Hallelujah! What a Savior!

How great a distance do we try to keep between ourselves and notorious sinners?  I am not asking how far we keep from their sin, which should be very far, but from them as individuals.  The Pharisees of Jesus’ day had a simple answer – as far as possible.  So one day when an infamous sinner was able to gain access to the home of a key Pharisee, who was hosting Jesus, we see a confrontation of religious bigotry and Christian love.  J. Wilbur Chapman, the well known writer, pastor, evangelist and hymnist wrote a hymn about Jesus’ response on this occasion, “Jesus, What a Friend for Sinners”. 

In the modern vernacular we would say that the Pharisee was not amused at the appearance of the woman in his home.  He even smirked at Jesus’ naiveté at letting the sinful woman approach Him.  But Jesus was not naïve; He was the manifestation of God in the flesh, the God whom Christ proclaimed as being the One who loved the world.  Jesus response to the approach of the woman was simple, He let her fall at His feet and worship Him and then He publicly announced the forgiveness of her sins.  Chapman captures the beauty of this moment in the first stanza of his hymn, “Jesus! What a Friend for sinners!
Jesus! Lover of my soul; friends may fail me, foes assail me, He, my Savior, makes me whole.” 

The woman had gone into the Pharisee’s home a despised and defiled person.  She went away that day a forgiven and whole child of God.  She went out of that house a person with hope, strength, healing, joy and new life.  These are different aspects of the great love Chapman expresses throughout his hymn.  He saw Jesus, the Friend of sinners, as the one who was also as the Strength in weakness, the Help in sorrow, the Comforter of the soul, the Guide and Keeper the Pilot in the storm and the great Forgiver of sins.  He said, “More than all in Him I find.”  It is with exultation that he concluded each verse with the rousing chorus, “Hallelujah! What a Savior! Hallelujah! What a Friend! Saving, helping, keeping, loving, He is with me to the end.”   Hallelujah indeed!   The grace of God in Christ is more than all we will ever need now and forever!

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A Shepherd's Grace

One of the greatest comforting passages of Scripture is found in Mark 6:34. Jesus saw the multitude and felt compassion for them for they were like sheep without a shepherd.  We see a stranded kitten and we feel compassion.  We see a wandering lost puppy and we feel compassion.  Jesus saw the multitude lost and wayward and without a guide or keeper in life and death.  Seeing them He felt compassion. 

Charlotte Elliot who is most famous as the writer of “Just as I Am” wrote a number of other hymns as well.  One of them is titled “Jesus, My Savior, Look on Me”.  It is taken from this passage in Mark and its parallel passage in Matthew 9.  She imagines in her hymn a variety of the needs that the multitude had that day and the needs that we also face in our lives.  The multitudes of yore are not any different than the multitudes of today.  We share the same needs for a shepherd to care for us, rescue us and guide us.

The first stanza of her hymn reads, “Jesus, my Savior, look on me, for I am weary and oppressed; I come to cast myself on Thee: Thou art my rest.”  The crowds had come to see Jesus.  He saw their needs as being more than just that of physical healing, so the first thing He did was to teach them.  Later in the day He fed them, the whole multitude by a great miracle.  The next day, according to John 6, He challenged them to see what true food and drink was and to believe in Him. Those that did so cast themselves on Him and He became their rest.

In the succeeding verses of her hymn Charlotte points out an ever widening array of our human needs.  At the end of each stanza she lays out another distinct nature of Christ.  She calls Him her strength, her light, her rock, her peace and her life.  She found Him sufficient in weakness, darkness, danger, fear and death.  In her final stanza she sums up her needs and His sufficiency with seeing Him as her all.  That is who He wanted to be to the crowds that day on the hillside.  That is who Charlotte Elliot found Him to be in her life.  That is what He wants us to find Him to be in our lives.  He wants to fill us with His grace and be our all in all.  That is His compassionate heart.

The musical score for this hymn was written by the famous song writer Arthur Sullivan of Gilbert and Sullivan renown.  

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Grace in Fatigue

The cares and work of our daily lives can leave us drained and weary.  Jesus’ disciples came to Him after going on a preaching trip and He could see their need for rest.  It is the grace of Jesus Christ that He knows our needs.  He said to the disciples to come apart and rest a while.  He calls us to the same escape from the labors of life.  Because He cares for us He calls us to take some time alone with Him.

A lovely hymn of unknown origin, “Sitting at the Feet of Jesus”, reminds us of the value of time spent alone with Him.  The first stanza of this hymn reads, “Sitting at the feet of Jesus, Oh, what words I hear Him say! Happy place! So near, so precious! May it find me there each day. Sitting at the feet of Jesus, I would look upon the past; for His love has been so gracious, it has won my heart at last.”  This is what Jesus calls us to, a happy place so near so precious.  What was it like for the disciples to spend time alone with Jesus?  That is the same experience He calls all His present day disciples to enjoy with Him as well.

