Posted on by Angela

Third Verse Devotion: Down at the Cross

We are humans born into sin. We are all sinners in need of salvation. When we accept Jesus’s precious gift of salvation, that gift is eternal. We will stumble. We will fall. Stumbling and falling doesn’t mean we have to start over in our salvation. It means we must confess our sin and seek forgiveness in repentance and strive to walk in faithfulness. The third verse of the hymn Down at the Cross gives us hope in our eternal security.  

O PRECIOUS FOUNTAIN THAT SAVES FROM SIN 

Jesus gave His blood as an atonement for our sin. When Adam and Eve sinned in the Garden, there had to be atonement. Remember, after their eyes were opened what did they do? They sewed fig leaves together to cover themselves. After God confronted them and punishment was given, God himself clothed them with animal skins. There had to be shedding of blood to cover their sin. “Without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness” (Hebrews 9:22).  

From those earliest days we understood there had to be a sacrifice. Jesus was the ultimate sacrifice for our sin. He did this once for all time. Paul wrote to the Romans, “for the death that he dies, He died to sin once for all time: but the life that He lives, He lives to God.” Romans 6:10 NASB. The writer of Hebrews also reflected this in 7:27 and in 9:12. Peter, also, in 1 Peter 3:18 says, “For Christ also suffered for sins once for all time, the just for the unjust, so that He might bring us to God, having been put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit…”  

Jesus’s sacrifice was enough to save us eternally. He does not have to repeatedly sacrifice himself to save us from our sin. His sacrifice was once for all time, and we are saved once for all time. Our response is to put our trust in Him. The choice is ours. 

I AM SO GLAD THAT I ENTERED IN 

When God placed Adam in the Garden he told him he could eat from any tree in the garden except one. The tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was the only one Adam was told not to eat from. From that moment on God gave Adam a choice. Would he obey what God told him?  

Eve was created and the same command was given to her. Soon temptation slithered in and the rest is history. From that first bite till now mankind has been given the choice to obey God or not.  

We have free will. When Jesus gave His life on the cross as an atonement for our sins, He gave us a choice. Accept Him and His free offer of salvation or not. The choice is still ours. What is your choice? Can you say you are so glad you entered His salvation? If you have breath, you still have a choice. Make the choice today to enter the salvation that is freely offered.  

THERE JESUS SAVES ME AND KEEPS ME CLEAN 

When we make the choice to accept the work of salvation Jesus has done on the cross, the process is continuous and eternal. We are sealed forever in His presence. The work of the cross cannot be undone. We may wander away from the teaching of Christ and follow our own way, and many have done so, yet their lives are unfulfilled and empty, they have no satisfaction or peace, until the moment they return to Christ. It is far better to remain in Christ than to wander away into lifestyles that we know are not meant for us. When we remain in Christ, we are continually kept clean and know the joy of His salvation.  

For example, suppose you are hiking, and the trail is well marked and clean. Off to the side, you see a beautiful flower. It is not on the trail, but some distance away. You can see it from the trail, so you decide it is safe to leave the trail to go examine this lovely flower. So, you step off the trail into the forest and brambles. You walk several feet and look back. Yes, you can see the trail clearly. You see the flower and soon forget about the trail. You want the flower.  

You stumble through the undergrowth and over the fallen logs and brambles you didn’t see when you were on the trail and have had to make several detours and now you cannot see the flower or the trail. You are still in the park but are lost. You don’t panic you have a compass. You take it out only to discover it is broken.  

Now you start to worry. You try to retrace your steps. All you want now is the trail. The flower is forgotten. You regret ever leaving the safety of the trail. You are sweaty and dirty and … was that a snake? The sun is starting to set and you really don’t want to be in these woods overnight.  

Finally, you hear a motor. A park ranger is nearby. You cry out for help. He comes to your aid and though he scolds you for leaving the trail, he takes you back to the safety of the trail. It was right where you left it. Waiting to take you back to your cabin. As you follow along, you see the flower again. It is still beautiful in the evening light, but this time you have no desire to leave the safety of the trail to pursue it.  

