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.
Humble Thyself in the Sight of the Lord
This is a SATB arrangement of Bob Hudson’s 1978 chorus Humble Thyself in the Sight of the Lord (copyright Maranatha! Music). I remember learning this song in youth group as a junior high student and it has stuck with me ever since. When Micah 6:8 showed up in the lectionary for a service I was planning music for, I added a cantor line setting of that passage to this arrangement to give it a Taize community style.
Obeying the Lord requires the humility to submit ourselves to his will and his ethic. Doing justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly with God is no easy, one time decision. Like the repetition of this piece, it requires the daily breathing of humility and submission to the Lord’s way.
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