

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I mean, we don't need to sing to live. We need to breathe, we need to eat, we seek shelter, all of these things.

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But God said, I'm gonna make these people a singing people.

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So when we sing, when we sing songs, Christian songs, hymns, spiritual songs, psalms, it is...

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What a wonderful thing it is to think that we are breathing in the air that God gave us to breathe and pushing it through the vocal chords that God designed to sing out these words to praise this majestic, holy, righteous, eternal

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God who made us. What a precious, wonderful thing that we can relate to our

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Maker that way. And to me, that makes me think and put such supreme importance on what

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I'm singing, what words are coming out of my mouth in praise to Him. I want them to be pleasing to Him.

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I wanna sing yes in spirit, with my emotion, with ardent love and joy, but I want it to be in truth. I want to sing things that are true about God, that represent

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Him well, that are biblical, and scripture -saturated.

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A number of years ago, we had a young couple visit the church where I'd serve, and they had come from kind of a

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Roman Catholic and charismatic background, pretty unchurched, really. So they came and they had been converted just before coming to the church where I pastor.

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And so when they arrived, they had no contact with hymns, and here we are singing out of an old hymnal.

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So we had them for supper one night, and I was talking with them, and I said, I kind of felt a little embarrassed about the hymnal.

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It's kind of hard work. And so I didn't know how they would approach that. They had no contact with that.

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So I said to them, the hymnal's a little difficult, and they interrupted me. They said, wait, don't ever apologize for this hymnal.

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They said, you could find the gospel in this hymnal. I mean, you could find God through these words.

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It's the gospel. And we grew up in church traditions that never gave us the path to God, and here it is in a songbook.

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So I really felt immediately... They didn't mean for it to be, but I felt terribly rebuked, like, what am

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I? I'm such a wimp. And it just made me appreciate... I never needed to give in to the kind of the quiet whisper that sometimes you hear in church groups, even by well -meaning people, that if you would adjust music to be easier for everybody, we'd get more people in here and that would do more good.

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I do think that that's a lie, because appetite really is what drives us. If you're hungry for the

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Lord, you'll sing. Absolutely. But also the other lie is that when we gather on Sunday, it's all about getting everybody that you can get into the building.

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And we talked about, ultimately, hymn singing, it's not even primarily a tool for our education and giving truths to other people, but the pleasure of our

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King. We want to sing things that God, if we could humanize it, if you could forgive this kind of anthropomorphism, that God would be pleased that he showed up at church with us

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Sunday. And I find that takes care of just about 90 % of my problems with singing.

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I'm embarrassed to sing sometimes. Sometimes I have to lead out in the front of the church and I just wanna mumble and let the piano carry it.

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And then sometimes you're sitting beside somebody and you're... And I just think, John, just think, like you mentioned, just think of the things you're allowed to say to your

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King, and then everything else just becomes unimportant. Yeah. And we think about the scenes of heaven that we have in the

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Revelation, and what do we see them doing time and time again?

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But lifting their voices in song to the King. Returning to the point about children, the complexity,

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I've got a four -year -old, his name's Seth, just a joy and also a rascal at the same time.

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But early on, one thing I do each night with him and his older brother, they're the two youngest, when

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I put them down to bed, we go over their catechism questions, we pray, and then we'll sing several hymns together.

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I couldn't get out of that these days if I wanted to. There's no getting out of that. They hold me accountable to that.

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They love it. They can't go to sleep without it. But Rock of Ages is one that we'd always sing, and my son, you just see his growing...

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At first, he loved that song. He always wanted it, but he called it the Rocket Song. In his mind, I was saying

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Rocket Ages. And so he wanted to sing the song about the rocket.

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Now, over time, he understood that. A few months ago, I was just doing something in the house, and he was nearby.

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He was paying no attention to me whatsoever. And all of a sudden, I heard him singing, Our God, our help of ages past, our hope for years.

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This is a four -year -old. He got almost through that whole stanza. And it's old Isaac Watts, Our God, our help from ages past.

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And I just thought, thank you, Lord. Now, does he understand all of the theological nuance?

