O FOR A THOUSAND TONGUES--CHARLES WESLEY

This beautiful hymn of 19 stanzas was written by the gifted Charles Wesley on the first anniversary of his conversion in 1739. Can you imagine in a modern church singing ALL of this hymn? The "O For A Thousand Tongues" verse was originally verse seven.

O for a thousand tongues to sing
My great Redeemer’s praise,
The glories of my God and King,
The triumphs of His grace!

My gracious Master and my God,
Assist me to proclaim,
To spread through all the earth abroad
The honors of Thy name.


Jesus! the name that charms our fears,
That bids our sorrows cease;
’Tis music in the sinner’s ears,
’Tis life, and health, and peace.


He breaks the power of canceled sin,
He sets the prisoner free;
His blood can make the foulest clean,
His blood availed for me.


He speaks, and, listening to His voice,
New life the dead receive,
The mournful, broken hearts rejoice,
The humble poor believe.


Hear Him, ye deaf; His praise, ye dumb,
Your loosened tongues employ;
Ye blind, behold your Savior come,
And leap, ye lame, for joy.


In Christ your Head, you then shall know,
Shall feel your sins forgiven;
Anticipate your heaven below,
And own that love is heaven.


Glory to God, and praise and love
Be ever, ever given,
By saints below and saints above,
The church in earth and heaven.


On this glad day the glorious Sun
Of Righteousness arose;
On my benighted soul He shone
And filled it with repose.


Sudden expired the legal strife,
’Twas then I ceased to grieve;
My second, real, living life
I then began to live.


Then with my heart I first believed,
Believed with faith divine,
Power with the Holy Ghost received
To call the Savior mine.


I felt my Lord’s atoning blood
Close to my soul applied;
Me, me He loved, the Son of God,
For me, for me He died!


I found and owned His promise true,
Ascertained of my part,
My pardon passed in heaven I knew
When written on my heart.


Look unto Him, ye nations, own
Your God, ye fallen race;
Look, and be saved through faith alone,
Be justified by grace.


See all your sins on Jesus laid:
The Lamb of God was slain,
His soul was once an offering made
For every soul of man.


Awake from guilty nature’s sleep,
And Christ shall give you light,
Cast all your sins into the deep,
And wash the Æthiop white.


Harlots and publicans and thieves
In holy triumph join!
Saved is the sinner that believes
From crimes as great as mine.


Murderers and all ye hellish crew
In holy triumph join!
Believe the Savior died for you;
For me the Savior died.


With me, your chief, ye then shall know,
Shall feel your sins forgiven;
Anticipate your heaven below,
And own that love is heaven.

GOD'S PROMISE KEEPS- C.H. SPURGEON

"Cast thy bread upon the waters: for thou shalt find it after many days" (Ecclesiastes 11:1).

We must not expect to see an immediate reward for all the good we do; nor must we always confine our efforts to places and persons which seem likely to yield us a recompense for our labors. The Egyptian casts his seed upon the waters of the Nile, where it might seem a sheer waste of corn. But in due time the flood subsides, the rice or other grain sinks into the fertile mud, and rapidly a harvest is produced. Let us today do good to the unthankful and the evil. Let us teach the careless and the obstinate. Unlikely waters may cover hopeful soil. Nowhere shall our labor be in vain in the LORD. It is ours to cast our bread upon the waters; it remains with God to fulfill the promise "Thou shalt find it." He will not let His promise fail. His good word which we have spoken shall live, shall be found, shall be found by us, Perhaps not just yet, but some day we shall reap what we have sown. We must exercise our patience, or perhaps the LORD may exercise it. "After many days," says the Scripture, and in many instances those days run into months and years, and yet the Word stands true. God's promise will keep; let us mind that we keep the precept and keep it this day. (From Faiths Checkbook for June 1)

PSALM 23 IN ORIGINAL KJV FORMAT 1611 A.D.

It would be a little hard to read today in our modern times, but fewer professing Christians in our day are reading any Bible. If He is our shepherd, we must read His word regularly.

YOUNG AND OLD----CHARLES WOODRUFF

I have been young, and now am old; yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging bread (Psalm 37:25).

My understanding of this verse has deepened as I have gotten older. First because at one time I could not identify with "I have been young, and now I am old". I think most of us feel when we are young that we have all the time in the world. But, much more rapidly than we think, if God lets us live, we find ourselves on the other side of this verse--old! They say you are as old as you feel, and that may be true, but sometimes I feel about 30, and sometimes I feel about 100!
(This photo is me at about 40 years old).

King David, the human writer of this Psalm, evidently only lived to be 70 and 1/2 years old. "David was thirty years old when he began to reign, and he reigned forty years" (2Samuel 5:4). That once would have seemed a long time to me, but it doesn't sound like so many years to me now at age 66.


One thing for sure, I have not seen the righteous forsaken. The Hebrew can mean the just; the lawful, in other words he who does right. No man is absolutely righteous in the eyes of God, yet may be considered so in the eyes of men.Paul tells us in Romans 3:10 "As it is written, There is none righteous, no, not one".

As to the truth of this verse, it is the word of God -- we can, and must, believe it! Methodist theologian Adam Clarke writing on this verse in his commentary published in 1831,"I have been young, and now am old - I believe this to be literally true in all cases. I am now grey-headed myself; I have traveled in different countries, and have had many opportunities of seeing and conversing with religious people in all situations in life; and I have not, to my knowledge, seen one instance to the contrary. I have seen no righteous man forsaken, nor any children of the righteous begging their bread. God puts this honor upon all that fear him; and thus careful is he of them, and of their posterity".

