Cross Creek Church Blog

Come Thou Fount

Here By Thy Great Help I’ve Come

“Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing” is one of the best-known and most loved hymns for a reason. The text was written over 250 years ago, yet it is still as relevant today as it was then. Each of us, as Christians, can place our selves in the middle of the narrative and sing this hymn as if the words were our own. We desire to praise and worship God, yet recognizing our brokenness and inability to do it on our own we must rely on the help and grace of God to make it in our daily lives. The phrase “here by thy great help I’ve come” in the second verse is the theme woven throughout the entire text as we sing of our struggles with our own sinful nature and our daily encounter with the Gospel.

Hymns can be difficult because there are lots of words packed with even more meaning going by really fast. Often, we can skip over the depth of meaning in an effort to keep up with the music. For those unfamiliar with hymns, the richness of the poetry and language can be hard to decipher at first glance. So, we’re going to slow this one down and walk through it.

Come Thou fount of every blessing, tune my heart to sing thy grace;
Streams of mercy, never ceasing, call for songs of loudest praise.
Teach me some melodious sonnet, sung by flaming tongues above.
Praise the mount! I’m fixed upon it, Mount of Thy redeeming love.

In the first verse, we ask for the Holy Spirit to come and help us to worship. God’s grace, mercy and redeeming love deserve praise, but we don’t know the song. We are asking the Spirit to “tune our hearts to sing Thy grace”; we want to sing the same song the angels in heaven are singing: “teach me some melodious sonnet, sung by flaming tongues above”. Without help we are unable to worship.

What shall I render to the LORD
for all his benefits to me?
I will lift up the cup of salvation
and call on the name of the LORD.
Psalm 116:12-13, ESV

Here I raise my Ebenezer; Here by thy great help I’ve come;
And I hope, by thy good pleasure, safely to arrive at home.
Jesus sought me when a stranger, wand’ring from the fold of God;
He, to rescue me from danger, interposed His precious blood.

The second verse begins with “Here I raise my Ebenezer;” a reference to 1 Samuel 7. The Israelites, with God’s prodigious help, have just defeated the Philistines. Samuel places a stone as a monument of the victory and called it “Ebenezer”, which means “Till now the Lord has helped us”. So, in this second verse, we raise our own “Ebenezer” in response to God’s grace to say “here by thy great help I’ve come”. We, like sheep, have wandered off. Jesus sought us and rescued us by his blood. We now hope to arrive safely at home in heaven.

“What man of you, having a hundred sheep, if he has lost one of them,
does not leave the ninety-nine in the open country,
and go after the one that is lost, until he finds it?
And when he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders, rejoicing.
Luke 15:4-5, ESV

O to grace how great the debtor daily I’m constrained to be;
Let thy goodness, like a fetter, bind my wandering heart to Thee.
Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it, Prone to leave the God I love;
Here’s my heart, O take and seal it, seal it for Thy courts above.

Now, in the third verse, we are debtors, bought with a price we can never repay. We confess we are aware of our sinful natures and we realize our need for His help to not leave and wander away again. We ask the Lord, with his grace and goodness as a chain, to “bind my wandering heart to Thee” and “seal it for Thy courts above”; let our hearts ever be on things of God and not of this world.

But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God,
the fruit you get leads to sanctification and its end, eternal life.
Romans 6:22, ESV
Listen to “Come Thou Fount of Everything Blessing” as performed by the Hymn Collective.

 

 

Inner Dialogue

[By Holly Coble]
As Jim and I left to have a date the other night, we laughed about how Caroline parroted the often heard phrase: “I love you SO much…How much?…So much!” This is one of the phrases that we repeat over and over…. And it tickles my ears to hear her say it to us unprompted. After our parental giddiness subsided, we further discussed why these phrases are important. As we went down the rabbit trail of personal discovery, we talked about how we are not programming a machine to spit out an output unthinkingly or unfeelingly, but rather we are training her mind and heart to have an inner dialogue of truth. We want for her to be so certain of these truths that, when times get hard and she is uncertain of what is real, she knows this is true.

Likewise, God has instructed us to plant seeds of His Truth in our minds and hearts through memorizing His Word.   This truth of His love, plans, and promises is unshakable and unwavering. As much as I want Caroline to know and trust me to love her unconditionally, I will fail her. But God never fails. And this Truth with a capital “T” is bedrock. Only on it and through it can I ever hope to love her as Christ has given me the ability.

As we talked about how we want her to have an inner dialogue of these parental truths, I had to ask myself, are we sufficiently teaching her God’s truths of His love and promises to lean on? A child’s mind is fertile ground in which to plant the Word of the Lord!

Pastor’s Job Description – Super Star or Hired Hand?

As our church works its way this Fall through the letter which the early church leader, Paul, wrote to the Christians in the Greek city of Corinth, we’ve seen a church possessing much zeal coupled with considerable confusion. As a result the congregation in Corinth apparently struggled in a number of ways – everything from the nature of the resurrection, to the role of women in church leadership, to mishandling of the Lord’s Supper, and misunderstanding marriage, and even their sometimes haphazard application of Spiritual gifts.

As we see in 1 Corinthians 4, it also shaped their understanding of what a church leader, a pastor, or in the case of Paul, an Apostle, should look like. Ironically, underlying their competition over which pastor/teacher to align with – Paul, Apollos, Cephas, was on the one hand an elevation of human leadership beyond appropriate consideration, and on the other hand a neglect on the part of the people to actually heed and follow the sound things that any, and all, of those leaders might say.

