213. Christ the Song

Christ the Song

Psa_118:14 : ’93The Lord is my strength and song.’94

The most fascinating theme for a heart properly attuned is the Saviour. There is something in the morning light to suggest him, and something in the evening shadow to speak his praise. The flower breathes him, the stars shine him, the cascade proclaims him, all the voices of nature chant him. Whatever is grand, bright, and beautiful, if you only listen to it, will speak his praise. So now, when I come in the summer-time and pluck a flower, I think of him who is ’93the Rose of Sharon and the Lily of the Valley.’94 When I see in the fields a lamb, I say, ’93Behold the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world.’94 When, in very hot weather, I come under a projecting cliff, I say,

Rock of Ages, cleft for me,

Let me hide myself in thee!

Over the old-fashioned pulpits there was a sounding-board. The voice of the minister rose to the sounding-board, and then was struck back again upon the ears of the people. And so the ten thousand voices of earth rising up find the heavens a sounding-board which strikes back to the ear of all the nations the praises of Christ. The heavens tell his glory, and the earth shows his handiwork. The Bible thrills with one great story of redemption. Upon a blasted and faded Paradise it poured the light of glorious restoration. It looked upon Abraham from the ram caught in the thicket. It spoke in the bleating of the herds driven down to Jerusalem for sacrifice. It put infinite pathos into the speech of uncouth fishermen. It lifted Paul into the seventh heaven; and it broke upon the ear of St. John with the brazen trumpets and the doxology of the elders, and the rushing wings of the seraphim.

Instead of waiting until you get sick and worn out before you speak the praise of Christ, while your heart is happiest and your step is lightest and your fortunes smile and your pathway blossoms and the overarching heavens drop upon you their benediction, speak the praises of Jesus.

The old Greek orators, when they saw their audiences inattentive and slumbering, had one word with which they would rouse them up to the greatest enthusiasm. In the midst of their orations, they would stop and cry out ’93Marathon’94 and the people’92s enthusiasm would be unbounded. My hearers, though you may have been borne down with sin, and though trouble and trials and temptation may have come upon you, and you feel today hardly like looking up, methinks there is one grand, royal, imperial word that ought to rouse your soul to infinite rejoicing, and that word is ’93Jesus!’94

Taking the suggestion of the text, I shall speak to you of Christ our song. I remark, in the first place, that Christ ought to be the cradle-song. What our mothers sang to us when they put us to sleep is singing yet. We may have forgotten the words; but they went into the fiber of our soul, and will forever be a part of it. It is not so much what you formally teach your children as what you sing to them. A hymn has wings, and can fly everywhither. One hundred and fifty years after you are dead, and ’93Old Mortality’94 has worn out his chisel in recutting your name on the tombstone, your great-grandchildren will be singing the song which last night you sang to your little ones gathered about your knee. There is a place in Switzerland where, if you distinctly utter your voice, there come back ten or fifteen distinct echoes; and every Christian song sung by a mother in the ear of her child shall have ten thousand echoes coming back from all the gates of heaven. Oh, if mothers only knew the power of this sacred spell, how much oftener the little ones would be gathered, and all our homes would chime with the songs of Jesus!

We want some counteracting influence upon our children. The very moment your child steps into the street, he steps into the path of temptation. There are foul-mouthed children who would like to besoil your little ones. It will not do to keep your boys and girls in the house and make them house-plants; they must have fresh air and recreation. God save your children from the scathing, blasting, damning influence of the street! I know of no counteracting influence but the power of Christian culture and example. Hold before your little ones the pure life of Jesus; let that name be the word that shall exorcise evil from their hearts. Give to your instruction all the fascination of music, morning, noon, and night; let it be Jesus, the cradle-song. This is important if your children grow up; but perhaps they may not. Their pathway may be short. Jesus may be wanting that child. Then there will be a soundless step in the dwelling, and the youthful pulse will begin to flutter and little hands will be lifted for help. You cannot help. And a great agony will pinch at your heart and the cradle will be empty and the nursery will be empty and the world will be empty and your soul will be empty. No little feet standing on the stairs. No toys scattered on the carpet. No quick following from room to room. No strange and wondering questions. No upturned face, with laughing blue eyes, come for a kiss; but only a grave, and a wreath of white blossoms on the top of it; and bitter desolation, and a sighing at nightfall with no one to put to bed and a wet pillow and a grave and a wreath of white blossoms on the top of it. The heavenly Shepherd will take that lamb safely anyhow, whether you have been faithful or unfaithful; but would it not have been pleasanter if you could have heard from those lips the praises of Christ? I never read anything more beautiful than this about a child’92s departure. The account said: ’93She folded her hands, kissed her mother good-by, sang her hymn, turned her face to the wall, said her little prayer, and then died.’94

