Ephesians 5:18-20
Turn in your copy of God’s word
to the book of Ephesians chapter five. Today we’ll be reading
from verses 15 through 21, but our focus will be on verses 18
through 20. Over the last many weeks, we
have considered the subject or the theme of the means of grace,
the means by which or the avenues through which God communicates
or gives his grace to us in an ongoing way as we walk the Christian
life. And so we have looked at the
word. We’ve looked at the sacraments, baptism in the Lord’s supper.
We’ve looked at prayer. We’ve considered suffering. We’ve
looked at fellowship. We looked several weeks ago at
family worship or private worship. And today I want us to land on
the subject of singing in worship. The title of the sermon is this,
what to say and what to sing. in church. And so we take up
this subject from Ephesians chapter five. And I read to you God’s
word beginning at verse 15. Look carefully then how you walk,
not as unwise, but as wise, making the best use of the time because
the days are evil. Therefore, do not be foolish,
but understand what the will of the Lord is. And do not get
drunk with wine, for that is debauchery, but be filled with
the Spirit, addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual
songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with all your heart. giving thanks always and for
everything to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus
Christ, submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ. This is God’s holy, it is his
inspired, and it is his word from him, our King, to us, his
loyal subjects. Pray with me. Our Lord and God,
we come before you We come before you now as your people, and we
want to hear from you. We want to hear what you have
to say about us, what you have to say to us, and what you have
for us to do. So give us eyes that see, ears
that hear, hearts that are tender and willing to receive your word,
to treasure it, and to go out this week and to do what it says
as we put it into practice in our lives. Give us your help
by your spirit. to make these things so, to make
these things true in our lives. And we pray it in Christ’s name,
amen. When you read through the Old
Testament, one of the things that you will notice as a theme
throughout the books of the Old Testament is that the people
of God were very often disobedient. Now, if you’re like me and you’re
reading through the books of the Bible and you’re reading about
the kings, and you’ve read about one king who did what was right
in the eyes of the Lord, and things went well. And then you
start reading about other kings who did not do what was right
in the eyes of the Lord and things did not go well. You start rooting
for good kings. Lord, next chapter I turn to,
next page I go to, let there please be a good king. Another
Josiah, another king who fears God and keeps his commandments
and then blessing comes on Israel. But very sadly, when you read
the story of redemption throughout the Old Testament, you read that
God, speaking to his covenant people, to his church, has to
say to them over and over and over, you have stopped listening. You have stopped obeying my voice. You have stopped living as children
of the king of kings. And if it doesn’t change, if
you don’t amend your ways, if you don’t turn from your sin
and come back and return to the Lord, I will then have to punish
you as I promised. One of the recurring punishments
that we read of in the Old Testament is that God would do two things.
One is his glory would depart, he would physically He would
ascend from his people. He would no longer dwell in their
midst and be among them. His blessing and his presence
would go away. But another thing that he promised
is that they would be removed from the promised land. They
would be physically removed or exiled from the land of promise. And God made this threat over
and over to his people And as you read through the story of
redemption in the old covenant, they continue to be stiff necked. They continue to be rebellious.
And so in two stages in the Old Testament, we see God making
good on his promise. Now, some of you children. You
know just how far your parents will go. You know which threats
are empty and you know which threats they will follow through
on. You know which threats are just their huff and their puff
because they’re mad and they’re tired. And you know which threats
they will really see through to the very end. Well, it’s as
if the people of Israel did not believe Yahweh. And so in two
stages, he exiled the Northern 11 tribes to Assyria. They were carried away by the
Assyrians often in a very difficult and inhumane fashion. And so they were exiled to Assyria.
And then later the Southern tribe of Judah fell to the Babylonians. We know of the Babylonian captivity.
They laid to waste the city of Jerusalem. They leveled the temple. They leveled the walls. They
leveled the houses and destroyed as much as they could as far
reaching and around Jerusalem as they could. And the glory
of God departed. And so those two things that
God threatened, my glory will depart and I will send you away
came true. The people were carried off to
Babylon. They were carried off to a strange and foreign land.
You read the stories in the Bible, you know of this experience.