When we accept Jesus, we are still in the park but sometimes we leave the safety of the trail he has us on and decide to chase after something else. This is where we get into trouble. Often, we need help finding our way back. When we get back, Jesus is still waiting. Exactly at the point where we walked away.  

Sadly, there are some who decide to completely turn their backs on the salvation they have heard about. They follow along for a while but are determined to walk away. These have never accepted the free gift of salvation to begin with. For true believers, salvation is not something to be won or lost. Salvation is a gift freely given based on nothing but the shed blood of Jesus. We accept His gift and He keeps us continually and eternally. Even when we chase flowers in the forest and lose sight of the trail.  

GLORY TO HIS NAME 

The realization of this security leads us to praise and adoration. We praise the One who is able to save us so completely. We rejoice in the Name of the One who is able to bring us back when we wander off and stumble and fall. He loves us through it all. And He saves us eternally.  

Jesus assures us in John 10:28, 

And I give them eternal live, and they will never perish; and no one will snatch them out of My hand. (NASB) 

What hope would we have if every time we chased pretty flowers and lost our way, there was no hope of restoration, no chance of forgiveness? God calls us to return to Him. He had many times to un-choose Israel. Yet He never did. He called them and they were His and they remain His to this day. It is no different for those who have accepted the salvation of Jesus.  

Bring glory to His name by living your life in a way that pleases Him. Call on His name. Rejoice in Him. Celebrate Him. Tell of His goodness to those around you. Let Him shine through you. Praise His name forever.  

CONCLUSION 

While I believe in the eternal security of the believer. I also know that there are those who have never entered into this security I hold so dear. Or maybe at one time they believed but now have turned away from the faith. They have decided not to follow Jesus. All I can say to them is repent of your way. Return to Him. Believe in Him.  

For those of us who are in Christ, but we stumble and fall on our way. Get up and press on. Get back on the path. Pretty flowers soon fade. The path we are on leads to a place that will never fade and a hope that never passes away. Stay on the path, my friend. It may not be easy, but you are not alone.  

To reassure you this coming week, I challenge you to read the book of 1 John. It assures us of eternal life. Also, go to www.hymnary.org and look up Down at the Cross. It was written by E.A. Hoffman. Read the words of the entire song and listen to the music. If you already know the song, sing along. Let the words wash over your heart this week.  

All for One 

Angela 

Posted on by Angela

Third Verse Devotion: I Am Thine, O Lord

This week’s hymn is “I am Thine, O Lord.” It is one I can still hear my grandfather singing and one of many favorite Fanny Crosby songs. So, let’s explore the third verse,  

O, the pure delight of a single hour 
that before Thy throne I spend, 
when I kneel in prayer, and with Thee, my God, 
I commune as friend with friend!  

 
There are four stanzas to the hymn, and each seems to have a different theme. However, when you come to the refrain (chorus) they are all bound together.  

Refrain: 
Draw me nearer, nearer, blessed Lord, 
to the cross where Thou hast died; 
draw me nearer, nearer, blessed Lord, 
to Thy precious, bleeding side. 
 

They are all about being drawn closer to Christ. This particular stanza is about drawing deeper in prayer. What does prayer mean to you? How much time do you dedicate to prayer? Can you say you spend a single hour in prayer? I tend to relate more to the disciples when Jesus was in the garden, and He took the disciples with Him. He asked them to watch and pray. What did they do? They fell asleep. He came back and found them sleeping. His response? “Could you not keep watch for one hour?” (Mark 14:37) He asked the question to Simon Peter, but He might as well have asked me. I doubt I could have done much better. This account is found in Matthew 26 and Mark 14 if you need a refresher.  

Crosby calls it a “pure delight” to spend an hour in prayer. Some of us can barely manage fifteen minutes in prayer before our minds start to wander. So how can we spend an hour in prayer? I think it is a learned practice. It is something you build up to. It becomes a spiritual discipline. We begin to delight ourselves in the Lord (Psalm 37:4) and watch as His desires become our desires. At first distractions are everywhere then over time they come to a minimum as we learn to focus on Him and he becomes our heart’s desire.  