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And no, of course not, but he will. He will. Yeah, really. Like you mentioned, the uniqueness of the human makeup, that song is a part of how

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God designed us, that it is such a great teaching tool. And I remember being in a religious college, a

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Christian college, where you would hear young people make decisions, and they would make decisions based on the newest thing that came out on the radio, the newest pop song.

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So and so sang in his song, and I'm thinking, you're gonna make a life decision based on Bon Jovi? That's terrible.

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But yeah, to have our hearts filled with deep realities, and songs condense that into potent phrases, poetry does.

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And then, yeah, makes a wonderful vehicle. Yeah, I like to describe hymns as a little sermon you can carry with you.

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If you know a good, solid hymn by heart, and you can sing it by heart, you're preaching to yourself.

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And some people say, I've had a few people ask me, well, you always say you want hymns to be rooted in Scripture, and Scripture, why don't you just sing the

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Scriptures? Why don't you just sing the Psalms? Why would you bring in these? And I understand the argument. But in my mind, a hymn is, we sing hymns for the same reason we preach sermons.

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Whenever I sing a good biblical hymn, the text is explained to me. I think about it in ways that I haven't thought about it before.

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It's applied to my life in ways that I hadn't thought about it being applied before.

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So hymns, for me, it's a way to, first and foremost, to praise my

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King, my Savior. It's a way to teach myself, my children. But it's also, it's a weapon for me.

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It's a shield. It's a, I like to say it's a weapon of war. I am in a spiritual battle.

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And I want to know these songs of faith so that I can repeat them to myself and sing them to myself.

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Whenever I'm driving down to New Albany, and there's a torrential rain pour, and it's a little shaky out there, and I feel a little fear.

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Or I want my kids, when they leave my home and they face miscarriage, they face cancer, they face, who am

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I going to marry? That, of course, they hold to the scriptures first and foremost. But they have these songs of the faith that have stood the test of time that they can go back to, to redirect their hearts to Christ.

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I think one great use of the hymns also, I would say, is to set the heart in a very definite direction, first thing in the day.

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Yeah. So kind of combined with Bible reading. Absolutely. So the simple way that I've tried to do through the years is, if you think of the affections of your heart like an anchor hanging from a boat, it's gonna catch on something.

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And once it catches, it's gonna hold. So if you leave it just kind of free, just kind of casually, non -intentionally go through the day, it generally will hang up on self.

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Self will be the reason. I mean, everything in the world then becomes like, what do I wanna do today?

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Or what do I wanna do with my time when I'm done doing my work? And it's all about John.

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Then the other way is that I fix that anchor to the realities of God.

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And one way I do that is in the quiet time, first thing of the day. But one way I get my heart prepared and I think is, which is much more beneficial than having a giant library is to have a humble, receptive heart, is what

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I try to do is I pick my hymnal up and I sing quietly until I'm no longer worried about how long

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I've been singing. Like I got things to do, I got people coming. So I just think, I get up in time and I start to sing.

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And when I just am thrilled with what I'm singing and I'm not worried about how long I've been singing, then I know, okay, now

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I can come to the scripture. And it's a very different receptivity in my own heart.

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And I did that in college. I shared a room actually with the guy that is a co -pastor with me, Chuck. We shared a room in college and it was a big room.

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But I mean, you're sharing a room with a guy and you're a 20 year old. And I had just become a real believer and laid aside the mask.

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And I remember kneeling, I didn't have anywhere to go. So I would set my alarm, I'd get up and maybe

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Chuck was still asleep, I can't remember. But if somebody else is in the room, I would just kneel beside my bed, open my

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Bible, open a hymn book, and then I would grab my pillow. And I would look at my hymn book and I'd get like, okay,

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I know that hymn. And I'd stick my face in my pillow and I'd sing for a while. Then I'd look at another hymn. And like your friend would look like, what are you doing over there?

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I'm like, well, I'm singing, but I didn't wanna wake you up. I didn't care who saw it. And I would say to God, since you're

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God, I think you probably could still hear it, even though Chuck can't hear it. I mean, I was a baby Christian, but that's how

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I prayed. And that's how I sang in the earliest days when I had to share rooms with other people. That reminds me of the old

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Puritan saying, pray until you pray. Pray, even if it's cold, if it feels forced, keep praying until you feel the warmth come into your heart toward Christ.

