This Sunday I have the pleasure of introducing our congregation (or most of them, anyway) to a new song as I lead worship. The song is “Hymn of Heaven” by Phil Wickham and you can find the video for the song below. The song is about the joy we will experience in heaven as we sing together in worship around the throne of God. One line of the song has always stood out to me: “And every prayer we prayed in desperation, the songs of faith we sang through doubt and fear, in the end, we’ll see that it was worth it, when He returns to wipe away our tears.”
Have you ever had the experience of singing a “song of faith through doubt and fear?” I shared with my worship team last night at practice that this line takes me back to a specific time in my life. My family is musical and my mother is always asking us (commanding us?) to sing a hymn when we are together. Most of the time, the hymn she requests is “How Great Thou Art.” So we have many experiences at family gatherings for special occasions of singing a couple of acapella verses of How Great Thou Art.
When my sister passed away almost five years ago, one of the first things we did for her funeral service was sing How Great Thou Art congregationally. I remembered thinking at the time, as I sang through many tears, that the act of singing the truth about God’s greatness in the midst of such tragedy was an act of defiance against death and the powers of evil. Even though we were shaken and very sad, we sang what we knew to be solid truth. Becky was with Jesus and we would all be joining her eventually because of our awesome God! My point to the worship team was that every time we lead worship, we are singing the truths of our songs in defiance of what we see in the world around us and into dark situations (many of which are unknown to us) present in the people we are leading to drive back the darkness with the light of God’s goodness.
After sharing that word with them, I came home last night and saw a post on Twitter that gave me another great example of this. Russia had invaded Ukraine just that morning, and the post contained a video of a Ukranian family singing a Getty hymn called “He Will Hold Me Fast” back in December as the invasion loomed on the horizon.
What a blessing to be able to sing songs of faith in God no matter what our current circumstances!
Brian this is so great. I shared it with my prayer group and they love it too.