It is also important to remember that we are coming before the throne of Almighty God. We are not calling 1-800-I WANT NOW. We often need to change our attitude before we begin our prayer time. Our stanza talks about the delight of spending an hour before His throne. It is Him we are seeking. His presence. When we come with a list of Christmas wants, of course we can’t focus on much more than just those few things. He wants to spend time with us. He wants to commune with us. He wants us to want to commune with Him. Notice the last line, “as friend with friend.” You can’t say that when you meet with a friend you rush in with that friend and say something like, “I can only give fifteen minutes, so much to do, but here is what I need, by the way, I love you. You are my best friend. See you soon. Gotta run. Bye.” Before long that friend won’t want to meet with you and you can hardly call yourself friends. Friends talk and share. They listen to each other. They spend time together. They enjoy each other’s company. This is the relationship described in the hymn, “I commune as friend with friend.” 

I don’t know what your relationship with God is like. You may have a depth that others can only dream about. You may be more like the friend I just described. You may be somewhere in between. I hope wherever you are in your relationship you long to go deeper. You long for an ever-closer relationship with Him. I can say that with confidence because our God is so awesome in scope and power that just when we think we know Him He reveals another layer of His nature and character to us and we are blown away by Him and His greatness. 

I challenge you in this next week to change the way you think about your prayer life. Maybe you need to just begin to pray. So, five minutes is a challenge, and an hour is an eternity. So, start with the five minutes you do have. Maybe you are more like the friend I described earlier. Slow down and focus on Him who sits on the throne. He loves you and gave Himself for you. Leave your list and worship Him. Try something different. It is not too late to begin to draw nearer to God. In fact, He desires a relationship with you. Prayer is a conversation between you and God. He is waiting for you.  

 My prayer for all of us is that we would reach a place where our delight is a single hour in prayer talking with our God as friends.  

“Draw me nearer, nearer blessed Lord.” 

All for One 

Angela 

Posted on by Angela

Third Verse Devotion: Onward Christian Soldiers

I remember this hymn from when I was a kid in Vacation Bible School, back before the big production it is today. The song following the pledge to the Christian flag was almost always this hymn, Onward Christian Soldiers. We sang it from a small booklet that had all the pledges and the songs and a little about each of the missionaries for all five days. After, we marched out by classes, youngest to oldest for four hours of fun and crafts and lemon cookies and weak Kool-Aid. 

The first verse was all that was sung at that time. If you have ever tried to keep 75 to 100 or more kids contained during Onward Christian Soldiers played on an upright piano, then you understand why. So, I am the most familiar with the first verse. There have been times as an adult when we have sung the other verses but not often. I don’t know if it falls on many people’s list of favorite hymns. However, it is a good anthem to get the blood pumping and remind us that we are in a spiritual battle.   

Paul reminds us time and again that we are in a spiritual conflict. He tells Timothy to “fight the good fight.” I have been in churches where the fight became very verbal and very painful. It is easy to forget that our fight is not against flesh and blood. What we see is tangible. What we are fighting against is not. We cannot see it or touch it. We only see the effect of where it lingers or where it has been. We must remember that we are unified in the blood of Christ. Unity is the theme of the third stanza of our hymn.  

Like a might army moves the church of God 

Brothers we are treading where the saints have trod; 

We are not divided; all one body are we; 

One in hope and doctrine, one in charity. 

This verse reminds us that we are one body in Christ.  

There are examples of churches coming together for the good of the community. Working together for the needs of the people they serve. This is the church united. We are separated by denomination and doctrine and practice, so sometimes it is difficult to see what brings us together.  

Psalm 133:1 says, 

Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brothers to live together in unity! 

My husband and I had the privilege many years ago to be part of some prayer walks. I was the prayer coordinator at our church at the time and thought it would be a good idea to go to the other churches in our area and just stand in the parking lot and pray for the church. I wanted to be unobtrusive and not draw attention to what we were doing. So, we began to gather on Saturday mornings. Soon though a Methodist minister close to us caught wind of what we were doing and joined us every time we gathered. Our unobtrusive gatherings  culminated in a community wide prayer walk from the local convenience store to the school, about a two-and-a-half-mile walk praying for our community, our churches, our school, our state and our nation. It was a wonderful time of a community of churches. 