The second stanza of the hymn adds further details of this blessed time together. “Sitting at the feet of Jesus, where can mortal be more blest? There I lay my sins and sorrows and, when weary, find sweet rest. Sitting at the feet of Jesus, there I love to weep and pray, while I from His fullness gather grace and comfort every day.”  Isn’t that what we really need each day – some real rest?  Isn’t it good to have someone we can talk to that will really listen and care?  Isn’t it refreshing to have someone tell us they really love us each day and sincerely mean it?  Isn’t it strengthening to have someone come along side us and say that they will be there with us all day to take on whatever comes our way? These are the blessings we get in time alone with God each day for Bible reading, prayer, devotional thought and the uplifting strength of song.

These disciples were no different than we.  They were flesh and blood.  They grew tired and faced temptations.  Jesus said to them, “Come apart and rest.”  He extends the same invitation of grace to us each day.  Enjoy these quiet moments with Him and His promise to be with you the rest of the day.  

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Grace for Our Greatest Needs

What is our greatest need?  In Mark 5 a woman met Jesus as He was going on an urgent errand with a man whose daughter was dying.  To the man that was certainly the most urgent need.  To the woman it was not.  The woman had suffered at the hand of doctors for twelve years and had been impoverished by their failed efforts.  She felt her sickness was her greatest need and shyly approached the Savior to have it met.  She didn’t trip Him or block His way.  She merely reached out and touched the hem of His garment.  And what happened?  She was completely healed.  What else happened?  Jesus stopped and talked with her and told her that it was her faith in Him that had made her whole. 

What is our greatest need?  The man in this story still had a daughter who was dying. But while Jesus paused to talk with the woman, a messenger came from the man’s house and told him it was too late; his daughter was dead.  Jesus, seeing the man’s despair, said, “Don’t be afraid.  Only believe.”  Believe is the verb form of the word faith.  What the woman had shown in her healing was what Christ now called on the man to show in his great need.  Jesus then went to the man’s house and raised his daughter from the dead. 

What is our greatest need?  Our greatest need is that the sickness of sin be washed away and that the death sentence of sin be pardoned against us.  After that our greatest need is to trust our Savior who has done both things for us. 

John Beebe wrote a hymn, “Made Whole”, that covers both the physical and spiritual aspects of this account in Mark.  His first stanza reads, “The press was great, the throng was wild, and I, a sinner all defiled, how could I reach my Savior? Reach Him I must, without delay, and in the press, with fear, dismay, I, trembling, sought my Savior.”  He sees first in this hymn that which is our greatest need - a Savior.  Then in His last stanza he concludes with the sense of double healing, spiritual and physical.  “Go thou in peace, O hear Him say; from all Thy plague be healed this day; Oh, what a blessed Savior! To heal the body, save the soul, the vilest of the vile make whole, Oh, how I love my Savior.” 

What is your greatest need today?  There is One who can meet it.  With grace He will take care of His children.  With grace He will receive the lost.  Look to Him today for the grace that you need and then love the Savior.  

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Restoring Grace

One of the many hymnists from whom we could take an entire year of devotions would be Isaac Watts.  He is known as the Father of English Hymnody.  By the time he was in his early twenties he had written an entire hymnal.  One of those hymns, “Sin, Like a Venomous Disease”, relates to the encounter of Jesus with the mad man of the Gadarenes found in Mark 5.  It is an encounter of great grace both on the part of Jesus and also His disciples.

The third stanza of Watts’ hymn gives us a picture into our own nature bound up in the demon possessed man. “Madness by nature reigns within, the passions burn and rage, till God’s own Son, with skill divine, the inward fire assuage.”  As lost people we are always casting about for something to give us peace within.  The number of seminars given for that purpose and the amount of money spent on them reflects the great desire of mankind for inner peace.  That was the problem of the mad man of the Gadarenes.  All the self help books, societal gimmicks and legal restraints placed upon him had done nothing to alter the inner turmoil he had.  He had demons within and only Jesus could cast them out.

In Watts’ sixth stanza (yes, they used to sing hymns with many more stanzas than that) he describes both the problem and the cure.  “The man possessed among the tombs
cuts his own flesh, and cries; he foams and raves, till Jesus comes, and the foul spirit flies.” Then what happened?  He sat down at the feet of Jesus and listened to Him preach.  There is a great lesson for us all.   When we are in our right mind we will sit at the feet of Jesus and learn from Him.

