Words for Worship

Ministry Today

 

Texts:

 

Acts 2.34-47

 

Some years ago  I had to sit through  a performance by English national Opera

of the operetta - Princes Ida.

 

Not I have to say, in my humble opinion, one of Gilbert and Sullivan’s best efforts. But it does contain a line which refers to a woman in an all female university college as scarcely suffering Doctor Watt’s hymns.

 

And the learned doctor in question is Isaac Watts - one of the best known and most prolific hymn writers in British history.

 

So as we continue to study the great hymn writers of the past, we are going to look at Watts works with a view to discovering what makes a good hymn and why?

 

Well it is right to call Watts learned. For even at an early age he studied Latin, Greek and Hebrew. But he also was an inveterate rythmer. In fact, once he had to explain why he had his eyes open during family prayers. To which he said to his father pointing at a furry creature;

 

A little mouse for want of stairs

Ran up a rope to say its prayers

 

His father possibly driven to distraction with the boys verses took his anger out on his backside. To which undaunted young Watts cried out:

 

O father, do some pity sake

And I will no more verses make.

 

Game, set and match I would say to Isaac.

 

But his learning also helped him to see a better use for his poetic gifts because he was incensed by the hymns of his day. Now these were entirely based on psalms and biblical paraphrases and not very good ones at that. This example of ludicrously wording and turgid style makes his point:

 

Ye monsters of the bubbling deep,

    Your Master's praises spout,
Up from the sands ye coddlings peep,
    And wag your tails about.

 

And so Watts alighted on the innovation of setting his own poetry to music.  The result was a superb collection of fresh hymns in contemporary language which truly expressed the sheer exuberance of knowing Jesus Christ. Moreover, they also captured ordinary people’s imaginations keen to give voice to the personal experience of God in their lives; the very pleasure that the 1st century believers must have enjoyed too in the company of the Spirit of the Risen Christ.

 

The very delight of which watts wrote:

 

Joy to the world! the Lord is come;
Let earth receive her King;
Let every heart prepare him room,
And heaven and nature sing,
And heaven and nature sing,
And heaven, and heaven, and nature sing.

 

 

However, not every one was enthusiastic about Watt’s quantum leap in hymn technology. A bit like Saul’s daughter who despised David for dancing in the presence of the Ark, his works were denounced by some as common. Indeed, one critic fuming upon the alleged worldliness of his hymns. Therefore, he bleated: Christians have shut out divinely inspired hymns and taken in by Watt’s flights of fancy.

 

Yet this moaner missed the point. For, every hymn should aspire to take flight; if it doesn’t it will not cross the divisions that are obstacles to its survival both in their own era and in the future.

 

Now Watts knew all about barriers and prejudices and segregation. For his own father, a renowned dissenter from the Church of England had been in prison for his troubles. Isaac himself, despite his obvious intellectual brilliance, was debarred as a non-conformist from the Oxbridge universities. Yet he wrote in a manner that did not pander to any church partition. Rather he penned hymns that bridged the demarcations between the Church’s denominations then and now. They also speak equally well of God’s love to all levels of understanding. But most important of all, his works in common with all great hymns have the ability span space and time.  Because the best seem spanking new and relevant even after centuries and make real sense to people from entirely different cultures and walks of life. Yet to be honest, Watts’ efforts pass the most severe test of all. And that is the one for being divinely inspired. Since, to achieve that blue riband a hymn must hold the power to breach the schism between ourselves and God.  And it was for that reason Isaac watts wrote:

Our God, our help in ages past,
Our hope for years to come,
Be Thou our guard while troubles last,
And our eternal home.

 

 

 

Yet it could be asked how did Watts come to write such great hymns? Well, Isaac Watt wasn’t just a minister and hymn writer he was an outstanding scholar as well. In fact, his treatise on logic remained the standard textbook at Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard and Yale universities for nearly 100 years. And either or because or despite these studies he realised a crucial thing about speaking to all people of God and for all people to God. And it was this!

 

All Christians are faithful not to a set of commands nor to a memory of one who was. No – each and every one of us is in a very real relationship with a living person. That was exactly Peter’s unique selling position to the crowd after Pentecost. And that has to be a good hymn’s selling point too.  Because, if it does not set out to engage emotion and well as mind in our walk with Christ then it may be beautiful yet it is but dried up treatises. That is why Watt’s hymns concern themselves mainly with God and the individual human heart; their estrangement, their reconciliation and their reunion. That is why Watt’s hymns give sense to the drama of the incarnation and the cross, the dereliction and the resurrection and how an apparently small event has cosmic significance. That indeed is why Watt’s hymns are magnificent expressions of our out flowing to the man who brought earth up to heaven and for our sakes brought heaven low to earth. The sort of expression that Watt makes in these great words:

 

When I survey the wondrous cross
On which the Prince of glory died,
My richest gain I count but loss,
And pour contempt on all my pride.

Forbid it, Lord, that I should boast,
Save in the death of Christ my God!
All the vain things that charm me most,
I sacrifice them to His blood.

 

 

Well today in worship, we may not personally have the words to cross the apparently bottomless divide between created and creator; nor maybe are you hearing a sermon that bridges the gulf between the limited and the infinite. Indeed we may not even have read the prose that reconciles the unworthy and the spotless. But we can certainly find a hymn that does those tasks magnificently instead. The sort of great hymn that understands, even if we cannot, Watt’s four line stanza:

 

Where reason fails,

With all her pow’rs,

There faith prevails

And love adores.

 

 

Amen

 

 

Offering

 

HYMN

 

 

 

Isaac Watts