With All of the Saints
All Saints is a major feast of the church that is celebrated in early November (for more on the feast, click here). It celebrates the communion of saints—both those Christians who have gone before and who are now alive that we join with when we worship Jesus. Read More…
We Are Not Ashamed
This song appears on our EP “In Wilderness and Glory.”
Download the entire EP for free here.
In Lent, 2008, our church worked through Mark 8 and the call of Jesus to take up our cross and follow him. In lent we confess that we live our life in Christ in the same posture as we come to Christ, in need. Learning to need God is not weakness, but is actually a discipline of spiritual maturity. It is a virtue to be needy before God. He invites us to humble ourselves and come before him empty handed to receive from Jesus all that we need. This neediness is not only the posture of salvation, but it is the discipline of the entire Christian life. We live in him as we came to him–in need of a Savior.
When the Bible talks about how much we need God, it often uses the image of being hungry and needing to eat. Jesus is the bread of life, because we need his very being to survive. The Israelite, wandering in the desert cried out for bread from heaven—manna—God’s provision for their every need (Exodus 16). The bread comes to us in fulfillment in Jesus whose body as broken as bread for us—as the daily bread that we pray for in the Lord’s prayer (Matthew 6; Luke 11). Jesus tells us, unless we eat his body we will not have life (John 6).
In communion we receive the gift of Jesus from God. We cannot grasp at it for ourselves. We simply open our empty hands, admit our need, and receive.
I Have Decided to Follow Jesus
Sea of Galilee
This is an arrangement of a popular hymn that Bonnie and I wrote for an offertory during Epiphany, 2010 (click here for the sermon that it followed). I didn’t know beforehand, but the melody is a Hindustani folk tune from India. The passage for the Sunday was Luke 5 where Jesus calls his disciples to follow him.
We added a verse in the relative minor to echo Jesus’ words in verse 4, “Put out into the deep…”Just as the Lord called Peter into the deep to catch fish, he sends his church today into the world to bring others to him. May we, like Peter, leave everything to follow him and may the catch be astonishing!
We played it on guitar with kind of a folky back-beat feel. Our friend Robb Robins played it with us on accordion to add some sustain chords and also tag the melody lick in between things.
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