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It sounds like that's what you do with singing. So do you typically pick out one hymn to sing in the morning during your time with the

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Lord? Or do you sing multiple? Well, that's the timing issue. Now, as a pastor, I do have sometimes a more flexible schedule.

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Yeah. Sometimes it's worse, but sometimes it's nicer. Yeah. So generally what

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I do, I do have a system and I'm not very systematic ever, but this is my basic system.

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I try to move from hymns that speak about the greatness of God, then to the hymns that speak of the great work of redemption, and then to hymns that speak of the struggles of the

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Christian life or the joys of the triumphs of the Christian life. But I try to move in that order. And sometimes your heart is broken over something, you just go straight to the broken hearted songs.

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But I think if we consider the Psalms of the Bible as a good balance, those great realities are all held in perfect balance in the

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Psalms. Yeah. And so I try to balance them, but I almost always start with the big picture of God just to kind of put

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John Snyder in the right perspective. So no matter how broken hearted I am, whether I've slept that night before or not, or whether life is just going great, all of that is put in its proper perspective when

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I see him in the hymn. And so I just kind of... The hymnals are generally divided up along those kind of topics.

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So I usually flip through and pick one of each topic until I'm just so thrilled with singing that I forget that I'm singing, and then

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I think I better get to the scripture. Yeah, yeah, that's good. But that's how I do it. Yeah. I'm usually not very regimented.

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Yeah, and me neither. I typically will sing a hymn in the morning before, and my office kind of set off for my family, so I can belt it out.

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But I will say it's a rough go of the melody.

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I think it's one thing I like to encourage people. We gotta get over worrying about how we sound, you know what

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I mean? Like, well, I don't sing that well. So what? Yeah, yeah. In fact, in the last

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Hymn Stories episode, typically my daughter sings in the Hymn Stories, because she has a beautiful voice.

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But I sang a couple of verses in the last Hymn Stories, William Cooper's, There's a

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Fountain Filled with Blood. And I say in there, and it's not good. I tried to edit it a little bit, make it sound a little better.

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I didn't have any auto -tune, but I did try to... Yeah, you need more machines. But it has been so meaningful to me, that particular hymn, as I've sought

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Christ and sought to make the gospel the hope of my heart every minute of every day, that I wanted to sing it.

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And as an encouragement to those listening, to just sing, just sing to the Lord. Don't worry about how you sound.

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Yeah. And if you're leading your family in singing, don't worry about if you get off. I tell you, we sing hymns every day, just about every day with my family.

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It's very often where my wife says, can we stop and just start it over? Let me start us this time.

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Yeah, when you pitch it. I have the problem of pitching it here, and the girls in my family say like,

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I'm not gonna be able to reach that. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And again, it comes down to humility and realizing it's not about...

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Who cares if I sing terribly, if I don't sound good or I embarrass myself a little bit. Praise the

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Lord for that reminder of my need. But we sing for joy, we don't sing for accolades.

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Yeah, and so when you have visitors come over, you just need to give a little disclaimer, like this could hurt. I absolutely do.

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But it'll be good for you. Yeah. Let's talk about another topic, and we won't be able to spend as much time on these.

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Just some practical questions. How can we... Let's say it this way.

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If you lived to be 200, you would probably not have enough life to sing every

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Christian religious song that's been written. Yeah. So you're gonna have to exercise discernment.

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Yes. Not between the good and the bad, but between the good and the best, so that it's just wise, so that you can get the very best of the best.

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Now, when we talk about hymns singing in songs and people say, well, what about hymns versus...

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That's not really what we're talking about. Right. Hymns, choruses, new versus old. But how would you explain why you feel that the older hymns in particular are really the best of the best, and so you feel that that's a wise use of your effort?

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Yeah. Well, and I think... And really looking at old versus new isn't the right metric either.

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Right, right. But there are some advantages to the older hymns.

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One is, and it's very practical, and if you're a leader of a church or maybe starting a church, the older hymns don't have a copyright on them, unless they've been reworked after 1920 or something like that.

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So as far as making copies and using them in certain... In resources or for your church or putting on the screen, something you don't have to worry about.

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It's actually a helpful thing. Another helpful part of an old...