You remember Daniel and his compadres, they had to eat a certain diet. They had to pray a certain time
and they faced struggles living in a foreign place. Well, you
realize, you recognize how difficult it would be to be the people
of God out of the promised land. You realize how awful it would
be to be the people of God without the presence of God. But also we realize how difficult
it would be to be the people of God called out of the world
to live in a distinct way in a foreign land. In fact, Psalm
137 tells us a little bit about what they experienced. Psalm
137 says this, by the waters of Babylon, There we sat down and wept. When
we remembered Zion, on the willows there we hung up our lyres, for
there our captors required of us songs. And our tormentors,
mirth, sang, sing to us one of the songs of Zion. How shall
we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land? If I forget you, O Jerusalem,
let my right hand forget its skill. Let my tongue stick to
the roof of my mouth if I do not remember you, and if I do
not set Jerusalem above as my highest joy. This is the memory. This is the recollection of the
psalmist of how difficult it was to be out of the promised
land, to be without the presence of God, and to be amongst another
nation who did not know God, nor did they love God, nor did
they understand the worship of the people of God. Now we think
very often that The Babylonian captivity was something for the
people of God of old. And we read passages in books
of the Bible, like Ezra and Nehemiah, where the people of God returned
from Babylon and they rebuilt the temple. It was smaller. They
rebuilt the walls under Nehemiah’s leadership. They rebuilt their
houses and they again, indwelled in the promised land. And we
think all the exile is over. But if you read the New Testament
books of the Bible, particularly the words of the apostle Peter,
Peter addresses us as Christians in this way. He says, to the
elect, exiles scattered. And so dear Christian brothers
and sisters, we need not think of the exile as something of
the past. We as the people of God are presently
in exile. We are not in heaven. We are
not with God. We are not in the place where
he desires for us to be yet. Now, some of our loved ones are
no longer exiled. They’ve gone on to be with the
Lord, as we say. Their spirits have been made
perfect. They are no longer exiled here on earth. They are no longer
under the tyranny of the darkness of this world. They are no longer
trying to sing the Lord’s song in a strange land for they are
now singing the Lord’s song with the heavenly throng before the
throne of Almighty God. And so I want you to think today
about singing. I want you to think today about
living in exile among a strange people who do not understand
who you are, where you have come from, and why you do what you
do the way you do it. For we are exiles and strangers
in this land until we make it home to the new heavens and to
the new earth. Now, how are we to think of this?
Well, I want you to think of it in this way. You are a Christian. If you have come to faith in
Jesus Christ and you have rested in him alone for your salvation,
repenting of your sins and putting your faith and hope and trust
in him, you are a Christian. You are a new creation in Christ
Jesus. You are no longer an old man
under the old nature, under the sinfulness of Adam, for you have
been raised up with Christ Jesus and you have been seated with
him in the heavenly places. And you are a stranger here.
You are an exile here. You’re from a heavenly home,
a heavenly city, a new Jerusalem. And God is saying to you today
by his word and through the Holy Spirit from Ephesians chapter
five, particularly verse 18, you are not to live like the
rest of the world. The rest of the world is full
of wine, but you as a Christian are to be full of the Holy Spirit
of God. And so as Christians full of
the Holy Spirit, no longer full of wine and debauchery and all
other means of darkness, because you are now a Christian, you
are now a child of God, you are to say, and to sing the words
of God. A spirit-filled Christian makes
music to God from the heart. Let me say that again in a different
way. Spirit-filled Christians make music together from the
heart and to the Lord. So what do we say in church?
What do we sing in church? Well, let me read to you from
verses 18 through 20. Picking up at the latter portion
of verse 18, it says, but be filled with the spirit, addressing
one another in songs and hymns and spiritual songs, singing
and making melody to the Lord with all your heart, giving thanks. Always. I want us to think about
this passage. Think about our call to action,
our call to duty in three ways. As spirit-filled Christians who
are exiles in this world, waiting to get home to heaven. There’s
some action required. There’s some content that is
necessary. And then there is an audience.
