My Heart's Desire by David Jeremiah

Author:David Jeremiah
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: 2010-05-22T16:00:00+00:00

9

Let Heaven and Nature Sing

NINE

Let Heaven and Nature Sing

I HEARD OF A FARMER who was making his regular visit to the big city to stock up on supplies. Only this time, for one reason or another, necessity kept the farmer in town over the weekend. So he decided to find a church for his Sunday worship.

Back home this farmer attended a little wood-frame church where the preaching was energetic and the songs were of the old-time gospel variety. But on his weekend trip, the farmer decided it was time to gain a bit more experience of the religious world. So on Sunday morning he walked into a stately edifice with massive columns and a ceiling higher than any grain silo he’d ever seen. This, he concluded, was where they had “high church” meetings, as he’d heard them called. The farmer found a seat and worshiped the best he knew how, even though it seemed like he was in the “advanced” course and he was used to the “beginner” level.

When he arrived home at the farm, he regaled his wife with an account of his visit to the “advanced” worship service. She listened with fascination; it was as if her husband had been to the Land of Oz. “The singin’,” she demanded. “What was the singin’ like?”

“Anthems,” her husband replied. “We sang us some anthems.”

“And what, pray tell, is an anthem?”

The farmer stroked his beard pensively. Well,” he replied slowly, “I can’t rightly describe ’em, but it’s a little like this. If I was to say to you, ‘Bessie Mae, it’s time to feed the pigs,’ that would not be an anthem. No, ma’am. But if I was to put it to you, ‘Bessie, Bessie, Bessie Mae, Bessie Mae, it’s time; Bessie Mae, it’s time to feed, it’s time, it’s time to feed; it’s time to feed the pigs, the pigs, it’s time to feed the pigs, pigs, pigs, Amen!’—well now, as I understand it, that’s what you call an anthem.”

It’s true that we have our various musical idioms. The way we sing in my church bears very little resemblance to the way a church sings in Japan or Argentina. And we have very little idea how the first Christians expressed their melodies. What matters is that we are a singing people, nearly everywhere. A famous atheist named Robert Ingersoll left explicit instructions for his funeral: “There will be no singing.”1And I can understand that; what is there to sing about if the heavenly throne is empty? But if our faith is valid, as our hearts tell us it is, then we of all people can sing-regardless of our ability to join the Three Sopranos onstage. John Wesley once said, "Beware of singing as if you were halfdead or half-asleep. Lift up your voices with strength. Be no more afraid of your voice now, or more ashamed of its being heard, than when you sang the songs of Satan."2

Yet I know many people who don’t like to sing. I can see

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