verse of the day

Monday, 18 September 2023

Abide with me. ( Acts 17 v 24 -31 )

Many of us would not of heard of the Rev H.F.Lyte, he lived in Victorian times,he suffered from ill health which caused him to retire from the ministry,he died in 1847.He left behind ,as one writer puts it,' one of  the most   haunting lyrics of the 19th century ,the hymn 'Abide with Me'.It was the time when Darwin came on the scene,and so began the,  'Science vs Religion, controversy,'which has  continued to this day,and will continue  until our Lord comes back.We owe a lot to science,under God,but left to science alone we have no hope what so ever,life has no meaning, no  future only the darkness of oblivion.It is interesting that Tennyson  said of the hymn ,'Abide with Me', 'it was the cry of whole human race'. This hymn is sung every year at a major sporting event in England, sung as a tradition by most, yet for all that we have something of  the longing of the human heart in which God has placed  an eternal reality,that overrides ,the scepticism, secularism, modernism,atheism, which is so prevalent in life today.In the Christ event,God brings to us a message of hope, through His death  on the cross , and resurrection,is a  beacon of light to a lost world ,that in words from that hymn,'Shines through the gloom and points us to the skies'.

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