As a pastor, it is a little awkward to talk about the role of the pastor.  Yet even if it was not the next thing in our journey thru 1 Corinthians, it would be a good thing to consider, so members of the congregation can be mindful and prayerful to help our leadership stay on track as a church, and so us pastors can be mindful of what our task is and is not. As always, Paul seeks to correct their perspective by pointing them and us, to Jesus, and drawing a contrast between what we might call the Super Star and the Hired Hand pastor.

I’m grateful to Rev. Tom Cannon, for the seed of thought that I hope will bear fruit in today’s sermon, having heard him preach a message on this passage a number of years ago, where he drew this contrast.

I scarcely need to explain what I mean by Super Star pastor, and even in using the term I want to be careful not to be motivated by some jealousy I might have of other pastor’s skills. Indeed in some sense Martin Luther, George Whitfield, Charlie Spurgeon, and Billy Graham, could be called Super Star pastors in terms of their mass appeal. When I talk about the super star pastor, I’m referring more to the pastor who gains acclaim and following, not by force of the Holy Spirit in his ministry but by careful packaging of ministry strategies, skillful presentation of personal appearance and persona, that is not always rooted in readiness to boldly proclaim all the God’s Word has to say. The Super star has a lot of outward force to his ministry, but frequently lacks depth of character, sincere shepherding, and seems to have little place in his life or Gospel for sacrifice and suffering.

Likewise, when I speak of the Hired Hand pastor, I do not want to disparage the calling of other folks like me, who pastor small to medium sized congregations, and have little fame or notoriety. There is no shame in that. And in fact a pastor of a large church might operated as more of a hired hand. But instead I reference the Hired Hand as someone who might care deeply for the individual sheep in his congregation, and might genuinely desire to serve the Lord, but who lack’s backbone to actually lead. Indeed in its saddest form the Hired Hand pastor has an implied agreement with the congregation or at least the lay leaders of the congregation. We will make sure you are provided for, and can do the pastoral care and even the preaching you would like, but only as long as you don’t rock the boat too much, or attempt to lead too decisively. If the Super Star pastor misunderstands sacrifice, the Hired Hand does not lay hold of ministry power granted by the Holy Spirit.

Obviously the Apostle Paul did not use these terms but the ministry approaches are underlying what he says in 1 Corinthians 4, where he calls for pastors and ministry leaders, as well as their congregations, to embrace this truth – Since Jesus comes with power and sacrifice, we should desire pastors to be trustworthy stewards of the mysteries of God.  What is your view of the pastor’s role?  What is your pastor’s view of it?

Cross : Crown : Creed

As I launch this new blog, it won’t surprise those familiar with our church name or my sons’ names, that I picked some “C” words for the title. The letters are convenient and consistent (there I go again!), but the meaning is really what I have on my heart and mind.

Cross – The Apostle Paul, in the book I am currently preaching through, declares that Christ crucified, is central to the Christian faith (1 Cor. 2:2). One of my favorite passages, 2 Corinthians 5:21, states that God made Christ, who had no sin, to be sin for us, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God. The Cross is where God the Son bears the punishment we all deserve and, more than that, gives us his good record of faithfulness, that we might be seen as righteous before a holy God. So the Cross is vital to understanding what God does for us.

But the Cross also describes how we live for God. Jesus called us to, take up our cross daily, and taught that whoever seeks to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for God (that is, entrusts it fully to Him), will save his life. The Cross is central to how we can pursue a transformed live as Christ-followers.

Crown – Jesus not only comes as Savior through the Cross, but wears a Crown as our Lord. Proverbs 3:5-6 has been dear to my heart since the King of Kings first laid ahold of my heart in salvation – “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him and he will direct your paths”. When we realize our attempt to find our way in life on our own is futile, we will welcome the good commands of God, and his “easy” yoke as the best way for us, even if our soul defaults differently. So the Crown is vital to understanding what God does for us.

But the Crown also describes how we live for God. We have a new identity, we are crowned with a new status as Sons and Daughters of the King of Kings. For this reason, in his heavenly kingdom we will lay down those crowns at His feet, realizing that our high status is from Him, alone.

Creed – As we understand the Cross and the Crown, as they apply to Jesus and to us, we will grow in our belief. A creed is just an affirmation of faith. “I believe in Jesus” is a simple, but sound, creed. Some of our churches identify with certain historic statements of faith like the Apostles’ Creed or Nicene Creed. Other churches perhaps affirm Biblical truth but just never call it a creed. But God’s desire is that all of us be creedal in the way the late musician Rich Mullins expressed in one of his songs, “I believe, what I believe, is what makes me what I am. I did not make it, no it is making me.”

The truth about what Jesus has done, embraced through faith by followers of God, and lived out, is the Christian life. Cross. Crown. Creed.

Growing and Moving

Growing and Moving…Cross Creek Church recently celebrated all that God has done in and through our church family in the four years since we began.  Although the church exists wherever its members live and work and play, much of our meeting time has taken place at S. Shades Crest Elementary School.  As we have grown about fourfold since 2009, we are excited to move to a new Sunday meeting location at Deer Valley Elementary School.  God has opened the door for this move to a more visible location but has also given us a chance in the midst of our move, not only to look back but also to look forward to what He will do in the future.  We hope you will pray for us as we seek to glorify God by inviting all into God’s grace, and that you will join with us in whatever way God might be leading, to extend his Kingdom in our surrounding community and across the globe.