The Power of Song - Part 2

An excerpt from a sermon delivered at the Roseville Church of Christ

December 22, 2019

Part 2

Music that grew my faith through the years

The church songs that have meant the most to me have varied some through the years. When we lived in Memphis, as a teenager, I was in a youth chorus. We called it a chorus because we didn’t want it to be confused with the choirs some other churches had. We never sang during the worship service; that was when everybody sang. But our chorus went Christmas caroling as we walked the long halls at the huge veterans’ home in town and we sang for a lot of funerals and weddings. The chorus was our very active youth group.

During that period of time, I came to love some of the more complicated 4-part songs in the book, like “Oh, Lord, our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth… We’ll praise thy name for ever, ever more.” That’s one I like to think of us all singing together in heaven.

And at Christmas my favorite was “Joy to the world, the Lord has come! Let earth receive her king!” Especially the line that goes,
“He rules the world with truth and grace.” Til this day, when our grandson Alex puts the angel on top of the Christmas tree, I have him wait until I can cue up Manheim Steamroller’s version of that song. It is powerful.

But after I left Memphis, a new set of church songs captured my heart. I associate them with our 14 years in Tallahassee, Florida. We were worshipping with a church that had a building surrounded by the Florida State University campus. They are songs of victory, songs about triumph. One of them goes like this:

I heard an old, old story
How a Savior came from glory
How He gave His life on Calvary
To save a wretch like me
I heard about His groaning
Of His precious blood's atoning
Then I repented of my sins
And won the victory

O victory in Jesus
My Savior, forever
He sought me and bought me
With His redeeming blood
He loved me ere I knew Him
And all my love is due Him
He plunged me to victory
Beneath the cleansing flood

I heard about His healing
Of His cleansing pow'r revealing
How He made the lame to walk again
And caused the blind to see

[And I really love that story in Luke about the blind man and his parents and the Pharasees.]
And then I cried, "Dear Jesus
Come and heal my broken spirit”

I then obeyed His blest command and gained the victory

I heard about a mansion
He has built for me in glory
And I heard about the streets of gold
Beyond the crystal sea
About the angels singing
And the old redemption story
And some sweet day I'll sing up there
The song of victory

O victory in Jesus
My Savior, forever
He sought me and bought me
With His redeeming blood
He loved me ere I knew Him
And all my love is due Him
He plunged me to victory
Beneath the cleansing flood.

And there is “This world is not my home.”  That one has really shaped my view of the world in which we live, with all its different peoples fighting to try to control it. And I am reminded that I don’t have to worry about who wins those wars, because of the meaning of this song and the one that seems to contradict it but doesn’t: “This is my father’s world.” I especially like the line “Oh let me ne’er forget that though the wrong seems oft so strong. God is the ruler yet.”

And there are everybody’s favorites: “The Old Rugged Cross” and “Amazing Grace.”

And the songs about being close to the Lord like “Jesus Hold My Hand.” The first verse starts off: “As I travel through this pilgrim land, there is a friend who walks with me.” We should try to remember, whatever happens, that we always have a friend with us. The second verse has these words: “I will be a soldier brave and true and ever firmly take a stand. As I onward go and daily meet the foe Blessed Jesus hold my hand.”

Another one of the songs of that era that I still tear up over is “It is well with my soul,” especially the second and third verses where it says, “My sin, O the bliss of this glorious thought, My sin, not in part, but the whole, Is nailed to the cross and I bear it no more, Praise the Lord, Praise the Lord, Oh my soul.” I have to drop out a lot of the time when we get to the part about “not in part, but the whole, is nailed to the cross.” And the third verse moves into another of my favorite themes of church music: “And Lord haste the day when the faith shall be sight. [And I love this part]: The clouds be rolled back as a scroll. [And here comes the trumpet]: The trump shall resound and the lord shall descend, Even so, it is well with my soul.

I dearly love the notion of a trumpet announcing the second coming of Jesus. That has been true since I first heard 1 Thessalonians 4:16: “¹⁶ For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first.” You know the song that starts off “When the trumpet of the Lord shall sound and time shall be no more.” It goes on to give us the assurance that “When the roll is called up yonder, I’ll be there.” These songs are based on the scripture and they are full of assurances.

I also came to love the spirituals, especially those with a double meaning that were used during the movement to abolish slavery and during the civil rights movement.

If you haven’t seen the movie “Harriet,” you should. It is about Harriet Tubman. Early on when her family is about to be split up and sold off, she escapes from the plantation in Virginia and makes it all the way to a safe place in Philadelphia by herself. But not satisfied with that, she goes back to rescue her family and others. And she goes back again and again. One of my favorite scenes is of a living room in Philadelphia with a group of well-dressed people, Black and White, who were instrumental in setting up and operating what became known as the Underground Railroad. And the door bursts open and in comes Harriet followed by 6, 10 or 12 escaped slaves. They show scenes like that several times in the movie.

But my favorite scene is of a group of slaves chopping cotton in a field. There is a tree line beside the field. The slave owners know that someone is freeing slaves, but they don’t know whether it is a man or a woman. They call her Moses.

As the slaves are working, you hear this one woman singing just beyond the tree line: “Go down, Moses, way down in Egypt land. Tell old Pharaoh, ‘Let my people go’.” You see the moment of confusion on the slaves faces, then an instant of recognition. Then several of them drop their hoes and sprint for the tree line.

I still get choked up over “We shall not be moved,” and “We shall overcome” and one that is not really a church song but could be: “Blowing in the Wind.” Immediately after and for days to follow the riots associated with the admission of James Meredith to the University of Mississippi the local, Oxford, Mississippi, radio station repeatedly played Peter, Paul and Mary’s rendition of our own Minnesota’s Bob Dylan’s “Blowing in the Wind” with such lyrics as:

“How many roads must a man walk down before we call him a man?” and

“How many years can some people exist before they’re allowed to be free?” and

“How many times can a man turn his head, pretending he just doesn’t see?”

“How many ears must one man have before he can hear people cry?”

“The answer my friend is blowing in the wind; the answer is blowing in the wind.”

I still cry over those songs and I would really like to know the story of the Mississippi DJ and his managers who let him play that song over and over and over.

These are the songs that deepened my faith.