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Another helpful aspect of old hymns is that they've been distilled. And by that, I mean, kind of the ones that aren't so good have been left by the wayside.

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Those that have stood the test of time generally are the ones that we wanna sing, that they're just full of truth, they're rich, they're theologically sound, and we can trust them.

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One other aspect of this, and this is still an issue with some old hymns is, there's some really great modern hymn writers.

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We don't know what they're gonna be doing next year. We don't know what their theology is gonna do in five years from now.

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We hope and pray and we have a lot of confidence in them. But these guys and women who lived hundreds of years ago, there's no more question marks about that.

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Again, that brings up another question though. For example, the very popular hymn, It Is Well With My Soul, that doesn't have a great ending in terms of that author's theology.

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Probably not something we wanna get into now, but the older hymns do have some safeguards there in terms of authors that we can not worry about what they're gonna do in the future.

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Yeah, and even William Cooper, the great hymnist and friend of John Newton. He did reach some pretty deep depths.

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Yes, absolutely. But in a sense, the things they say are true, and we grab hold of that and we realize it came through an imperfect instrument.

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But like you mentioned, the test of time does, it just really does filter out the okay hymns that Isaac Watts wrote.

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Not everything Watts wrote is great. Right. Not everything Wesley wrote, not everything Dodridge wrote, not everything

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Top Lady wrote. Some of them were... Some of their songs were guided by religious battles of the day, and they were kinda bitter.

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And you might pretend like you're singing to God, but really you're blasting the other camp. Right. And those have not been preserved.

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You can find them... I have old hymns, so I find them in the old hymns and I think, man, that was kinda rubbish.

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But while Charles Wesley was a Methodist and I'm a Baptist, and he leaned toward the Arminian side and I would lean toward the

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Reform side, when I read And Can It Be, I think, man, he's talking about the same king.

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And so... Yeah. Yeah, the funny thing about John Wesley, he edited a lot of...

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He would edit Calvinistic hymns and make them less Calvinistic. There was a joke in John Wesley's day, his friends had this joke, they said, we're just glad that John did not live in the first century or he would have tried to have edited the

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Gospel of John. But somebody did edit John Wesley once, his hymns, he and Charles, a guy named

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John Barrage. John Barrage was a Calvinistic coworker with the Wesleys, a friend of George Whitefield, mighty preacher, a bit of a maverick.

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He labored in Northern England. Barrage's people were extremely simple, they were uneducated, this kind of the rough area.

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So it's not Londoners, these are country folks. So he took all of Wesley's hymns that he liked and he made it so that the ending of each line had a single thought, so not complex thought that you would have to go through the whole stanza to get the thought.

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And when Wesley found this out, he was furious. He said, you have turned my brother's poetry into doggerel.

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And it wasn't as good. The poetry wasn't as good, but the simple people could grasp it. So anyway, when we think about, as you mentioned, it's not old versus new.

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I remember as an early believer in college, I remember reading A. W. Tozer who said that a good hymnal in the church rescues you from a lot of bad sermons, because sometimes you go to a church and the sermon is just terrible, but you can get a good hymn, you can learn something.

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But one of the things he said was, get a hymnal for your own quiet times, don't get one under 100 years old.

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Now, that's just to say it's not legalistic, but as you mentioned, to pass the test of time is a really great filter.

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Another thing though, everything that we do, everything we write, our podcasts, anything we preach, it's always in some measure affected by our religious situation, our culture, our own experiences.

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If you read hymns or songs, if you use these that were written in times where the church was a bit shallow, light, then you tend to get, even among the best of them, shallow and light perspectives.

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So there is a benefit of singing the hymns about the beauty of Christ, the triumph of Christ, the struggles of the

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Christian life, whatever you're singing, but they come from men and women who have been through the fire, so to speak.

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Or as one old writer said, I like books that smell like the prison, from people who've been persecuted.

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We talked about Samuel Rutherford's letters. It's not just nice letters, it's the letters of a man who paid a terrible cost to love

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Christ. So I want to know what he writes. So those older hymns do sometimes come from periods where the sight of God...

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I would say it this way, it's like people wrote songs about Him after He drew near to them.

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So either in times of revival, but not just revival, but maybe like in the Puritans or earlier, in times of great suffering, and God drew near to His people, and they write of that account.

