Spirit Of God, Descend Upon My Heart

One of the finest of all hymns for the Pentecost season is “Spirit of God, Descend Upon My Heart.” It was written by Anglican minister George Croly, who was known among his associates as a “fundamentalist in theology, a fierce conservative in politics, and intensely opposed to all forms of liberalism.” The hymn first appeared in 1854 in Croly’s own hymnal, Psalms and Hymns for Public Worship. It was originally titled “Holiness Desired.”

Each stanza contributes an important truth for our spiritual benefit:

Stanza One— A desire to change the focus of one’s life from things temporal to things spiritual.

Spirit of God, descend upon my heart:

Wean it from earth, through all its pulses move.

Stoop to my weakness, mighty as Thou art,

and make me love Thee as I ought to love.

Stanza Two— The total dedication of one’s self to God.

Hast Thou not bid us love Thee, God and King?

All, all Thine own—soul, heart and strength and mind.

I see Thy cross—there teach my heart to cling:

O let me seek Thee, and O let me find.

Stanza Three— A prayerful concern for knowing fully the Spirit’s abiding presence.

Teach me to feel that Thou art always nigh;

teach me the struggles of the soul to bear—

to check the rising doubt,the rebel sigh;

teach me the patience of unanswered prayer.

Stanza Four— A most beautiful metaphor of a Spirit-filled life: “my heart an altar, and Thy love the flame.”

Teach me to love Thee as Thine angels love,

one holy passion filling all my frame:

The baptism of the heav’n descended Dove—

my heart an altar and Thy love the flame.

by K. W. Osbeck in Amazing Grace : 366 Inspiring Hymn Stories for Daily Devotions (electronic edition), page 153.

Preparing for Pentecost

Tomorrow we celebrate Pentecost Sunday.  I’ll let these words from Robert Benson help prepare you:

Easter does not last long but it is better than the mere twelve days we were given to celebrate Christmas if you ask me. Even so the fifty days of Easter seem hardly enough time to take in the Paschal mystery.

But ready or not, Pentecost comes this Sunday. The name simply means fiftieth, as in the fiftieth day. The day was originally a harvest festival that took place on the fiftieth day after Passover. The notion of “harvest” seems right somehow for the season after Easter. It is a day of great celebration, the celebration of the giving of the Holy Spirit to the disciples, and then to us. And a portion of the harvest will be celebrated in some communities with baptism and confirmation.

Come Sunday, in the Story that was first told in the pages of the Book and now is told to us by the Church calendar as well, the Spirit is about to be given to us, again. Which begs new versions of the same old question — What is the Holy Spirit up to these days, in our days, yours and mine, these days given to us in our generation? And how are we being called to we help with that work? To what are we being drawn by the Spirit — Lord, have mercy, to what is Robert being drawn by the Spirit — in this next season of the journey home? What new thing is the One Who made us trying to do in us and with us and through us on the other side of Pentecost?

“Be attendant upon that come Sunday,” I say to myself, “be attendant upon that.”

At the very least, I am drawn to an old prayer for this new season —

Grant that we may perceive the ways in which You are calling to us,

and then grant us strength and courage to pursue those things and to accomplish them;

in the name of the One Who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.

Prayer: Becoming Aware of the Story

If God is sovereign, then he is control of all the details of my life.  If he is loving, then he is going to be shaping the details of my life for my good.  If he is all-wise, then he’s not going to do everything I want because I don’t know what I need.  If he is patient, then he is going to take time to do all this.  When we put these all together–God’s sovereignty, love, wisdom, and patience–we have a divine story.

People often talk about prayer as if it is disconnected from what God is doing in their lives. But we are actors in his drama, listening for our lines, quieting our hearts so we can hear the voice of the Playwright.

You can’t have a good story without tension and conflict, without things going wrong.  Unanswered prayers create some of the tensions in the story God is weaving in our lives. When we realize this, we want to know what God is doing.  What pattern is God weaving?

If God is composing a story with our lives, then our lives are no longer static.  We aren’t paralyzed by life; we can hope.

~ Paul Miller, A Praying Life, page 22 (bold emphasis mine).

Your Spiritual Résumé

At times our approach to God becomes like preparing a résumé for a job application–we carefully include all our accomplishments, anything that might present us in a good light and make us more acceptable.  Gradually, before we know it, our Christian life consists of continually trying to update our spiritual résumé to remind God and others of what we’ve done and not done.  But in reality, the whole of our résumé is either sin or filthy rags (Isaiah 64:6).  So every time we approach God in prayer, worship, or any other spiritual discipline, we must see our résumé only as he sees it–overlaid by Christ’s perfect résumé.

~ Jerry Bridges and Bob Bevington in The Bookends of the Christian Life, page 46-47.

Experiencing The Daily Reality Of Justification

“I have been crucified with Christ.  It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.  And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”  Galatians 2:20 ESV

For Paul, justification was not only a past event; it was also a daily, present reality. So every day of his life, by faith in Christ, Paul realized he stood righteous in the sight of God–he was counted righteous and accepted by God as righteous–because of the perfectly obedient life and death Christ provided for him.  He stood solely on the rock-solid righteousness of Christ alone…

We must learn to live like the apostle Paul, looking every day outside ourselves to Christ and seeing ourselves standing before God clothed in his perfect righteousness.  Every day we must re-acknowledge the fact that there’s nothing we can do to make ourselves either more acceptable to God or less acceptable.  Regardless of how much we grow in our Christian lives, we’re accepted for Christ’s sake or not at all.  It’s this reliance on Christ alone, apart from any consideration of our good or bad deeds, that enables us to experience the daily reality of [justification], in which the believer finds peace and joy and comfort and gratitude.

~ Jerry Bridges and Bob Bevington in The Bookends of the Christian Life, page 29.