One of my favorite hymns from Sunday school, Trust and Obey–this is for Evelyn, lyrics and all. I don’t know how many Vagle Brothers there are, but they do make a nice sound together–and oh! the background scenery. God’s handiwork is always present, always a gift.
This is one of my favorite hymns, and thank you, Lisa Beth, for requesting it: Trust and Obey.
Our King is the rightful King of kings and Lord of lords. The others are nothing at all.
An old Sunday school favorite, Trust and Obey, has been knocking at my door since yesterday afternoon, so I guess I’d better post it. Performed by the kids at Fountainview Academy. Gorgeous fall scenery by God the Father: here, at Hat Creek Ranch, British Columbia.
This was always a Sunday school favorite: Trust and Obey. I wish I knew who’s singing it in this video by S.E. Samonte, but that information isn’t given. Oh, well. It’s beautiful, whoever they are.
How this takes me back to Sunday school! Trust and Obey, lovely old hymn from 1887: I do wish I knew what choir this is, singing it so beautifully, so I could give them proper credit.
I have a feeling that if one truly can trust in the Lord and obey Him, one has accomplished very much.
For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. –Ephesians 6:12
Yesterday “Unknowable” urged me, “Think about the atrocious matters which you report on daily.” I’m thinking, I’m thinking…
The question is, Does Satan truly rule this world? Well, first look again at that “Let’s all worship Satan” T-shirt. I’ve been kind of concentrating, in my reporting, on spiritual wickedness in low places. I can’t get at the rulers of darkness, but all this other stuff is right out in the open where we can all see it: the lust for power over others, the denial of God’s absolute authority, the cruelty, the wickedness, and the sheer stupidity of it all. To me it always looks like the jerks who want to rule the world are just–well, jerks.
As Christians we try to extend Christ’s Kingdom, wherever we happen to be–at home, at work, in the public square. At the same time, the jerks labor feverishly to extend the Kingdom of Man, the state. Some of you think they do it because they’re satanists. I think most of them have no idea they’re satanists: they think they’re doing it for themselves. Some of them even think they’re doing it for us, and it infuriates them when we don’t seem to appreciate their efforts.
From whence come those atrocious matters which I report on daily? I think they sprout from the seed of Original Sin. And from the seed of moral idiocy. From a culture that grows more depraved by the day. It gets that way because people work to make it so.
They’re proud of it. They think they’re the bee’s knees. R.J. Rushdoony cites a European Union poster that says, “This time we will make it work.” Uh-huh. Yeah. This time their insane follies, which have failed abjectly again and again and again, will work. Because they’re so smart, it’s all bound to work.
I don’t think Satan needs people to worship him consciously. I think he gets a bigger kick out of them thinking it’s all their own brilliant ideas. The Kingdom of Man can be satanic without a lot of black masses and yahoos in black robes dancing around a fire. In fact, it probably is a lot more effective when it’s coming from smart-sounding people sitting in offices and claiming to be guided by Science.
It’ll be up to Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God and King of Kings, to toss the powers, principalities, and rulers of darkness into the lake of fire where they belong. Meanwhile, here on earth, God has not given Satan the power to compel us to worship him.
The Lord commands us, “Occupy until I come” (Luke 19:13). That’s what we’re to do, in as many different ways as we can think of. All we can do, as the old hymn puts it, is “Trust and Obey.”
When you think of it, that’s really quite a lot for us to do.
This is another Sunday school favorite that never fails to move me, here played by the students at Fountainview Academy–Trust and Obey. John Sammis wrote it in 1887. He was attending a Dwight Moody crusade in Massachusetts when a young man in the audience, unable to grasp some of the nuances of the sermon, said he would at least “trust and obey.” We still sing his comment 130 years later.
As you can see, I can still copy and paste videos this morning, so I’d better hustle before the computer decides it won’t do that, either.
We must have sung Trust and Obey hundreds of times in Sunday school. Tradition has it that the hymn, published in 1887, arose from an exchange between evangelist Dwight L. Moody and a man in his audience, who found the point Moody was trying to make a little too complicated for him and so remarked something to the effect of, “Well, then, I guess I’ll just have to trust and obey!”
Not a bad fall-back position at all.
Tradition has it that John Sammis was inspired to write this hymn, in 1887, by something he heard at one of Dwight L. Moody’s revival meetings. Someone raised his hand and said (I paraphrase), “I’m not sure about what some of this means, but I will trust and obey.”
If this hymn doesn’t move you, I don’t know what will.
Thank you, Erlene, for suggesting it.
Having received no hymn requests for this morning, I chose this one–just because it came into my mind. A good old hymn.
But of course we don’t trust God, neither do we obey Him. Maybe we trust in gravity waves. Or in people who say they’ve just discovered gravity waves. We nod sagely and mutter, “Uh-huh, yep, gravity waves,” as if we had any idea at all of what we were talking about.
God have mercy on us.