WITHOUT HOLINESS-J.C. PHILPOT

Without holiness no man shall see the Lord. Hebrews 12:14

To possess this holiness is a necessary and indispensable meetness for the inheritance of the saints in light; but this meetness must be wrought in us by the power of God's grace, for I am sure that in ourselves of it we have none. But see its necessity. What happiness could there be in the courts of bliss unless we had a nature to enjoy it? Unless we were made capable of seeing Christ as he is, and enjoying his presence for evermore, heaven would be no heaven to us. Nothing unclean or unholy can enter there. Sanctification therefore must be wrought in us by the power of God, to make us meet for the heavenly inheritance, and he therefore communicates of his Spirit and grace to give us heavenly affections, holy desires, gracious thoughts, tender feelings; and above all that love whereby he is loved as the altogether lovely. By the sanctifying operations of his Spirit, he separates us from everything evil, plants his fear deep in the heart, that it may be a fountain of life to depart from the snares of death; and works in us a conformity to his suffering image here that we may be conformed to his glorified image hereafter. Thus there is a perfect and an imperfect sanctification--perfect by imputation, imperfect in its present operations. But the one is the pledge of the other; so that as surely as Christ now represents his people in heaven as their holy Head, so will he eventually bring them to be forever with him in those abodes of perfect holiness and perfect happiness which are prepared for them as mansions of eternal light and love.

J.C. Philpot - 1802-1869; from Ears From Harvested Sheaves for April 3rd.

WISE WORDS FROM THOMAS BROOKS

"Reader, remember this: if thy knowledge do not now affect thy heart, it will at last, with a witness, afflict thy heart; if it do not now endear Christ to thee, it will at last provoke Christ the more against thee; if it do not make all the things of Christ to be very precious in thy eyes, it will at last make thee the more vile in Christ's eyes." Thomas Brooks

"A man's most glorious actions will at last be found to be but glorious sins, if he hath made himself, and not the glory of God, the end of those actions."

"Truth is mighty and will prevail."

Thomas Brooks was an English Puritan (1608-1680). We will leave him for now with this gem from his classic book Heaven on Earth
The trifles which God gives

The emperor Augustus, in his great feasts, gave
trifles to some—but gold to his favorites.

Just so—honors, riches and worldly pleasures are
the trifles which God gives to the worst of men.

God gives His gold—His special love and grace—only
to His people.

WISE SAYINGS-GOVERNMENT--VARIOUS QUOTES

We need some statesmen today. We need some patriots (like these two people; John and Abigail Adams). I waited a little while to say this, but Obama turned out to be worse than I feared. I thought Jimmy Carter was bad, and he was! I thought Bill Clinton was bad, and in many ways he was! But this guy Barack Obama is the most socialistic, compromising president that I believe we have ever had. I say this after not quite three months. I am afraid we haven't seen anything yet!

My friend Charles Rosson in Arkansas sent me the following. I thank him, and, of course, gcfl.net They are humorous but mostly true.

Wise Sayings: Government

1. In my many years I have come to a conclusion that one
useless man is a shame, two is a law firm, and three or
more is a Congress. -- John Adams

2. If you don't read the newspaper, you are uninformed; if
you do read the newspaper, you are misinformed. -- Mark
Twain

3. Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a
member of Congress. But then I repeat myself. -- Mark Twain

4. I contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into
prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to
lift himself up by the handle. -- Winston Churchill

5. A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always
depend on the support of Paul. -- George Bernard Shaw

6. A liberal is someone who feels a great debt to his
fellow man,which debt he proposes to pay off with your
money.--G. Gordon Liddy

7. Democracy must be something more than two wolves
and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.
--James Bovard

8. Foreign aid might be defined as a transfer of money
from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor
countries. -- Douglas Casey

9. Giving money and power to government is like giving
whiskey and car keys to teenage boys. -- P.J. O'Rourke

10. Government is the great fiction, through which
everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody
else. --Frederic Bastiat

11. Government's view of the economy could be summed
up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps
moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.
-- RonaldReagan

12. I don't make jokes. I just watch the government and
report the facts. -- Will Rogers

13. If you think health care is expensive now, wait until
you see what it costs when it's free. -- P.J. O'Rourke

14. In general, the art of government consists of taking as
much money as possible from one party of the citizens to
give to the other. -- Voltaire

15. Just because you do not take an interest in politics
doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you.
-- Pericles (430 B.C.)

16. No man's life, liberty, or property is safe while the
legislature is in session. -- Mark Twain

17. Talk is cheap... except when Congress does it. --
Anonymous

18. The government is like a baby's alimentary canal,
with a happy appetite at one end and no responsibility
at the other. -- Ronald Reagan

19. The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing
of the blessings. The inherent blessing of socialism is the
equal sharing of misery. -- Winston Churchill

20. The only difference between a tax man and a
taxidermist is that the taxidermist leaves the skin.
-- Mark Twain

21. The ultimate result of shielding men from the
effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.
-- Herbert Spencer

22. There is no distinctly native American criminal class...
save Congress. -- Mark Twain

23. A government big enough to give you everything you
want, is strong enough to take everything you have.
-- Gerald Ford

-GCFL

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