Tag Archive for Ash Wednesday Hymn

from Prepare Yourself for Worship

2017-02-24 Devotional with Hymn, Prepare Yourself for Worship No comments

Prepare for Ash Wednesday

Father, we worry and complain about so many things,
but we rarely give even a passing thought to
what is saddest and most destructive
in our entire world:
our sin and
our unrepentant hearts.

Today, Lord, make us conscious of our sin and
its terrible price.
We have turned our back on You, our Creator,
the only Source of all that is good.
We have dethroned You
from our lives and
from our race.
In Your place, we have enthroned our
puny,
perverted,
ignorant,
short-lived selves.
The results have been predictable:
darkness,
chaos,
suffering, and
death.

Father, we own our sin.
It is the one thing in this entire world that is
truly our own.
We face and accept our physical death
as the inevitable result of our sin.
We bow to You, face down,
excusing nothing,
claiming nothing,
clinging to nothing but Your mercy.
We confess and repent, Father.
Have mercy on us.
O God, have mercy!

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Hymn: Ash Wednesday Hymn
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Sharing His Life

2015-02-08 Devotional with Hymn No comments

My wife and I have enjoyed browsing through antique shops. I got hooked on them years ago when I collected old books. So when she and I got the chance to spend a weekend away together, we decided to tour the small towns nearby and visit their shops.

The weekend was wrapping up, and we were in Gower, Missouri. In a small store there I came across a funeral card for a man who had died in 1887. Reading the card, I couldn’t help thinking about that man. He brought to mind the countless individuals around the world who have come and gone, seemingly unknown and unremembered. So many people. So many generations. We are like flowers. We bloom and proudly spread our petals toward the sun, only to die as quickly as we came, leaving little sign of our coming or our going. What difference does our living make? What does it matter that I, or any of us, were ever here?

We are surrounded by a stream of death that flows unceasingly through our world, engulfing all life, threatening to wash away all concept of meaning and significance. For me, antique shops quietly testify to that. They are graveyards for our treasures. When we’re gone, the things we counted precious are left behind to sell for pennies or to gather dust. They sit there on the shelf, mocking the foolishness and futility of our lives–lives hungrily invested in what is doomed to quickly pass.

As I stood there and saw myself as part of that stream of death, I was reminded that there is more.

I am not just a physical body that is dying even now. The life in me is the life of my Creator. He has shared it with me, and His life is unending. He is not a God of death and darkness, but of life and light. His life will not die with this body, and this world is not His final arena of existence or meaning.

What is more, I can know Him. I can know Him personally and live in a relationship with Him. I can please Him and talk to Him. I can learn of Him and grow in Him. I can fulfill the purpose for which I, and all this, was created.

That’s what I want above anything else. I want to become the person He designed me to be.

Listen and sing:
Hymn: Ash Wednesday Hymn
Recording
Printed Music & Lyrics