Oh, if I could gather up in one paragraph the last words of the little ones who have gone out from all these Christian circles, and I could picture the calm looks, and the folded hands and sweet departure, methinks it would be grand and beautiful as one of heaven’92s great doxologies! In my parish, in Philadelphia, a little child was departing. She had been sick all her days, and a cripple. It was noonday when she went, and, as the shadow of death gathered on her eyelid, she thought it was evening and time to go to bed, and so she said, ’93Goodnight, papa! Goodnight, mamma!’94 And then she was gone! It was ’93goodnight’94 to pain and ’93goodnight’94 to tears and ’93goodnight’94 to death and ’93goodnight’94 to earth; but it was ’93good-morning’94 to Jesus, it was ’93good-morning’94 to heaven. I can think of no cradle-song more beautiful than Jesus.

I next speak of Christ as the old man’92s song. Quick music loses its charm for the aged ear. The school-girl asks for a schottisch or a glee; but her grandmother asks for ’93Balerma’94 or the ’93Portuguese Hymn.’94 Fifty years of trouble have tamed the spirit, and the keys of the music-board must have a solemn tread. Though the voice may be tremulous, so that grandfather will not trust it in church, still he has the psalm-book open before him, and he sings with his soul. He hums his grandchild asleep with the same tune he sang forty years ago in the old country meeting-house. Some day the choir sings a tune so old that the young people do not know it; but it starts the tears down the cheek of the aged man, for it reminds him of the revival scene in which he participated, and of the radiant faces that long since went to dust and of the gray-haired minister leaning over the pulpit and sounding the good tidings of great joy.

I was one Thanksgiving-day in my pulpit, in Syracuse, New York, and Rev. Daniel Waldo, at ninety-eight years of age, stood beside me. The choir sang a tune. I said, ’93I am sorry they sang that new tune; nobody seems to know it.’94 ’93Bless you, my son,’94 said the old man, ’93I heard that seventy years ago!’94

There was a song today that touched the life of the aged with holy fire, and kindled a glory on their vision that our younger eyesight cannot see. It was the song of salvation’97Jesus, who fed them all their lives long; Jesus, who wiped away their tears; Jesus, who stood by them when all else failed; Jesus, in whose name their marriage was consecrated, and whose resurrection has poured light upon the graves of their departed. ’93Do you know me?’94 said the wife to her aged husband who was dying, his mind already having gone out. He said, ’93No.’94 And the son said, ’93Father, do you know me?’94 He said, ’93No.’94 The daughter said, ’93Father, do you know me?’94 He said, ’93No.’94 The minister of the Gospel standing by, said, ’93Do you know Jesus?’94 ’93Oh, yes,’94 he said, ’93I know him, ’91chief among ten thousand, the one altogether lovely!’92’93 Blessed the Bible in which spectacled old age reads the promise, ’93I will never leave you, never forsake you!’94 Blessed the staff on which the worn-out pilgrim totters on toward the welcome of his Redeemer! Blessed the hymn-book in which the faltering tongue and the failing eyes find Jesus, the old man’92s song! When my mother had been put away for the resurrection, we, the children, came to the old homestead, and each one wanted to take away a memento of her who had loved us so long, and loved us so well. I think I took away the best of all the mementoes; it was the old-fashioned, round-glass spectacles, through which she used to read her Bible, and I put them on, but they were too old for me, and I could not see across the room. But through them I could see back to childhood, and forward to the hills of heaven, where the ankles that were stiff with age have become limber again, and the spirit, with restored eyesight, stands in rapt exultation, crying, ’93This is heaven!’94

I speak to you again of Jesus as the night-song. Job speaks of him who giveth songs in the night. John Welch, the old Scotch minister, used to put a plaid across his bed on cold nights, and some one asked him why he put that there. He said, ’93Oh, sometimes in the night I want to sing the praise of Jesus, and to get down and pray; then I just take that plaid and wrap it around me, to keep myself from the cold.’94 Songs in the night! Night of trouble has come down upon many of you. Commercial losses put out one star, slanderous abuse puts out another star, domestic bereavement has put out a thousand lights, and gloom has been added to gloom and chill to chill and sting to sting, and one midnight has seemed to borrow the fold from another midnight to wrap itself in more unbearable darkness; but Christ has spoken peace to your heart, and you sing:

Jesus, lover of my soul,

Let me to thy bosom fly,

While the billows near me roll,

While the tempest still is high.

