The incessant storms of recent times—political, cultural, ecclesial, theological, medical, economic!—have shown how quickly such worldly securities can crumble. Such storms provide a perfect opportunity for the Church’s counter-message to shine most distinctly, as the city on a hill (Matt. 5:14). We are in great need of recovering this lost confidence.

Note: We don’t spend nearly enough time thinking about what we sing. God’s people are called to sing glorious songs to a glorious God (especially when it seems like they shouldn’t).

Ghostly Words

A few years ago I was in the habit of remembering random parts of hymns which I sung as a schoolboy. I wasn’t a Christian when I first sung them and so I usually had little idea what was truly going on at the time. Every now and then though, a short line from of one of them would suddenly reappear in my mind again, somewhat like a ghost. This often brought a moving sense of nostalgia. It is a nostalgia tinged with both gratitude and loss for a time that existed not all that long ago when profound theological words were sung daily by hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren across Britain.

These words roused us with exotic ideas and beings and lands and battles and victories and joys which seemed so wonderfully alien to the dull monotony of the playground or the classroom or the dinner hall. Most people today who ever did sing such songs have probably now put them far away from their minds. And yet I believe many such people still ache for something half-remembered too.

The epic sense of divine purpose which those half-understood words had the power to evoke is not easily replicable. It remains entirely unmatched by the relative banality of agnostic materialism which engulfs the lives of most westerners today, without them even realising. Even apparent “success” within such lives often just distracts from the ultimately tragic drift from the things they’ve forgotten they once sung.

A Glorious Song of Zion

One of these ghostly fragments which returned to my consciousness many years later was “None but Zion’s children know,” a strange phrase which I couldn’t fully recollect at the time. It was from John Newton’s Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken. I hadn’t sung that hymn since school assembly. I’ve since introduced the hymn to my young children, and taught them to sing it with gusto, as it should be!

The words of that hymn seem well-suited to the tumultuous times Christians have faced in recent years. Despite cause for renewed optimism about the future of the West in the US of late, it may take a while to land on this side of the pond, if it arrives at all. The tumult of “the Negative World” for Christians may well turn a corner at some point as a result of the cultural “vibe shift” away from the madness of Woke. But the challenges for Christians are likely to increase before they get better. If “cultural Christianity” becomes fashionable again, this will present new problems too. We must ever learn with Paul not only “how to abound” but also “how to be brought low” (cf. Phil. 4:12).

Wherever the times lead us, however soon the sands shift, I want my children to have glorious songs to sing. I think it’s fair to say God does too. That’s why the Book of Psalms exists. Glorious songs, however, are not always sung in glorious times. This is shown most famously in Psalm 137:

By the waters of Babylon,
    there we sat down and wept,
    when we remembered Zion.
On the willows there
    we hung up our lyres.
For there our captors
    required of us songs,
and our tormentors, mirth, saying,
    “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”
How shall we sing the Lord’s song
    in a foreign land?

—Psalm 137:1-4

For Israel to sing of Zion (that is, Jerusalem) at a time when were captive in Babylon, was no doubt torturous. Not least when they were forced to do so, and mocked when doing so.

Yet this lament is a song. It is a song expressing the heartache of a people who long for their present situation to match the glories for which they were destined. The rhetorical question of whether God’s people should sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land is precisely that: rhetorical. They did sing of Zion in a “foreign land”, as did Paul and Silas in prison (Acts 16:25), as should we whenever we find ourselves at odds with the world around us.

Glorious Assurance

There are different songs for different times, of course. Newton’s hymn is especially helpful for us today because of its unabashed confidence in truths which anchor us amidst the storms. The hymn’s beautifully uplifting words project a fortifying theological assurance for members of God’s kingdom. This is the security of a rescued people, safe in God’s formidable city, built on the most unshakeable of solid ground, God Himself:

“On the rock of ages founded
What can shake thy sure repose?”

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