Wide-Angle Worship

   “Precious in the sight of the LORD is the death of His saints.” (Psalm 116:15).

   Back in the days before YouTube, Spotify, and iTunes, weary saints carried around psalters and hymnals. Many an old hymn, rich with worship, reverence, and deep theology, was the wellspring of life that our Christian forerunners clung to in times of trouble. These hymns were the holy harnesses and the curative carabiners that aided believers in scaling the most painful of peaks upon the mountains of melancholy. These saints understood the culmination of a faithful life — the glorious “gold medal” for which they sought — came not by way of a prize, but by a pyre. 

   Saints of antiquity looked upon their own mortality with unflinching focus and victorious verve! Their final breath was not harnessed and bottled by a black hooded Grim Reaper, but by a gentle Savior whose instrument of death was not a shiny sharp scythe, but a holy high five!

   Perhaps the reason why so many modern praise songs, while uplifting us in the moment, fail to lift us up over and beyond our circumstances, is because they avoid the topic of death. We can sing about the Comforter, the Spirit’s fire, healing, miracles, redemption, victory, love, and joy in the now, but we fail to sing, with anticipation, about the greatest culminating moment of our lives — the blink of an eye ...

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