Joseph Scriven (1819-1886) wrote this hymn to comfort his mother who he hadn’t been able to see for some time due to working abroad.
What a friend we have in Jesus, all our sins and griefs to bear!
What a privilege to carry everything to God in prayer!
O what peace we often forfeit, O what needless pain we bear
all because we do not carry everything to God in prayer!
Have we trials and temptations? Is there trouble anywhere?
We should never be discouraged: take it to the Lord in prayer!
Can we find a friend so faithful, who will all our sorrows share?
Jesus knows our every weakness - take it to the Lord in prayer!
Read: Psalm 121
At the time when this poem was written, looking to the hills or mountains was a way of focussing on the place where earth connection with the heavens – concentrating on the place nearest to where God dwells. Our understanding of the universe means we no longer think that God lives just the other side of the clouds, but for people living 3,000 years ago when this psalm was written, this was a logical conclusion for them to come to, believing that hills and mountains took them nearer to God. This idea would also have been influenced through the people of Israel’s history as they remembered how when their ancestors journeyed through the Sinai wilderness, Moses experienced the presence of God on the top of a mountain.
So, when the psalmist says ‘I lift my eyes to the hills’ he is expressing the same desire as the writer of Sunday morning’s Bible reading when he told us to ‘Fix our eyes on Jesus’ (Hebrews 12: 2).
The writer of the psalm even tells us how we can focus our thoughts and lift our eyes to God. He tells us to remember who God is – that he is the maker of everything. As he considers this statement it gives him great assurance as he realises that each of us always have God’s full attention!
This is impossible for a human-being to do, we can only give our full attention to one or two individuals at any one time, and even then, our attention waivers after a short while. But God is alert and ready to respond to each of us at any time.
God never feels too tired and ‘drops-off’ as we are talking with him; God is never pre-occupied with something else, neither does he feel that there are more important things he ought to be doing rather than listening to us. This such amazingly good news - our Father in heaven, is a perfect parent, he is always excited to hear from each of us and if we follow his ways and listen to what he wants to say to us, we will find that God answers our every need and shows us how to live our life in the best way possible.
The coming four weeks of lock-down will present different challenges to each of us. Some of us will most of the time adapt well to the constraints of lockdown but even so there be some days that are more difficult than others, and some of us will struggle most days to cope with lack of interaction with other households, but each of us can ‘look to the hills’ and ‘fix our eyes on Jesus’ and discover that he fully understands our individual situation and wants to ‘watch over us’ – renewing us, refreshing us and providing all that we need each moment of each day.
On YouTube search for the hymn ‘Blessed Assurance.’ You will find many, many different interpretations of the same hymn – from very traditional versions (First Baptist Dallas Choir & Orchestra) to more contemporary renditions (Jeremy Riddle – best vale at 10 minutes long!) or the simple joy of the Getty family hymn-sing and I’m sure many of you will enjoy the version sung by ‘Sounds like reign’ The author of this hymn, Fanny Crosby went blind at 6 weeks old, but never allowed her blindness to stop her from ‘fixing her eyes of Jesus’ and in her lifetime wrote over 8,000 hymns.
On Friday I am hoping to be able to publish a guest writer
On Sunday I will post a message on the church website, but on the church’s facebook page we will live-stream some worship and a message. As it is Remembrance Sunday this will start at 10:00am so as not to clash with TV coverage of events at the Cenotaph. If 10am in not convenient, you can watch the video at any time afterwards.
ToyLink: The church hall will be open on Saturday 21st November, 10am to 12noon for gifts of toys for Birmingham City Mission to distribute, but you may prefer to go onto their website and on their toylink page make a donation and they will buy the toy for you.
Stephen