Dissolve my Heart in Thankfulness

Hymns #1: Dissolve my heart in Thankfulness
At the Cross by Isaac Watts

I’m introducing the topic of Hymns this morning with the hope of developing a greater awareness in our church of the importance of hymns to worship.
Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom, teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord (Colossians 3:16).

Hymns have become a byword among modern Evangelicals. The mere mention of the word causes facial grimaces and revulsion among contemporary Christians stemming from their chronological snobbery and the assumption that new is good and old is bad.

I was telling our worship team about a conversation I had recently with a pastor who was annoyed at the seniors in his church who insisted on having hymns sung in their worship time. I was surprised by the disdain he held for hymns and I told him about our church- even the young here love the hymns.

I have one theory that is that perhaps the reason that hymns are used here is because we don’t have any Baby-boomers. They are the generation responsible for the most innovations since the Reformation. Later generations have been trying to undo many of those changes.

In their effort to appeal to the masses, churches have radically altered the meaning of worship. Worship services have moved from having God as its object and subject to having man as its object and subject.
The main theologian of this shift has been Robert Schuller who wrote a book called the New Reformation in which he argued that man must replace God as the center of theology.

Schuller has had a major impact on the church growth movement, influencing leaders like Rick Warren and Bill Hybels (a graduate of Schuller’s school of Church Growth).

The assumption among church leaders is that bigger is better and Walmart churches on the outskirts of town have leached onto and replaced the local mom and pop churches leaving communities void of a Christian witness and the sheep in those mega churches are without a shepherd. Ironically, while churches have become larger then ever, more relevant, more culturally influential and contemporary, the Church in North America is declining and losing its Holy Spirit power and evangelistic thrust.

The result of this New Reformation has been a deformation of the church. Preaching which once focused on God, now attends to the felt needs of the unregenerate. And the disposal of the timeless and majestic hymns (replacing them with music that is at times shallow and thematically limited) is just another symptom of this deformation.

Now don’t get me wrong, there are some awesome modern worship songs that are being composed… “Shine Jesus Shine” is deep!
24 "The Lord bless you and keep you; 25 The Lord make His face shine upon you, And be gracious to you… (Numbers 6:24-26).

Out of Zion, the perfection of beauty, God will shine forth (Ps 50:2)

[Unbelievers] whose minds the god of this age has blinded, who do not believe, lest the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine on them. (2 Corinthians 4:4).

Matt Redmond’s “Heart of Worship” revolutionized the way saw worship: “I’m coming back to the heart of worship, and It’s all about you Jesus.” Those are radical words in this age.

I’m not saying we need to abandon contemporary worship. Colossians 1:16 calls for a variety of musical styles; Psalms, Hymns and spiritual songs.
It isn’t the elderly and the Gen-Xers calling for more hymns who are violating the gospel command to worship God in a variety of forms. It the people like my pastor friend who have broken this command.

Now I don’t want you to think that this pastor he is a usurper, or a wolf, or a Liberal. In fact, his intention is very Evangelical. The pastor I told you about gave an example: there were four or five unchurched youth who dropped in unexpectedly on a Sunday worship service and sat through about two songs, before they got up and left. This pastor blamed it on the hymns, they just didn’t connect with those kids.

My question is, why assume it was the hymns? Maybe it was only one of them who wanted to leave, the others just followed. Maybe there was something in the content of the songs that convicted them and the seed was sown.
Whatever the case may be, since when have unconverted youth become the authority for determining the content of our preaching and worship? That philosophy is a holdover from our materialistic pop culture that is enamored with youth. It worships the new and the next whereas preaching and hymns are all about the ancient and the unchanged (or at least it should be).

You may find this hard to believe, but sometimes I get accused of preaching over people’s heads. My response is that I would rather people reach up then make no effort at all. In seminary they told us to dumb down the message to the lowest common denominator. How ironic that our society is the most literate and educated it has ever been, but our preaching has become so shallow and empty of the profound truths it once contained.

Try reading the Puritans, or Spurgeon. The reason people don’t like to read them is because they used big words and long sentences. “Gold is deep; you have to dig for it, so let’s just stick to gravel- you don’t have to dig.”

Hymns are like that, they’re gold; they’re full of deep and profound truths about God and when we don’t sing them, we lose touch with the measureless worth of God and devalue ourselves by our ignorance. God’s attributes can’t just be taught, they must be sung for them to have any value.