So as spirit-filled Christians, What actions are we to take,
particularly in the context of the church? These are six things
we find in this passage. We are to address one another. We are to address one another
with psalms and with hymns and with spiritual songs. We’re to
make music, we’re to make melody, and we’re to give thanks. You
know from your grade school days, I’m sure, when you add the three
letters I-N-G to a verb, it sort of puts a continuous, ongoing
action emphasis to it. We were joking this week with
my wife’s family out in Tennessee about the funny things we say,
and my mother-in-law says I’m fixing to do something. Well,
take the word fixing, for example, if you’re, if you’re going to
fix something, you’re going to go fix it. But if you’re fixing
to do something, you add ING, you see, it’s kind of an ongoing
process. And what are those ongoing ING
actions for the church? We are addressing one another. We are psalming one another. We are hemming one another. We
are singing one another. We are music making with one
another. We are giving thanks with one
another. In weeks past, we’ve talked about
the word fellowship. And we’ve talked about how the
word fellowship means partnership or having in common. It’s koinonia. But we talked about how fellowship
is not just about fried chicken. Now, fried chicken, good. We
go to the fellowship hall, have fried chicken, you’ve had a good
Sunday. But fellowship literally or theologically means we do
something together that’s biblical. And yes, eating fried chicken
is somehow biblical or barbecue or whatever, but there has to
be more. And so we fellowship together
under the word. We fellowship together singing.
We fellowship together, psalming and hymning and spiritual psalming
and music making and giving thanks. And so the action that is required
of Christians is that we address one another biblically, that
we sing psalms, that we sing hymns, that we sing inspired
songs of praise, that we make music or melody together, and
that we give thanks together. If somebody asks you, well, what
do you do at your church? You know what a really good answer
would be? We address one another in Psalms and hymns and spiritual
songs. We make music together and we
give thanks to God the Father through Jesus Christ together.
And do you know that most of the people, even in the Christ
haunted South where everybody at least used to go to church,
not so much now, they’ll look at you kind of weird and say,
y’all do what? Because we’ve lost our way. We go to church
for all sorts of things now, but in the book of Ephesians,
Christ has saved us for all kinds of things. But one of the things
he has saved us to do is to come together and to sing together
to God in the name of Christ and in the company of one another. The other week we attended a
wedding. We attended a wedding. It was a fun event. Sometimes
you just need a wedding. Sometimes you need a foretaste
of heaven. And this wedding was that. It was a foretaste of the
great wedding supper of the Lamb. A lot of folks together, 400
or 500, crammed together in this beautiful cathedral. There was
one congregational hymn. We sang Psalm 67 together. And
that place was loud and it was roaring. And as the, the, the
music played and as the, the voices of the people of God who
had gathered to witness that wedding together saying it sent
chills through your body. Now Psalm 67 is one of my favorite
songs. and it has now been set to a
new tune, which I had never heard it sung to that tune before,
but it’s one of my favorite songs and one of my favorite tunes.
Will you put those two together? It’s glorious. And it sent chills
through, it sent chills at least through my body. It took me a
moment just to be able to sing the first stanza, to get over
the emotion of the music, the emotion of the gathering of people
and the voices. But friends, that is what we
do together, is we sing together. And it ought to be special, it
ought to be electrifying. If we have been saved by faith
through the Lord Jesus Christ, and we come into the house of
God, and we see others who’ve been saved by Christ, and when
we sing together the words of the scripture, whether through
psalms or hymns or spiritual songs, it ought to be the most
exhilarating, spirit-filled thing in our lives. You know, I’ve
been to Cameron Indoor Stadium. You know where Duke is. That
place shakes. That place vibrates. That place
is loud. That place is an assault on your
senses. Why? Because people love Duke
basketball. And I go there and I love Duke
basketball. And I have to tell you, I don’t think I’ve ever
been to a church service that has been that electrifying. That’s
kind of sad, isn’t it? I’ve been to Presbytery where
150 men’s voices fill the room. I’ve been to General Synod where
600 male voices fill the room. I’ve been to the Twin Lakes Fellowship
down in Mississippi where 200 or 300 guys sing together, but
it doesn’t vibrate and shake the place. And you see, one is
a sports venue. One is just a thing. But the
other is the eternal word of God being sung in the hearts
and with the voices of the people. There’s something you’ll hear
me say very often. I love to say it because I think it’s true.