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Another thing about hymns that we wanna mention is that because these songs are written by men and women, and it's not the inspired word of God, then we do need to understand that we have a responsibility by the grace of God to balance our diet.

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You can fall in love with hymns in a certain category and kind of ignore the others, and then that's not healthy.

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My suggestion, what I try to do with my own... With the church and with my own soul, is to balance out two great categories, objective truths and Christian experiences.

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So when we mentioned it's not hymn versus chorus or hymn versus... We didn't say this, but one of the benefits of a hymn is also what some people feel would be a weakness, is complexity.

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A hymn does give you enough room to teach a truth carefully, whereas a chorus, if it's a repetition of a few key phrases, even if the phrases are great phrases, there's not much room in the chorus to really give that truth a context that is more beneficial.

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So when we think about hymns with objective and experiential truths, so we sing hymns that give us the clearest views, the most biblical views of God, but also,

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I think, honest views of the Christian life, and that is a place where I think choruses can fall down, in particular, even those that quote

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Psalms. So I've had people at times say to me, why don't you sing choruses?

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I say, well, I'm not against choruses, but we feel that the hymns have some better benefits. We feel that in these areas.

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And they say, well, but that chorus that we just sang, all it is, it's a statement from the book of Psalms.

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And I say, yes, but you took one phrase from Psalms and you've presented it as if it's the whole of the

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Christian life. So something like, I just live to worship you, and you sing it a hundred times.

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I can't do that because I can't say to God, the only thing I get up to do today is just worship you.

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I can say, God, I want that to be true. You mentioned a hymn that in our hymn book is 698, it's one of our favorites,

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I ask the Lord that I might grow. So that's a great picture. I'm begging God to grow my soul.

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Mm -hmm. What happens next shocks me. It's like He lets all the power of hell against me, and it just flattens me and it strips me.

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And then in the end, I realized it was so that Christ will be my great treasure. And we have a hymn in our book by Charles Wesley, Oh, love divine, how sweet thou art.

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He says, okay, that's a great statement. Then he goes on to be very honest. When shall I find my heart all taken up with thee?

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God, I know your love is perfectly sweet, but my heart is unresponsive, it's cold, it's dull.

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When will I lay aside this dull husk of a heart and be free to love you as you deserve?

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That does not generally show up in the modern chorus, the agony of longing to love God appropriately, or the struggle of the

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Christian life, or the questions you throw to God and say, are you trying to kill me? Like Newton said, are you trying to kill your worm?

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You're stomping on me. So good balance in the hymns. All of which is what we see in the

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Psalms. This struggle and this balance between this objective and subjective perspective.

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Yeah, that's so good. That's so good. One of the things that has impacted me the most in my,

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I guess you could say, study or investigation in the backgrounds of hymns and accompanying stories, and it caught me by surprise, honestly, because I just haven't thought as much about this, is how often hymns are requested by those who are inside of eternity, by those who are on their deathbeds.

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One of my favorites is Frances Ridley Havergill, who wrote...

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Take My Life. Yeah. Who wrote Take My Life and Let It Be.

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The doctor said, Frances, you don't have much time to live at all.

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And she said, is it true? And he said, yeah, it's true. Tenderly trying to help her.

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And she said, that's too good to be true. I cannot wait to see my Christ.

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And she asked the people there to sing John Newton's How Sweet the Name of Jesus Sounds. And it's just...

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It's very moving to me to think about these saints of old who have run the race well, and to see them dying with songs of praise on their lips.

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It makes me want to live that sort of life and die that sort of death. Oftentimes in the

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Psalms, we see the psalmist boast in God, and he makes... He gives us a description of God.

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He says, He is my strength and my song. And so if you think of the battle scene, you know, to run into battle, and knowing the cost is real.

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Amy Carmichael, the missionary to India said, only theatrical battles are exciting and fun.

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Real battle is blood and loss. And so we get up and we face that.

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We face real heartaches and real sorrows and real struggle. But on that battlefield,

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He is my strength, but He is also the song. It's not enough just to be strength. We stand beside the captain who has never suffered defeat once.

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And as Paul says, He brings us in the train of His victory. We're drawn behind Him.

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And why not fill the battlefield with songs?