When you consider His infinite qualities- His love and mercy and sovereignty, you must sing. But contemporary worship songs are not always able to of convey the vast truths of God and so they appear sporadically and contemporary worship is reduced to singing about 3% of all the truths that are revealed in scripture.
Imagine how long you would live if your diet was entirely made up of only 3% of the healthy food we need to survive? That’s what happens when we dispose of the hymns. That is a remarkable comment on the health resulting from spiritual malnutrition of North American Christianity.

The hymns remind us that worship is not about us, but about God. They force us to use our minds to be involved in worship. And, from time to time, Hymns force us to have to get out a dictionary and look up a word.

Let me share with you the testimony of one young lady after she discovered the value of hymns,
Lori wrote, “Coming from a typical praise chorus-reliant high school youth group, I sort of turned my nose up [at the] hymns…. I didn’t understand a lot of the poetic and imagery-driven lyrics and the word hymn automatically meant boring music. But as the weeks passed, I found myself falling in love with the old hymns…. The words are so profound and full of truth one can’t help but be broken. Singing hymns has seriously changed my life and freed me from feeling frustrated by surface lyrics that focus on how I feel about God, which is always changing. Hymns have allowed me to center my worship on the Gospel, which in turn compels me to love the God I am prone to hate and wander from.”

The hymn I want to introduce today is “At the Cross” by Isaac Watts. Watts was born in 1674 and died in 1748; he was a nonconformist (my kind of guy); that was just another term for a puritan.

Puritans have gotten a bad wrap in our day. They’re often portrayed as killjoys. Someone once called Puritanism “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”
But that is not a fair and honest portrayal. In fact, John Owen kept a library of books on brewing beer and he was known for being very fashionable. Jonathan Edwards danced all night long after his ordination.

The Puritan are among the greatest thinkers of all time. They were well versed in Greek and Latin; they read the classics in their original languages and formulated theories about mathematics, astronomy, science, physics, politics and philosophy- many of which are still in use today (i.e. Isaac Newton).

That is the stock from which Isaac Watts was drawn. His work on Logic is still in print today. He was a preacher, a theologian, but he is most remembered for his poetry. He wrote over 600 hymns, put the book of Psalms to meter. Listen to how he interprets Psalm 1:

Blest is the man who shuns the place
Where sinners love to meet;
Who fears
to tread their wicked ways,
And hates the scoffer's seat:
But in the
statutes of the Lord
Has placed his chief delight;
By day he reads or
hears the word,
And meditates by night.
[He, like a plant of gen'rous
kind,
By living waters set,
Safe from the storms and blasting
wind,
Enjoys a peaceful state.]
Green as the leaf, and ever fair,
Shall
his profession shine
While fruits of holiness appear
Like clusters on the
vine.
Not so the impious and unjust;
What vain designs they form!
Their
hopes are blown away like dust,
Or chaff before the storm…

Watts also wrote “Joy to the World”, “O God, Our help in Ages Past”, and, among others “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross”.

In the Chorus Watts writes, “At the cross, at the cross where I first saw the light, and the burden of my heart rolled away” he is describing the feeling of being born again, seeing the light and having the burden of sin removed.

If you are weary and heavy laden from carrying the burden of your sins, there is hope on in the cross. For it is at the cross, we see in that first verse, that our saviour bled and sovereign died. When you put your faith in Jesus Christ, he becomes your King and saviour. Imagine a worldly King giving his life to save a worm? That is a faint comparison to what happened at the cross.

“While the firm mark of wrath divine, His soul in anguish stood” describes the transaction that occurred at the cross. God’s wrath towards sinners was poured out on Jesus. You ask “what kind of God demands such violence in order to abate His wrath?” I answer, “what kind of God willingly submits to such violence on behalf them against whom he is angry?” “Was it for crimes that I had done that He groaned upon the tree?” The kind of God who demands such violence and then satisfies it is a perfectly just and a perfectly loving God, that’s who.

Only an infinitely loving God would take the infinite wrath of God. Such anguish could only be endured by him. Amazing pity, grace unknown and love beyond degree… when Christ the mighty Maker died, for man the creatures sin.

If that picture of Christ’s sacrifice does not provoke your heart to dissolve in thankfulness and melt your eyes to tears then you are probably not born again…. Go to the cross and receive your sight and then you will be happy all the day.