Let me encourage you today not to let anything distract you from the common faith we have. The apostles and writers of the New Testament faced this as much as we do today. Two thousand years have not solved the things that divide us. Believers still squabble over doctrine and Jesus’s words. Yet unity for believers is the very thing Jesus prayed for in John 17. 

I in them and You in Me, that they may be perfected in unity, so that the world may know that You sent Me, and You loved them, just as You loved Me. John 17:23 

Jesus prayed for us to be unified not divided. It is Christ that unifies us and in heaven we are all one in Him. We are reminded by Paul that we are one in Christ when he writes in Ephesians, 

Ephesians 4:4-6 

There is one body and one Spirit, just as you also were called in one hope of your calling; one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all who is over all and through all and in all. 

Brothers and sisters, we are one in Christ. So let us pray for our world, our individual nation, our community, our church, our family. We are soldiers in battle. If you have opportunity in the coming weeks to join with other Bible believing, Christ redeemed churches take advantage of the opportunity. Let us fight the good fight as soldiers and remain united to the end.  

Onward Christian Soldiers! 

Angela 

Posted on by Angela

Third Verse Devotion: America the Beautiful

We sing this hymn around the patriotic holidays of Memorial Day and Independence Day.  I also incorporated it around 9/11. I know I am past Independence Day, but I want to celebrate our freedom all month. Each of the Third Verse Devotions this month is patriotic in nature.

While every verse of the song is poignant and can cause reflection on the beauty and wonder of our nation verse three is a testament to those who have sacrificed much for this land of liberty. By way of note, I pull the hymns for the Third Verse Devotions from the 1991 edition of the Baptist Hymnal. You can find it here at www.hymnary.org.

Katharine Lee Bates wrote this song after climbing the top of Pike’s Peak. Inspired by the vista below she penned these verses. I think we can understand where she was coming from. I have never stood on Pike’s Peak, but I can imagine the view having seen vistas from lesser high points. Ms. Bates had been a high school teacher and a professor at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. She never married as at that time women who married were required to resign their tenure at the college. She wrote poems, books and was in demand as a speaker. America the Beautiful is perhaps her best-known work.

I have only found four verses for the song. The Methodist Hymnal 1989 moves the verse I want to focus on to verse four. The Baptist Hymnal 1991 and most of the other hymnals I looked at all have the verse as verse three.

O beautiful for heroes proved
In liberating strife,
Who more than self their country loved,
And mercy more than life!
America! America!
May God thy gold refine,
Till all success be nobleness,
And ev’ry gain divine.

This country was fought for with the blood and vigor of men who became heroes because they believed in what they stood for. Our armed forces today are still made up of men and women who are willing to become heroes in some way for this country. “Who more than self their country loved.” They are willing to give themselves for this country on the battlefield wherever it may be. There was a rise in enlistment after Pearl Harbor and again after 9/11. When our country is under attack there is a spirit that rises to defend her. When she is at peace, that same spirit is there to make sure that peace remains. I fear that there is a serious lack of patriotism among some of our people today. Our country means nothing to these individuals and those that have given their lives so they can express their hatred seems in vain. These individuals are not heroes proved in liberating strife.

This verse makes clear who the heroes are. Those who are willing to put their lives aside for their country. Those who are proved on the battlefield. Those who stand for what is right. A belief so unshakable that America is the greatest nation. Their state is the greatest state. Their town is the greatest town. Their school is the greatest school. Their family is the greatest family. Look to find heroes at the smallest level. How do they treat their family? Heroism begins small and grows from there to the battlefield of life.

Stand for what you believe. Be a hero to your family. Do what is right. Be proved a hero in the strife that comes. Stand strong and firm. Love your country. Love your family, more than your life. Be a giver of mercy. You are part of a great nation. Make it greater by your actions. In Micah 6:8 we have this admonition:

He has told you, mortal one, what is good;

And what does the LORD require of you

But to do justice, to love kindness,

And to walk humbly with your God? (NASB)

You want to be a good person? A hero? It starts with faith in God and a willingness to set yourself aside. Here in Micah we have an outline for three ways to live your life. Do justice, love kindness, walk humbly with God. If we all try to do these three things we would see America beautiful again. All success be nobleness and every gain divine. God bless America.

Angela