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No unbeliever has a reason to do it, but we do. Yeah, absolutely. So before we close up, let me ask you this question.

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Give me a few of your favorite hymn writers. Favorite hymn writers.

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I love the Oney hymns, John Newton and William Cooper's collection.

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In fact, I had an old version PDF and had it printed just so I could have as a devotional guide that I use.

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So I love what they do, what they did. Also really like Frances Ridley Havergal.

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I don't know a whole lot of her hymns, but the ones that I do know, I I appreciate a lot.

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Isaac Watts, of course, Charles Wesley. One other hymn that's been really meaningful to me and actually kind of sparked this whole thing of hymn stories is

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Henry Francis Light, Abide With Me. I heard Kristen Getty sing a version of it.

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I thought, wow, that's amazing. I thought she'd written it. And I went back and looked and looked at, read a bit about the background of it and was really moved, moved by his life and the way that that song developed over decades in his life.

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And some of the information that came out later about that. I won't tell you what it is. You have to go listen to the hymn stories episodes to get that.

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But yeah, those are some of my favorite that have ministered to me over the years. Yeah, I would agree.

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I think Newton is... The older I get, the more Newton is becoming just a favorite of mine, just for the balance, the good theology, but the strong heart.

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Yeah, actually, I would say one that you didn't mention that I think is one of the... Well, there's a

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Welsh one, but the problem is we only have about 100 of his hymns in English, and then there are hundreds and hundreds in Welsh.

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It's William Williams, Pantekellen. Pantekellen, the name William Williams was very popular in the 18th century.

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So you would put the name of where you lived, Pantekellen was the name of the farm you grew up on. So John from so and so.

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William Williams was the Welsh Great Awakening minister who really was kind of a mirror of Charles Wesley.

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He was the hymn writer for the Great Awakening in Wales. And he wrote a number of volumes of hymnals, and his stuff is great.

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He wrote Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah, but that's just... He's probably the most popular one. One of my all -time favorite, and kind of a newer favorite, is

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Anne Steele. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. And so it's like... Here's how people have described

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Anne Steele to me. She was more manly than the men that wrote hymns. And so I'm sorry that's a very sexist comment, but there is a holy militancy in her hymns that puts steel in your backbone, but it's not...

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Of course, it's not the silly machoism, it's built on the valor of Christ. And when

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I read her, I just cannot lay around and tell God how bad life has been to me. So Anne Steele...

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Actually, there's a little biography out by her. I bought it for one of my daughters for Christmas that has all of her hymns in it, but we'll have to put that in the show notes.

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Yeah. There's actually some new in -depth research on her and her family, because there hasn't been done much of it.

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And some interesting things, all good things about her life has come to light.

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But yeah, her hymns, her poems, she has a large volume of poetry that she published under a pseudonym at the beginning.

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Really, really good stuff. Absolutely. Actually, one of her songs is in the Family Worship Guide as well. Yeah, we have a few in our

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Strange Hymnal that we use, and so I always like them. I like Top Lady, although I like his hymns sometimes better than his life.

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He became a bitter antagonist at times, and you just wanna pull them aside and say, you'll do much more good if you just leave the pride out of the battle, just stick with truth.

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And Philip Doddridge, I really like Doddridge, kind of like an Isaac Watts, but maybe a more gentle attitude toward people that weren't in his church.

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He was very patient with Whitefield. Isaac Watts was pretty frustrated with Whitefield. Well, great.

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So we wanna end with this one statement there. This is one of my favorites I've used in different contexts, but there was a medieval

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English Bible translator, Richard Roll, R -O -L -L -E, and after an unusual experience of God dealing with his soul,

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Roll wrote this. He said, I was compelled to sing what

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I once only spoke. So when he's talking about theology, I used to be able to...

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I've talked about Christ, I talk about the Scripture, but something happened, and I feel that I have to sing it.

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And I would say personally, we have podcasts, we have sermons, we have small group studies, we have one -on -one counseling, that kind of makes up my week.

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I am tired at times of being a person who can talk the right...

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Talk about Jesus. I want to be a person whose heart has been inflamed with these truths, and I walk out from before his face and sing the truths to the people.

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Yeah. Amen. So, well, we hope this has been helpful.