Hide me, O my Saviour! hide,

Till the storm of life is past,

Safe into the haven guide;

Oh, receive my soul at last!’94

Songs in the night! Songs in the night! For the sick, who have no one to turn the hot pillow, no one to put the taper on the stand, no one to put ice on the temples or pour out the soothing anodyne or utter one cheerful word’97yet songs in the night! For the poor, who freeze in the winter’92s cold and swelter in the summer’92s heat and munch the hard crusts that bleed the sore gums and shiver under blankets that cannot any longer be patched and tremble because rent-day is come and they may be set out on the sidewalk and looking into the starved face of the child and seeing famine there and death there, coming home from the bakery, and saying, in the presence of the little famished ones, ’93O my God! flour has gone up!’94 Yet songs in the night! Songs in the night! For the widow who goes to get the back-pay of her husband slain by the ’93sharpshooters,’94 and he knows it is the last help she will have, moving out of a comfortable home in desolation, death turning back from the exhausting cough and the pale cheek and the lusterless eye, and refusing all relief. Yet songs in the night! Songs in the night! For the soldier in the field-hospital, no surgeon to bind up the gun-shot fracture, no water for the hot lips, no kind hand to brush away the flies from the fresh wound, no one to take the loving farewell; the groaning of others poured into his own groan, the blasphemy of others plowing up his own spirit, the condensed bitterness of dying away from home among strangers. Yet songs in the night! Songs in the night! ’93Ah!’94 said one dying soldier, ’93tell my mother that last night there was not one cloud between my soul and Jesus.’94 Songs in the night! Songs in the night!

This Sabbath-day came. From the altars of ten thousand churches has smoked up the savor of sacrifice. Ministers of the Gospel preached in plain English, in broad Scotch, in flowing Italian, in harsh Choctaw. God’92s people assembled in Moravian church and Quaker meeting-house and sailors’92 Bethel and king’92s chapel and high-towered cathedral. They sang, and the song floated off amid the spice groves or struck the icebergs or floated off into the western pines or was drowned in the clamor of the great cities. Lumbermen sang it and the factory-girls and the children in the Sabbath-class and the trained choirs in great assemblages. Trappers, with the same voice with which they shouted yesterday in the stag-hunt, and mariners with throats that only a few days ago sounded in the hoarse blast of the sea-hurricane, they sang it. One theme for the sermons. One burden for the song. Jesus for the invocation. Jesus for the Scripture lesson. Jesus for the baptismal font. Jesus for the sacramental cup. Jesus for the benediction. But the day has gone. It rolled away on swift wheels of light and love. Again, the churches are lighted. Tides of people again setting down the streets. Whole families coming up the church aisle. We must have one more service. What shall we preach? What shall we read? Let it be Jesus, everybody says; let it be Jesus. We must have one more song. What shall it be, children? Aged men and women, what shall it be? Young men and maidens, what shall it be? If you dared to break the silence of this auditory, there would come up thousands of quick and jubilant voices, crying out, ’93Let it be Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!’94

We sing his birth’97the barn that sheltered him, the mother that nursed him, the cattle that fed beside him, the angels that woke up the shepherds, shaking light over the midnight hills. We sing his ministry’97the tears he wiped away from the eyes of the orphans; the lame men that forgot their crutches; the damsel who from the bier bounded out into the sunlight, her locks shaking down over the flushed cheek; the hungry thousands who broke the bread as it blossomed into larger loaves’97that miracle by which a boy with five loaves and two fishes became the commissariat for an army. We sing his sorrows’97his stone-bruised feet, his aching heart, his mountain loneliness, his desert hunger, his storm-pelted body, the eternity of anguish that shot through his last moments, and the immeasurable ocean of torment that heaved up against his cross in one foaming, wrathful, omnipotent surge; the sun dashed out, and the dead, shroud-wrapped, breaking open their sepulchers, and rushing out to see what was the matter. We sing his resurrection’97the guard that could not keep him; the sorrow of his disciples; the clouds piling up on each side in pillared splendors as he went through, treading the pathless air, higher and higher, until he came to the foot of the throne, and all heaven kept jubilee at the return of the conqueror. Oh! is them any song more appropriate for a Sabbath night than this song of Jesus? Let the passers-by in the street hear it, let the angels of God carry it amid the thrones. Sound it out through the darkness: Jesus the night-song, appropriate for any hour, but especially sweet and beautiful and blessed on a Sabbath night.

I say once more Christ is the everlasting song. The very best singers sometimes get tired; the strongest throats sometimes get weary, and many who sang very sweetly do not sing now; but I hope by the grace of God we will, after a while, go up and sing the praises of Christ where we will never be weary. You know there are some songs that are especially appropriate for the home circle. They stir the soul, they start the tears, they turn the heart in on itself, and keep sounding after the tune has stopped, like some cathedral bell which, long after the tap of the brazen tongue has ceased, keeps throbbing on the air. Well, it will be a home song in heaven; all the sweeter because those who sang with us in the domestic circle on earth shall join that great harmony.