Saved people sing. And you know what I thought of
the other week when I went to that wedding? There’s a lot of saved people
here because, you know, you can go to a funeral sometimes and
people don’t sing. And you say, well, this was probably
an unchurched family. You can go to a wedding sometimes
and they’ll do the obligatory hymn singing and people aren’t
singing. But when you go somewhere where
there are saved people singing, addressing one another in Psalms
and hymns and spiritual songs, making music to the Lord and
giving thanks, what an electrifying and wonderful thing it is. Let
me encourage you in this way. The elders of the church can
provide opportunity for you to worship. We can open the building,
we can turn on the heat or the air, we can cut on the lights,
we can put an order of service out for you, we can provide a
preacher, but you’ve got to come ready. You’ve got to come ready
to meet your maker, to meet with your King, your Lord, your sovereign,
and you’ve got to be ready because you’re saved and saved people
sing to lift the roof off of this place. because you’re so
excited to be in the presence of God and in the company of
saints as a person who is no longer under condemnation. You
know, sometimes we come to church and we have these dour looks
on our faces and you wonder sometimes, does he or she know that she’s
been saved from the wrath of God and from eternity forever
without, because sometimes we come to church and we’re grumping
about something or something bad went wrong at home or there
was a little tiff in the car on the way here. You know, there’s
a wonderful little saying in the Song of Solomon, and it’s
speaking about marriage and relationship of marriage, but it can apply
elsewhere. Don’t let the foxes spoil the vineyard. Dear friends, you’ve got to get
ready for church. And I don’t mean your clothes. I mean, please
do. But you’ve got to be spiritually ready because guess who does
not want you here in the Lord’s house on the Lord’s day with
the Lord’s people? Satan, because he wants nothing
less than God to be worshiped. He wants you to have a spat on
the way here. He wants you to be worried about the color of
the carpet more than the condition of the hearts of your fellow
church members. He wants you occupied with something
other than the glory of God and the praise of God and the thankfulness
to Christ for such a redemption. And so this is just a little
on the action that is required of us. What about the content?
Think about these key words here, Psalms and hymns, and spiritual
psalms. What are the psalms? Well, we
know what those are. There’s 150 of them right in the middle
of this book. But you know, we’re not a psalm
singing people like we used to be. Did you know that in our
denomination, up until about the middle of last century, our
denomination, the Associate Reform Presbyterian Church, sang psalms
only. No hymns, psalms only. And we are in a vein or a tradition
of many other reformed churches who put a great emphasis on singing
Psalms. And thanks be to God in our denomination
that we are challenging and encouraging every congregation to sing the
Psalms of the Old Testament again. I mean, for sure, you know, Psalm
23, the Lord is my shepherd. You’ve sung it to the tomb cremant
a number of times. Maybe you know all people that
on earth do dwell, Psalm 100. Sing to the Lord with cheerful
voice. And perhaps you’ve sung A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,
Martin Luther’s rendition of Psalm 46. But what a blessing
it is in this day and age to have in our hands a book that
contains a musical setting and the words to all 150 Psalms so
that we are no longer impoverished. I tell you, back in 2000, summer
of 2000, I moved to Charlotte to go to seminary. The first
book that I bought, it was required, was a psalter. And do you know
why we bought those psalters? It was required of every student
to own one because every class was opened with the singing of
a psalm. And I’ll tell you, I have a lot
of memories of seminary. I learned a lot of wonderful things, met
a lot of wonderful people, sat under a lot of wonderful things,
but probably the most hands down spiritual blessing for me, second
or next would be learning the shorter catechism, was singing
the songs. It is a wonderful, wonderful
thing to sing the word of God. And so we’re to sing the songs.
