Lyrics for our Journey Home

In Psalm 119 verse 54 we find, “Your statutes have been my songs in the house of my sojourning.” I love what Lig Duncan said, he said this verse gives us lyrics for our journey home. God has supplied the lyrics for our journey through life. We must not only hope in the word, live through the law, resolve to keep the law, meditate on the law, be governed by it, but we must also learn to sing the Word of God. The hymns, psalms, and spiritual songs are to be used by the people of God as they walk through life…especially in the midst of affliction.

Paul and Silas in prison singing praises to God. Bonhoeffer urged his students to sing. When he came to the states and found very little in terms of theology that moved him, but one thing that did move him was the Spirituals sung in the African American churches. He took them back to Germany with him and played them for his students.

Songs written and sung by a people in the midst of great affliction. We can learn from our African American brothers and sisters…they have suffered much and yet they sang and worshiped. Biblical people are a singing people.

The last thing we find in in the last two verses, “I remember your name in the night O LORD, and keep your law. This blessing has fallen to me, and I have kept your precepts.” We must obey the Word of God. We find the idea of meditation again, in the watches of the night, but we read it, study it, memorize it, and mediate upon it and it is all for naught if we don’t obey it.

Notice what he says—he is in affliction, but when he obeys God’s Word blessings fall upon him. There isn’t a word about being out of the affliction, but we must know we can know blessing in the affliction. Only in God can this be true, but we praise Him in the midst of it, we sing, we obey Him, and His comfort comes, His presence is felt, and we worship Him and we are blessed…even in the midst of sorrow and affliction.

Let me close with a little video. Many of you have seen it before, but Wintley Phipps is a pastor and Gospel Singer. He told the story of the black spirituals and then he talked about the most famous of the White Spirituals…the song, Amazing Grace. He said that the earliest renditions of the song list the words by John Newton and the music as unknown. Our hymnal attaches a name to it, but the earliest versions just list it as unknown. He said that he thought Amazing Grace was written by Newton to a West African Slave Chant that he would have heard as a slave trader. He said imagine slave at the bottom of the ship, in tight quarters, groaning out this chant…watch this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtCTkLaBc9Q