Jerusalem, my happy home.

Name ever dear to me;

When shall my labors have an end

In joy and peace and thee?

On earth we sang harvest songs as the wheat came into the barn, and the barracks were filled. You know there is no such time on a farm as when they get the crops in; and so in heaven it will be a harvest song on the part of those who on earth sowed in tears and reaped in joy. Lift up your heads, ye everlasting gates, and let the sheaves come in! Angels shout all through the heavens, and multitudes come down the hills crying, ’93Harvest-home! harvest-home!’94

There is nothing more bewitching to one’92s ear than the song of sailors far out at sea, whether in day or night, as they pull away at the ropes’97not much sense often in the words they utter, but the music is thrilling. So the song in heaven will be a sailor’92s song. They were voyagers once, and thought they could never get to shore, and before they could get things snug and trim the cyclone struck them. But now they are safe. Once they went with damaged rigging, guns of distress booming through the storm; but the pilot came aboard, and he brought them into the harbor. Now they sing of the breakers passed, the lighthouses that showed them where to sail, the pilot that took them through the straits, the eternal shore on which they landed.

Ay, it will be the children’92s song. You know very well that the vast majority of our race die in infancy, and it is estimated that sixteen thousand millions of the little ones are standing before God. When they shall rise up about the throne to sing, the millions and the millions of the little ones’97ah! that will be music for you! These played in the streets of Babylon and Thebes; these plucked lilies from the foot of Olivet while Christ was preaching about them; these waded in Siloam; these were victims of Herod’92s massacre; these were thrown to crocodiles or into the fire; these came up from Christian homes, and these were foundlings on the city commons’97children everywhere in all that land; children in the towers, children on the seas of glass, children on the battlements. Ah! if you do not like children, do not go there. They are in vast majority; and what a song when they lift it around about the throne!

The Christian singers and composers of all ages will be there to join in that song. Thomas Hastings will be there. Lowell Mason will be there. Beethoven and Mozart will be there. They who sounded the cymbals and the trumpets in the ancient temples will be there. The forty thousand harpers that stood at the ancient dedication will be there. The two hundred singers that assisted on that day will be there. Patriarchs who lived amid threshing-floors, shepherds who watched amid Chaldean hills, prophets who walked, with long beards and coarse apparel, pronouncing woe against ancient abominations, will meet the more recent martyrs who went up with leaping cohorts of fire; and some will speak of the Jesus of whom they prophesied, and others of the Jesus for whom they died. Oh, what a song! It came to John upon Patmos; it came to Calvin in the prison; it dropped to Ridley in the fire; and sometimes that song has come to your ear, perhaps, for I really do think it sometimes breaks over the battlements of heaven.

A Christian woman, the wife of a minister of the Gospel, was dying in the parsonage near the old church, where on Saturday night the choir used to assemble and rehearse for the following Sabbath, and she said, ’93How strangely sweet the choir rehearses to-night; they have been rehearsing there for an hour.’94 ’93No,’94 said some one about her, ’93the choir is not rehearsing to-night.’94 ’93Yes,’94 she said, ’93I know they are; I hear them sing; how very sweetly they sing!’94 Now it was not a choir of earth that she heard, but the choir of heaven. I think that Jesus sometimes sets ajar the door of heaven, and a passage of that rapture greets our ears. The minstrels of heaven strike such a tremendous strain the walls of jasper cannot hold it.

I wonder’97and this is a question I have been asking myself all the service’97will you sing that song? Will I sing it? Not unless our sins are pardoned, and we learn now to sing the praise of Christ, will we ever sing it there. The first great concert that I ever attended was in New York, when Julien, in the ’93Crystal Palace,’94 stood before hundreds of singers and hundreds of players upon instruments. Some of you may remember that occasion; it was the first one of the kind at which I was present, and I shall never forget it. I saw that one man standing, and with the hand and foot wield that great harmony, beating the time. It was to me overwhelming. But oh, the grander scene when they shall come from the east and from the west and from the north and from the south, ’93a great multitude that no man can number,’94 into the temple of the skies, host beyond host, rank beyond rank, gallery beyond gallery, and Jesus will stand before that great host to conduct the harmony, with his wounded hands and his wounded feet! Like the voice of many waters, like the voice of mighty thunderings, they shall cry, ’93Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive blessings and riches and honor and glory and power, world without end. Amen and Amen!’94 Oh, if my ear shall hear no other sweet sounds, may I hear that! If I join no other glad assemblage, may I join that.

Autor: T. De Witt Talmage