Do you long to worship on Sunday mornings? Do you prepare your heart throughout the week and look toward the weekend with joyful anticipation of what God will do? I’m beginning to ask God to grant me that desire and one way I thought I could help prepare my mind and hopefully yours as well (especially those of you who attend Living Word) is by giving you a preview of Sunday that can hopefully deepen your worship experience. I’d love to start doing this every Thursday and I hope it’s beneficial to you.
The Church’s One Foundation
We’re going to be singing this wonderful hymn after the message Sunday. As we were rehearsing it I realized that there were some words in there that I wasn’t even quite sure what they meant, so I thought we could take a look together.
First of all, the hymn is a bold declaration of unity within the church body as a whole. It was written during a time of turbulence in South Africa in 1860 when a certain bishop declared some very controversial statements about the Bible. At that time Samuel John Stone wrote a series of twelve hymns that explained the twelve sections of the apostles creed. This hymn reflects the section “I believe in the holy Christian church, the communion of saints.” You can read the rest of the hymn story here, but I wanted to take a look at a couple of the verses to help us grasp them a little better. Most of the verses are fairly straight-forward, but some might be slightly tricky to grasp.
The Church’s one foundation
Is Jesus Christ her Lord,
She is His new creation
By water and the Word. <- Our baptismal water combined with the power of God’s Word
From heaven He came and sought her
To be His holy bride;
With His own blood He bought her
And for her life He died.Elect from every nation, <- That is, the church, all who were chosen by Jesus at the Cross and those in every nation who believe
Yet one o’er all the earth; <- Yet we are united by Jesus throughout the entire earth
Her charter of salvation,
One Lord, one faith, one birth;
One holy Name she blesses, <- The name of Jesus
Partakes one holy food, <- His body and blood in the Lord’s Supper
And to one hope she presses, <- The hope of eternal life
With every grace endued. <- Endued meaning that we are provided with every Grace from God
What a great promise of being provided with every grace! Let’s look at one more verse:
’Mid toil and tribulation,
And tumult of her war, <- Every day we are at war with our sin and face emotional struggle and agitation (tumult)
She waits the consummation <- The finish, the end, the victory
Of peace forevermore;
Till, with the vision glorious, <- Actually seeing Jesus with our own eyes
Her longing eyes are blest,
And the great Church victorious
Shall be the Church at rest. <- No longer fighting the daily struggle of our old nature vs. our new nature
Other Things to Anticipate
- O for a Heart to Praise My God (same tune as O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing)
- Immanuel (From the Squalor of a Borrowed Stable) – I love this modern hymn. (affiliate link)
- Lord, Reign in Me (great song of both confession of faith and sin)(affiliate link)
- Surrender All (.mp3 download from Sovereign Grace Music)
- Pastor Wade is coming back! Don’t forget that October is Pastor Appreciation Month
What do you look forward to the most in anticipation for your weekend worship service?
(foundation illustration by Daniel Carroll)