We’re also to sing hymns. Now, when we see this word hymns
here in Ephesians, Chapter 5, you’ll also see it in Colossians
chapter 3. You may think of your hymn book, and that’s a good
thing to think about. But I first want you to think
about the hymns that are not in the Psalter. They’re not in
the 150 Psalms that are in the Bible. Do you remember what Moses
and Miriam sang when they crossed the Red Sea? Some of you probably
sang it if you made it through the Bible or the Calvary Bible
movement back in the 70s and 80s. I can remember singing this
as a kid. I will sing unto the Lord for he has triumphed gloriously. The horse and the rider have
been thrown into the sea. And it goes on from there. Or
think about Mary. When the angel appeared to her
and said, Mary, you have found favor with God. You’re gonna
have a child and his name shall be Jesus for he will save his
people from their sins. And what did Mary do? Check her
iPhone and put it on Instagram and move on about life. She broke
into song. She said, I rejoice greatly. And she went on to sing praise
to God for he has seen fit to save his people. And he had somehow
seen fit to use her a little servant girl. And so Mary sings,
we call that the Magnificat. And you see other songs, Zachariah
sings, Simeon sings at the coming of Christ. There are hymns in
the Pauline epistles. And then you get to the book
of Revelation. And you see over and over again, how around the
throne of glory in heaven, the people of God, night and day
sing, holy, holy, holy, worthy is the lamb who was slain and
over and over. And so in the Bible, even outside
the Psalter, there is much to sing. And then we come to spiritual
songs. You know, in the 2000 years plus
of church history, thousands of hymns have been written. You
know, the Wesley brothers, Charles and John, they wrote tons of
hymns. One of them wrote over 5,000 hymns. There was Fanny
Crosby in the 1800s, I believe it was, who wrote over a thousand
hymns, I believe. And you get all the way up to
the modern day. We sang in Christ alone, the Gettys. The choir
has sung many of the hymns of James Montgomery voice, who went
to be with the Lord maybe 15, 18 years ago, who wrote a number
of hymns before his death. You’ve heard from our choir,
some of the hymns of R.C. Sproul. He went home to be with
the Lord last Christmas. But there have been hymns and
spiritual songs written throughout the ages. And then many composers
have put these these words, these words of the scripture, these
words of theological and spiritual truth to music so that we can
sing them. And what a wonderful and precious
gift. If we were to have a hymnal in
our church that had every good hymn that we’re singing, it would
be huge, it would be thick. We would have volumes in the
pews and so it’s difficult for us to sing all that the Christian
church has to offer. But we wanna sing the best. We
want to sing the best words set to the best music so that the
congregation who’ve gathered before the throne of God can
give praise. And what is the content? The
content is nothing other than the truth of scripture. Now,
what about audience? We looked at action. We sing,
we address one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs.
We make music, we give thanks to the Lord. What is the content?
Well, it’s the word of God in psalms and hymns and spiritual
songs. What about the audience? Notice in our passage in verses
18 through 20, it gives us the audience. We’re to address one
another in Psalms. There is a sense when we are
singing in the congregation, we are singing to one another.
And I know, dear friends, we make jokes about our voices.
We say things like, I can’t carry a tune in the bucket, or thanks
be to God, they are just making a joyful noise to the Lord. But
you know one of my favorite things on Sunday? One of my favorite
things as I stand here is to hear y’all sing. It’s a wonderful
thing. It’s a wonderful thing to hear
saved people saying, I have a unique position up here because y’all
are singing at me as you sing to God, but I can hear it. And
it is a wonderful and special treat. And as y’all sing loud,
it encourages me to sing loud. Now, some of you will say, maybe
we should stop singing loud. So he’ll stop singing loud, but
it’s good to be together and to sing together and to sing
the truths of God to one another, affirming to one another. This
is all that we have in this world. And this is what is good and
right and true. Well, there’s another member of the audience. We’re to sing to one another.
We’re to address one another in Psalms and hymns and spiritual
songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with all your heart. You know, the church And I’m
sure it’s this way in other parts of the world, but at least the
church in America, the church in America, if you go to many
modern churches, the congregation no longer sings. There are paid
professionals. There are band members, people
trained in music, and they’re the ones doing the singing. And dear brothers and sisters,
God has redeemed a church. He has redeemed a church for
his own glory and he wants us to sing to him. He wants us to
sing psalms to him and spiritual songs and hymns. He wants to
hear our thanksgiving. He wants to hear our voices.
And when we take away in the church of the Lord Jesus Christ,
the opportunity, the spiritual blessing, the spiritual benefit
of the congregation singing, we’ve taken away one of the greatest
privileges that the people of God have. You look all throughout
the history of the people of God, the people of God sang before
God. Now, somewhere in the early church,
in the period we call the dark ages, the people of God quit
singing and they quit singing because professional musicians
filled the upper chambers of the church and they did the singing.
People also quit singing because the liturgy was in Latin. And
Latin was the language of the educated class. And so if you
didn’t know Latin, you could not sing. And not only if you
didn’t know Latin, could you not sing, you could not understand
the word because it was read only in Latin. Well, enter Tyndale,
enter Huss, enter Wycliffe, enter Luther. enter those famous figures
of the Protestant Reformation, many of whom we studied last
year, what did they bring back to the church? They brought back
the red word of God and the sung word of God. And so for the past
500 years, we as the people of God have been privileged to hear
the word of God in our own language, not only read, not only preached,
but also sung. In Calvin’s Geneva, psalm singing
was revitalized, and it carried over into Scotland, then carried
over into the United States, and it carried over into our
denomination. And so we have a rich history
as children of the Reformation, as children of the Associate
Reformed Presbyterian, to be a psalm singing, Bible singing
people. And what a great gift that is.