But the grace in this story was not just demonstrated by Jesus with His healing of this needy man.  Grace was also demonstrated by His disciples.  The man must certainly have terrified them when they first encountered him.  He was violent, scarred, naked and raving.  But we find him sitting with THEM after he was cured.  They graciously accepted him into their circle.  There was no shunning him for his past.  How much we need that grace in our churches today.  We don’t have to elevate them to leadership right away, but we must welcome them as a child of God to share His witness and the blessings of His sacraments.  That was a grace they had learned and we need to apply it, too.  

  The Friday Benediction

Until Monday, my friends, may the good God envelop you with His grace; may you prove the common confession of faith, “I believe in the holy Christian church and in the fellowship of the saints”, and may you be enriched with joy and hope as you exercise that confession this weekend.  Amen

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Founded on the Rock Grace

After Jesus finished preaching the Sermon on the Mount the people were amazed.  They said to each other, “He speaks as one with authority and not as one of the scribes.”  The words of Jesus were the very voice of God.  He was the Word of God incarnate.  The words that He had spoken were words of guidance, hope and peace.  He had authoritatively declared the meaning of the law and its application to life.  He didn’t mince words and He boldly asserted that to ignore His words was to ignore the hope and grace of God.

One of Haldor Lillenas’s great hymns is “The Bible Stands”.  Jesus compared obedience to His words as having a house built on a rock.  That house would stand.  Today there are too many people discounting the authority of God’s word and trying to substitute some weakened down socially acceptable version of their own.  The grace of God in Christ comes through the words that Jesus spoke and the authority with which he upheld the words already given by the Old Testament.  God’s grace, purpose and peace shine clearly in all the words of our Holy Bible and are not found in the reasoning of men however esteemed. 

The first stanza of Lillenas’s hymn reads, “The Bible stands like a rock undaunted
’mid the raging storms of time; its pages burn with the truth eternal, and they glow with a light sublime.”  We hear people howl today about the Bible being obsolete or out of date or not in tune with modern thinking.  Only on the last point are they correct.  It is not in tune with our thinking, ancient or modern.  It is the very thoughts and ideas of God that are eternal and surpass our thoughts and ideas by such a degree as to be disparaged by men.  But, they have stood and will stand and all men will be judged by them.  Therefore, in His great grace God has given them to us so that we know what He wants and what He will do.  When Jesus spoke He spoke with this authority. 

The third stanza of this hymn reads, “The Bible stands and it will forever, when the world has passed away; by inspiration it has been given, all its precepts I will obey.” Rejoice in the grace of God that He has spoken.  Rejoice that He has given us in His word the means of salvation through His Son Jesus Christ.  His authority is without end.  His grace is eternal for all who come to Him.  

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Grace on a Birthday

From day of birth my life thou’st led; Thy faithfulness ever my guest; with loving grace Thou cov’r’st my head; Thy plan for me Thy gracious best.

Today is my birthday. (The day I write this, not the day you read it.)  It is a day to reflect on the great grace of God in Christ.  For many years my flesh, in body and mind, has been plagued by various ills from petty to profound.  For those same years my income has ranged from little to a little more than that.  But these are not the issues that life is made of or to be about.  Jesus said that our life does not consist in the abundance of things we possess.  Our wealth is His grace.  Our thorns in the flesh are the opportunities for His grace to be manifest through us.  Today I reflect on the wonderful riches of the grace of God to me.  These are riches that cannot be taken away or lost in earthly calamity. 

First there is peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.  42 years ago I was at enmity with God and He with me.  I was a child of wrath in mind, body and spirit.  My destiny was sorrow in this life and greater sorrow for eternity.  Then, in a grand revelation of His grace, I was no longer an alien to the life and hope and peace of God.  He saved me and forgave my sins and made me His child.  He did this because of His grace in Christ who died for my sins and rose again for my justification.

Secondly He set me on a path of wonderful adventure with Him.  Though I never planned to go to college He has taken me to graduate from four to prepare for His service.  It brought me to meet my dear wife whose only goal in life was to serve her Savior.  What a perfect companion He gave me.  It has taken us across America to serve in pastoral ministry, music ministry, education ministry and missionary ministry.  We have learned languages we didn’t know existed and led people to the Savior from many places we had never even imagined visiting.  This path has given us six wonderful children who are all active in their own churches with two of them in full time ministry.  This path has seen our bank account never run dry even when my income was insufficient to pay just the rent and we had no other income.  God has been ever faithful.  He has been ever gracious.  He has been ever the wonderful Savior who wooed me from sin to salvation in His dear Son.  This day is really a celebration of His goodness and love.  

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