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    Mar 22, 2015

    The God Story 5: The Soundtrack - Hymns of the Cross

    The God Story 5: The Soundtrack - Hymns of the Cross

    Passage: 1 Samuel 16:1-13

    Speaker: Rev. Vivian McCarthy, Pastor

    Series: The God Story

    Category: God's Relationship with You

    Keywords: god story, hymn, soundtrack

    Every great movie has a great soundtrack to go with it. Today we'll discuss the God Story's soundtrack.

    You know how it works with a great movie that has a great soundtrack – hear just a few measures, or in some cases just a couple of notes, and the whole story floods into your heart and mind!

    In our study book, Jacob Alexander says several things about the soundtrack of The God Story:

    • People tend to forget and need reminding of God’s love for them.
    • The soundtrack of The God Story is actually the song of God’s love – recurrent and relentless.

    For me, songs and hymns of the cross are some of the songs that communicate God’s love to me, and today we are going to sing and talk about a few of those songs.

    O How He Loves You and Me

    Text and Tune by Kurt Kaiser – FWS #2108

    This little song was written in 1975 out of a snippet that Kurt Kaiser had jotted down. Kaiser often jotted down words or phrases and stuck them away like Post-It Notes until a time came to put it to music. Somewhere, sometime, someone apparently exclaimed “oh how He loves you and me” as a commentary on where she saw God working – and Kaiser was captivated.

    David Cain, a blogger who is “fascinated by song stories” says,

    Notice the phrase is ‘Oh, how…’, not just ‘He loves you and me’. That suggests an extraordinary event someone was describing…

    I’d like to also draw your attention to two phrases that reflect that kind of emotion. “He gave His life. What more could He give?” and “What He did there brought hope from despair.” This simple hymn, composed in about 15 minutes, according to Cain, captures the emotion of those who realize the depth of God’s love shown to us in the life and death of Jesus.

    Cross of Jesus, Cross of Sorrow

    Text by W. J. Sparrow;

    I have always been sorry that this hymn was not included in the 1989 hymnal. This hymn points to the deep theological meaning of the cross and the profound mystery of God’s sacrifice for us and for our sin.

    The first and last verses act as brackets, emphasizing the perfection of Jesus and how Jesus was both fully God and fully human, while the second and third verses probe the mystery I mentioned above. Listen to the words:

    Here the King of all the ages, throned in light ere worlds could be,
    robed in mortal flesh is dying, crucified by sin for me.

    O, mysterious condescending! O abandonment sublime!
    Very God Himself is bearing all the sufferings of time!

    I probably don’t need to point out that these hymns of the cross are filled with emotion, but I’d like to invite you to reach into yourselves today and sing them with some of your own emotion.

    O Love Divine, What Hast Thou Done

    Charles Wesley – UMH #287

    I’m not going to say much about this hymn, but it seems to me to do a couple of things. First, Wesley speaks in the first person about what Christ’s love has done for him. In the second verse, Wesley has captured what Jacob Armstrong has said in the chapter on the soundtrack of The God Story: God’s love reaches out recurrently and relentlessly to bring us back to God. The third verse takes us to stand at the cross – to watch, in our memory, and see how Jesus poured out His love for us. Finally, that measure and a half refrain at the end is a cry of sorrow – a cry of realization – a cry of thanksgiving – and it sticks with you!