But we sing to the Lord. Yes, we address one another.
But our main audience is to the Lord. It’s to God the Father,
as our passage tells us. And it’s in the name of the Lord
Jesus Christ. This is not a fight song for
our favorite university. This is not a lullaby to get
us to go to sleep. This is not Whatever your favorite
channel is on your XM radio in your car or your favorite records
or CDs or tapes or eight tracks or whatever format it is you
listen to your music on. This is sacred music sung by
the people of God to the Lord of glory. And so dear brothers
and sisters, we want in our worship service, if we’re to think about
the actions of singing, the content, the word of God, the audience,
one another and God, our worship ought to be full of reading and
singing and preaching and praying the scriptures. Now you’ll notice
in our service, We always sing the Gloria Patri and we always
sing the doxology. Those are fixed praises to God. But our opening hymn is always
God directed to God be the glory. Great things he has done. Our
middle hymn is always something about redemption in Christ alone.
My hope is found. He is my light. He is my strength.
He is my song. The end hymn, the final hymn
is always something about. God, I’ve heard what you said
to me today, and I’m going to take seriously the call to be
a disciple and a witness of Jesus Christ. And therefore, by your
strength, I’m going to go do in the world what you have called
me to do. And so we sing the songs and
the hymns and the spiritual songs of the faith at certain points
in our service to move us to service as we leave with God’s
blessing and his benediction. Now a few thoughts about music.
Martin Luther said, music is the handmaiden. It is the servant. It is subservient to the words
that we sing. You know, the purpose of music
in the church is simply to help the saints sing praise to God. Now we have brothers and sisters
who sing without music. Some of you know one of our brothers
who preaches here on Sunday nights in my absence. His congregation
sings songs only without any musical accompaniment. And there
are folks with that conviction that we should sing only without
the accompaniment of music. We believe that music is fine,
but we believe it is a handmaiden. We believe it is a servant. It
is not the master. And so when we have our piano
or our organ or our flute or our violins or cellos or whatever
instruments we have to offer to the Lord, they are there simply
to assist us. They are there simply to help
us, to aid us in just giving praise to almighty God. The words that we sing to one
another and to God are the main event. Dear brothers and sisters,
let me encourage you today. Let me encourage you from this
scripture. Let me encourage you pastorally
to think of the marriage of the words of God and the music that
is played as a wonderful and pleasing offering as it gathers
together and as it rises up into heaven. Do you think there’s
anything more pleasing to God than a spirit-filled, warm-hearted
Christian who sings his words back to him? What a special treat
it is for us to be saved and then to be able to sing. Dear friends, saved people sing. And I want you to encourage you
in this way. Saved people will sing forever. Sometimes you hear people say,
church is boring. Sometimes you hear people say, well, I went
to church today and there was nothing in it for me. I have a friend in ministry,
a colleague in ministry. He says, well, if you don’t like
church on Sunday, you’re gonna be really bored in heaven because
heaven is just church for eternity. Friends, saved people sing and
saved people will be singing forever in heaven. This is a
foretaste of glory. And so before you is an opportunity
to get ready for heaven, to rehearse, to practice and to be ready. Let me leave you with these words
of Psalm 95. Come, let us worship the Lord. Let us sing to the God of our
salvation. Amen. Pray with me. Our Lord
and God, we pray with all our hearts that you would stir in
us a love for you, a love for one another, a love for your
church, and a love for the glory of God that helps us, that motivates
us, that drives us to be a singing people. Lord, we sing that wonderful
hymn, Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch
like me. But we sing it without a smile
on our face. We sing it without feeling in our heart because
We’re really not that amazed by grace. We’re really not in
wonder that we who once were wretched have now been made clean
and fully clothed. Help us, Lord, to see with our
eyes, with our minds, and with our hearts who we are in Christ. and help that to come out as
we lift our voices up to the heavens. This we pray in the
name of Jesus, the one who has saved us, amen. Let us respond
to God’s word as we sing number 534, fill thou my life, oh Lord,
my God.