Tag: holiness

Glory to you, O God

Today’s hymn is ‘Glory to you, O God’ by Howard Gaunt. It’s another of the hymns from the ‘saints’ section of the book. The suggested tune is that of the hymn ‘My song is love unknown’.  John made some changes to the words and used a different tune.  But these comments are based on the words in Sing Praise.

The first verse gives glory to God for the saints, using the traditional language of the early Church of winning victory in the fight against the evils of fire and sword. The second gives thanks for those saints who walked in humble paths, speaking God’s word and act as shining lights to inform our own lives.  The third verse is about ourselves, asking to know God’s truth and walk his way as ‘saints on earth’.

These are three very different concepts of sainthood.  The language of the first verse is not commonly used in most Western churches today. Even British saints such as Alban and Thomas (Becket) who were martyred are not usually spoken of as winning victory so much as showing courage in the face of evil, and other martyrs such as Hugh Latimer, Nicholas Ridley and (on the Catholic side) Margaret Clitherow are not usually called ‘saints’ even though they showed equal courage and loyalty to their beliefs. The language of war and victory does however still resonate with those in countries where persecution is still a reality.  The imagery of the second verse is more commonly found in our British churches, where we remember ‘home grown’ saints such as Cuthbert, Wilfrid and David whose ascetic lives are held up as a model of discipleship.  And the concept of all God’s people, living as well as dead, as being saints, is a popular one in our time.

Purify my heart

Today’s hymn from Sing Praise is another devotional song, “Purify my heart”.  Although relatively recent (like all the songs in this book – this one was written c.1990) it has become popular in many churches. Unlike yesterday’s song which was corporate (“Father, hear our prayer”) this one is personal (“Purify my heart”) and it fits the theme of Lent, as it asks Jesus (not named but it is obviously He who is being addressed) to “purify my heart” in various ways.

The first verse asks that I become “as gold and precious silver … as gold, pure gold”.  This, and the chorus (addressing Jesus as the Refiner’s Fire) refer to Malachi, the last book of the Old Testament, where the Lord’s messenger is said to be coming like a refiner’s fire to “sit as a refiner and purifier of silver” to refine the descendants of Levi (i.e. the Temple priests) “like gold and silver until they present offerings to the Lord in righteousness” (Malachi 3:2-3).  In other words, it is asking Jesus to strip away all the impurities that are preventing me from serving him as I should.  

The second verse is more direct: “cleanse me from within and make me holy … cleanse me from my sin, deep within”.  It recognises that sin is not just my relationship with the outer world – the things I say and do wrong – but also my inner life, my thoughts, desires and attitudes.  Those are harder to deal with, and that’s why I have to ask Jesus to deal with them.  The other prayer in the chorus is that I should be “set apart for you, ready to do your will”.  So the purification of the inner person is not only for my own sake but so that I can serve Jesus better.

The Bible in a Year – 1 June

If this is your first viewing, please see my Introduction before reading this.

1 June. Ezekiel chapters 8-11

In chapters 8-11 Ezekiel has a vision in which he is transported from Babylonia where he has been living, back to Jerusalem whence he originated.   Such physical transportation from one place to another as a part of extreme spiritual experience is not unique: Elijah experienced it, as did Philip (Acts chapter 8), and Mohammed in his “night journey” to Jerusalem.  Whether such transportation took place literally (and hence miraculously) or was only a transcendental out-of-body type experience may be a matter for debate, but either way it is clearly something well beyond the experience of most people, believers or not.

 

The purpose of Ezekiel’s transportation was to show him that those left behind after the first deportation to Babylon – even the spiritual leaders of the community – were not only worshipping false gods, but even bowing down to the sun and allowing prostitution, and all this within the ruins of the temple itself!  Therefore God would allow a second enemy invasion to destroy those people and what was left of the city, until a new and more faithful generation of Jews would be allowed to return and rebuild it.

 

Ezekiel’s vision of the glory of God departing from the temple is another example of a prophet seeing a spiritual reality beyond the physical evidence.  A place is made holy by a continuous period of religious observance and prayer; that holiness can be cancelled very quickly by acts of desecration.  Some people seem to be more open than others to a sense of either ‘holiness’ or the ‘numinous’, or conversely the presence of evil or foreboding spirits; I am not one of them.

 

Ezekiel is not a widely quoted Biblical book – the most well known passage is the valley of bones in chapter 37 – but verse 11:19 is an exception. “I will remove from you a heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh” is often used to describe the experience that Jesus called “being born again”, when someone realises that God is not remote but actually lives in them.