Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine
Oh, what a foretaste of glory divine
Heir of salvation, purchase of God
Born of his Spirit, washed in His blood
This is my story, this is my song
Praising my Savior all the day long
This is my story, this is my song
Praising my Savior all the day long
I didn’t know this song when I stood in the congregation at my church to sing it the first time early last summer. Congregational singing of an unfamiliar melody is always something I find frustrating. I like to sing expressively in church, and that’s very difficult when you don’t know the tune! I don’t quite have the exuberant self-forgetfulness to try with gusto, so usually I favour an uncertain mumble that drags behind the beat. It’s usually worth a go even just for the sake of the words. These are a splendid example: a glorious and evocative celebration of assurance, the certainty that Christian blessings apply to the singer. Familiar biblical metaphors (heir, purchase, rebirth, washing) are claimed as identity markers, leading into a triumphant refrain: this is not just a possibility for humanity, this is my story and my song. In confident and joyful knowledge of this, I praise my Saviour.
That drizzly Sunday morning, I didn’t feel triumph, or confidence, or joy. Careworn, guilty, and discouraged, I felt unable to join in the congregation’s singing. My heart joined my head, saying with sadness, ‘I don’t know this song.’ My story? My song? Whispered voices in my head poured scorn on the idea.
In the halcyon days when my club, Reading FC, played in the Championship, I went to see them play at QPR. Forced by circumstances to sit in the home end with home fans, I endured a humiliating 4-0 defeat. Even the shame of hearing 15,000 west Londoners around me gleefully singing “4-0 on your big day out” little compares to the dizzying loneliness of standing amidst 80 or so members of my spiritual family singing a song I felt unable to claim.
Some time later we sang the song again, and my heart drooped to see those marvellous lyrics projected onto the screen yards and yards away. They still seemed well out of my reach. But as the music started, I now knew the tune. I could now, even if at a superficial level, sing along with the brothers and sisters standing around me. As I sang, a rising instinct in me defied those internal voices: I might not feel it all the time, but this is my story. It is my song. If I am not feeling blessed assurance, the solution is not to lie low until I do. It’s to sing, confident of what the Lord has done, until my heart resounds with the truths in the words. How do you learn an unfamiliar song? By singing it. A holy defiance, a putting down of the foot: ‘Though the fig tree does not bud and there are no grapes on the vines, though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food, though there are no sheep in the pen and no cattle in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the LORD.’
What mood prompted the Psalmist to write, ‘praise the LORD, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits’? When St Paul links ‘gratitude in [our] hearts to God’ with the singing of ‘psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs’, which way does the causal channel run? Must Charles Wesley excite in himself some special spiritual fervour before he can earnestly wish for a thousand tongues with which to sing his dear Redeemer’s praise? If the gospel is true, it is true at all times. If there are benefits for me in heaven’s store, they never perish, spoil, or fade. Whatever my mood, however well I know the song, it is my story and it is my song.
Cloying embarrassment and disconnected frustration are poor medication for a downhearted Christian. The Lord Jesus is a doctor to the sick, a friend to the outcast. His gospel is food to the hungry and life to the dead. Would the same Lord reserve the joy of singing for the happy and the contented and the certain? Never, never, never.
When I don’t know the songs, then I must sing.
Photo by Chr Appelsved on Unsplash
Yikeiatry 